At the Madison Greyhound station, riders frequently play checkers as they wait in the depot. In lieu of checkers pieces, white riders square themselves on the west side of the station, while metaphorical black checkers follow suit, taking seats on the east side.
In 1955, Rosa Parks took the first step toward challenging discrimination on buses, but what about the implicit racism that endures at the Madison Greyhound station? Compared to racial advancements in black history, which February celebrates, progress in the 'black present' seems stagnated at the university.
Similar to the bus station, the university campus embodies a daily game of racial checkers as white students and students of color negotiate racial relations. The players determine who jumps or gets jumped, dodges or gets dodged.
The adversarial nature of the checkers metaphor may create discomfort, but according to panelists at a forum titled 'Education Not Incarceration' and a report in Black Commentator magazine last September, UW-Madison is the 'Worst Place in the Nation to be Black.'
Six months before the ranking's release, the Multicultural Student Coalition sponsored a sit-in at Ed's Express after a group of black students accused a white supervisor of taking discriminatory actions. The supervisor allegedly reprimanded the students for littering a table but denied any racial motivation.
This confrontation captures one 'jump,' or affront, that students of color endure in the game of racial checkers. It illustrates high-strung sensitivity to race on campus. The undercurrent of suspicion between white and black individuals dictates the outcomes of possibly innocent questions, comments or requests that appear racist.
In light of this tension, it comes as no surprise that students of color compose fewer than 13 percent of UW-Madison's undergraduate student body. In a sea of over 20,000 white students, administration-sponsored diversity initiatives'targeting racial and ethnic minorities'fail to rally popular support.
At the Plan 2008 forum on diversity last September, which was intended to heighten awareness of and support for diversity initiatives, attendance dropped to merely 50 students by the end of the day. This translates to 0.2 percent of the student body. At the event, Chancellor John Wiley expressed a degree of both satisfaction and disappointment with Plan 2008 diversity projects. 'There are areas where we are making steady progress,' he said at the forum. 'Not as fast as anyone would like, but steady progress.'
Considering the low attendance of the event, it seems as though the salience of diversity to the student body would go in the 'not as fast as anyone would like' category of progress.
Prospective students of the university deserve to have assurance that the idealistic diversity goals of the administration align with those of the student body at large. As the forum incident illustrates, this is not true.
In addition to the seven main priorities for Plan 2008 (available at the university website), the administration needs to research the biases and skepticism that the term 'diversity' evokes among many students. They must then reformulate and tailor a strategy to illustrate the importance of diversity to students who are not minorities.
The administration has an obligation to recognize that the strength of the university's progressive reputation hinges not on ideology, but on the beliefs and behaviors of each individual student. If diversity education at the university ends with the fulfillment of the ethnic studies requirement, many students will continue to play checkers'??jumping and dodging diverse people and, in turn, diversity education.
Rosa Parks initiated racial progress on a public bus. In Madison, whether progress commences at the Greyhound station or a Plan 2008 forum, administrators and students must work to set the wheels of racial progress back in motion.
