In the news

[danger03]

There were camera men and camera women from at least two networks on the street I live on. I ran behind one man being interviewed, so there's a slight chance I made it to the evening news. I checked a few networks and sure enough, I found this

Comments

[forcemajeure]

Someday you'll be featured prominently on the evening news, maybe when you do your first perp walk.

A quote in that article reminds me of a guy I know who moved from an isolated rural part of California to the Bay Area. A friend of mine asked if anti-Semitism was common up there; he said "no, we didn't even really have Semitism, let alone anti-Semitism."

In the story, the reporter said racial tensions were high at Northwestern; I'm always suspicious of such statements, especially in the summary of a story. Is it your experience that racial tensions are high there? Or are people dismissing it as just a few isolated assholes? Or both?

And why is it that so many TV stations which are channel 7 on the dial use the exact same 7-in-a-circle logo? KGO, channel 7 in San Francisco uses that too, and lots of other channel 7s as well. I don't know of any other channel numeral with a viral logo like that.

[danger03]

Kieran, I wrote a multi-paragraph essay to answer your question and lj ate it. So here's my short version. Lucky you.

Basically, I think 'racial tensions' is kind of an empty term. Is diversity a priority here? Of course it is; this is the campus of an I-can't-believe-it's-not-ivy school. Officials care about threats to racial diversity because we have it--the freshmen class is one of the most diverse ever in this school's history.

But does that mean I wake up wondering if I'll be the target of a homophobic hate crime? To tell you the truth, I hardly think about race or hate. I kind of wrote off the whole incident at Chapin. Afterall, people write 'fuck you, bitch' (with varying degrees of seriousness) on people's white boards all the time. It doesn't take too much additional thought to write down a racial epithet.

I think that most Northwesterners are friendly, intelligent people. I think swastikas are an anomaly, not the norm. Does that answer your question?

[forcemajeure]

More or less -- I assumed swastikas and the like were anomalies -- I just wondered if you observed that all of this had caused tension between people of different races and whatnot. Saying "racial tensions are high here" is one of those things reporters say without thinking through what that actually means. I'm sure the graffitti annoyed and even angered people who saw it, particularly if they felt it was directed at them; but there's a difference between that and saying racial tensions are high. Racial tensions are high in Kosovo; I'm more skeptical when someone says they are at Northwestern.

[danger03]

OK, I lied. The tensions here are very real. Last weekend our floor erupted into a spontaneous heated debate about whether or not the local student media blew the story out of proportion.

And now several people have egg on their face..

http://www.dailynorthwestern.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2003/11/18/3fba9953ddb6e?template=default