White Powr.

It was February 2007, I was a senior in high school, and I came to see Kirk at UMD. It was nighttime, and as we walked past Regents garage, someone shouted from the top level (unseen, mind you) "N****r! Fucking n****r!"

Fast forward to some recent semester when I was actually a student at UMD. Someone hangs a noose on a tree near Nyumburu Cultural Center on campus. A despicably hateful statement, a rather direct statement considering Nyumburu is the spot for many ASA, BSU, and otherwise African American oriented programs and activities on campus. The hub of black campus life at UMD -- decorated with a symbol of racially motivated violence.

Now, March 2010, the newest installment of blatant racism, on the doors of Jimenez Hall:
"White Powr." Why they chose to omit the "e" in "power" is beyond me. But that's beside the point. At a campus that is 62% white, how can one person feel so little and threatened (and ignorant and entitled and brazenly stupid) to scrawl this on a building at a supposedly "prestigious" and "diverse" university? "White powr" is inadvertently scrawled on the walls of society, why be the dummy to actually take time out of your day to physically write it?

According to today's Diamondback: "In 2004, there were 24 hate crimes reported at this university. There were 18 in both 2005 and 2006, 22 in 2007, 10 in 2008 and nine in 2009."

Racism is only racism when the person with the power (read: WHITE powr) flaunts and abuses it while putting down or chastising minorities. That is to say, when black comedians say "white people eat cheese sammiches for lunch," it is not racist. When Kramer called his heckler the n-word, he most definitely WAS being racist. That is also to say that it is more socially acceptable for fat people to make fun of skinny people than vice versa (Mo'Nique can say "skinny bitches," but Chapelle in Nutty Professor can NOT fry Sherman Klump), midgets can make fun of normal-sized people but not vice versa, and so on. Minorities will almost always be at a disadvantage. And to graffiti "white powr" onto the door of the building which houses many Asian-American Studies, Spanish language, culturally diverse courses, etc., (on top of being rude, illegal, disgusting, and inflammatory) is a huge insult on top of one huge historical injury.

White people have power, or should I say "powr"? They have it easy, generally speaking. No, "white men can't jump," but they can get paid a much greater salary for the same job a minority or a woman can do. Look at the statistics because I'm too lazy to find some and post them. Is it not enough that society as a whole KNOWS that Caucasian is the standard, and everything else is a deviation (an often lesser-valued deviation) from it? Should we replace Obama with Biden? Should we change February, May, and September to White History Months? White History Month is year-long, as seen in 95% of textbooks. No, I'm not bitter. Although I don't completely identify with the Caucasian portion of my racial make-up, I accept and embrace it because it's me. And I'm one of those loving hippies who truly do believe in Puzzle Place-esque cultural unity (see picture to left). So, reverse racism (i.e. minorities discriminating against whites) is not the answer, and there seems to be no answer, actually...it's just disheartening to believe that some people have not moved past their archaic and bigoted notions about life.