Shauna Staveley, a UMass student.
Posted: 11/7/05

All too often we allow racism to go unchallenged. We simply brush it off as an isolated incident and never attempt to understand the underlying motivation for the hatred. Racism, one of the most poignant issues in our country, seems to be an issue most students at UMass only discuss in their classrooms. True progress cannot come from the top down, so we cannot wait and hope the powerful institutions do all the work for us. If we do not start engaging people different from ourselves, outside the classroom, we will never make positive changes on this campus.

I'm going to take you through an experience that inspired this piece of writing. I was invited to a party on Friday by a friend of mine. We are both white females. The person that invited us to the party was a white male. After getting together a small group, we left for this party. It was supposed to be a good one: a keg with a DJ. Sounds like a typical and fun Friday night at UMass, right? Wrong.

We arrived at the party and we quickly noticed we were the only white people there, and everyone was staring at us. A female laughed at us, questioned my friend about who he knew at the party (he knew a couple people), then approached me and tried to make me pay a cover charge that nobody else had to pay. Keep in mind, we found out the party was free from the person who invited us.

I decided we should wait it out, because it may have just been a few people giving us a hard time, and since we were invited we should be welcome at the house. Wrong again. When I tried to dance after minding my business by the wall for about an hour, the entire room stopped and stared. Finally, we left.

The problem with experiencing hatred is that people typically react in two ways: they hate themselves, or they loathe someone else. I am not going to fall into this trap. The key to learning from this experience is to try and understand the mindset of those who are acting out against you. This is the only thing that can bring true positive change.

I think the same discrimination may have happened to those that treated me the way they did on Friday. I truly feel that the people were passing hatred onto me that was passed onto them by negative experiences in the past. It could have been at UMass, or it could have been throughout their lives. Regardless, I feel that there was a reason behind the behavior: they probably have been in my shoes, many times.

This saddens me to see beautiful people do such ugly things because they allow hatred to spread until they condemn an entire group. This happens to people of every color and creed, and it does not strengthen a person; it makes them weak and destroys their heart. If people could only see that passing on the hate displayed against you is simply empowering those who hated you in the first place, we could all learn to empower ourselves instead and eliminate the cycle of ignorance and hate. In the words of the great author James Baldwin, "Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated and this was an immutable law."

Another thing I've noticed at UMass-Amherst is that there's a bit of isolation between races. Granted, I've seen times where everyone gets along fine. However, I've also seen situations where white people and non-white people do not even associate with each other; in classrooms, in meetings, in dorm areas and in dining halls. Some would call this racial unity. That could be the explanation. But when groups of people become so ethnocentric that they allow assumptions and stereotypes to completely cloud their judgment of people they've never met, we are just building walls between each other that are almost impossible to break down. There is no progress in that.

Has anyone asked themselves why there are so many instances of racial isolation on this campus? It happens with every skin color, so no single group is to blame. Solidarity should not mean disdain, skepticism and hatred of those outside a group. I repeat: no progress is made when dislike is promoted instead of understanding. We should all try and learn about the cultures around us. When we ignore the obvious separations, we are to blame. Everyone should take it upon themselves to talk about why race seems to be such a dividing factor on our campus, or any campus in this country, and put effort in destroying the tension that is lying under the surface seemingly on a daily basis. We should at least try to start the change within our student population. Ignorance is not bliss, and hatred accomplishes nothing.