To Be Perfectly Honest

"Never again. Never again."

In regards to the racially sensitive letters which Ball State men's basketball coach Ronny Thompson & his staff received this past weekend, I can't help but say that when it comes to discrimination of any type, once is enough.

So what if it happens to be the perpetrator's/perpetrators' first offense? It doesn't matter; anyone who thinks that discrimination based on skin color, religion, socioeconomic status, etc. is awesome isn't fit to be a student on any college campus including Ball State's. These are my views & I'm sticking to them obstinately.

Yet racism is only a small part of the much larger picture behind why this anonymous source chose to write such demeaning comments to begin with. It just as well could stem from one's psychological makeup, that is to say, one's overall personality whether it involves social interaction/strong social relations with others. This much we must take note of while we're still ahead. Whether it was seriously motivated by racial hatred or just a sick joke someone decided to play on the BSU men's hoops staff, something has to give. In the coming weeks, this issue will be a topic which will bring on anxiety as much as it will bring on more pressing questions which need to be asked. How will we respond? It is not just racism we're talking about but a much larger dilemma looming on the surface of which racism is a part.

There are those who think that racism is a thing of the past but it isn't. Whether we talk about interracial dating, job opportunities for minorities, the likelihood of job advancement for minorities, so on & so forth, there is the uneducated, Jim Crow-bred mind which feels & sees differently. Racism is still present, even if it is revealed in more subtle forms; there is no doubt about that. But to explain it away or to compartmentalize it is to rob minorities of their senses of pride, humanity & dignity in the same way the anonymous letter writer robbed Thompson & his staff of all three values which I just mentioned. To say that there is no such thing as racism, that it is all a giant lie: it is also to rob minorities of their true worth as our fellow human beings, something which I among so many others cannot stand for.

Let us hope that such an incident never does happen again; it already has sparked enough tension to make us wonder about what the future holds in our relations with those whose skin color is not the same as ours. But one thing we can be sure of: we can stand strong together in a situation like this to see to it that (to end things on a poetic note):

never again can such hurtful words
strike chords of
fear & distrust into our hearts
never again
will such faceless actors
vent their cowardly rage
towards those
not of their own color
Never again
will such hatred repel us
from one another
only make our bonds stronger
I say never again
Only love for one another
& God's love for all
wins the day
fulfills the victory
we have so desperately sought.