The Culture of Fear_ Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things - Barry Glassner [72]
Wrong. The student’s remarks are ignorant and offensive yet familiar, and no worse than what I have read in college newspapers in recent years about a range of groups—immigrants, gays, feminists, conservatives, and (alas) blacks. The main difference between the Columbia student’s column and other bigoted commentaries in college newspapers is the amount of attention they receive. Around the same time as the Columbia Spectator incident a student newspaper at the University of Wisconsin ran a column that said of the verdict in the O. J. Simpson murder trial, “to believe that one cop led a multi-million dollar plot to execute or lock up one nigger (oops did I say nigger? ...) is completely ludicrous.” After student groups protested and called on the university administration to end support for the paper the newspaper’s editors responded, as adolescents will, by publishing an even more objectionable column, this one full of obscenities and epithets about “fags” and “bitches.” The news media paid no attention to the controversy.29
Also around this time, at Pennsylvania State University, swastikas appeared in two dormitories, and on the door of a black student’s room appeared the letters “K.K.K.” Close to two thousand students and professors attended a rally to protest the hatred. There were rallies as well, likewise neglected in the media, at Dartmouth College after anti-Asian and antigay slurs had been scrawled on students’ doors and on literature from student organizations.30
Nationwide, 20 to 30 percent of students from racial and ethnic minority groups report being physically or verbally attacked during their college careers, according to surveys. That is, tens of thousands of attacks per school year—only a small portion of which could conceivably be the doing of black anti-Semites. For every anti-Semitic African American enrolled in America’s colleges and universities there are dozens, if not hundreds, of white anti-Semites, racists, and homophobes. 31
Makers of the Nation’s Most Hazardous Music
Fear mongers project onto black men precisely what slavery, poverty, educational deprivation, and discrimination have ensured that they do not have—great power and influence.
After two white boys opened fire on students and teachers at a schoolyard in Jonesboro, Arkansas, in 1998 politicians, teachers, and assorted self-designated experts suggested—with utter seriousness—that black rap musicians had inspired one of them to commit the crime. A fan of rappers such as the late Tupac Shakur, the thirteen-year-old emulated massacrelike killings described in some of their songs, we were told. Never mind that, according to a minister who knew him, the Jonesboro lad also loved religious music and sang for elderly residents at local nursing homes. By the late 1990s the ruinous power of rap was so taken for granted, people could blame rappers for almost any violent or misogynistic act anywhere.32
So dangerous were so-called gangsta rappers taken to be, they could be imprisoned for the lyrics on their albums. Free speech and the First Amendment be damned—when Shawn Thomas, a rapper known to his fans as C-Bo, released his sixth album in 1998 he was promptly arrested and put behind bars for violating the terms of his parole for an earlier conviction. The parole condition Thomas had violated required him not to make recordings that “promote the gang lifestyle or are anti-law enforcement.”
Thomas’s new album, “Til My Casket Drops,” contained powerful protest lyrics against California governor Pete Wilson. “Look how he did Polly Klaas/Used her death and her family name/So he can gain more votes and political fame/It’s a shame that I’m the one they say is a monster.” The album also contained misogynistic and antipolice lyrics. Thomas refers to women as whores and bitches, and he recommends if the police “try