I’ve been waiting a long time for a chance to reiterate and
clarify a column of mine from last semester, a column that took an opposing
position on the issue of university-implemented racial diversity. So when
College Jeopardy! celeb Suchita Shah offered to do a point-counterpoint column
with me, I was honored. I also saw an opportunity to make another inquiry into
a system that, as I asserted last semester, widens the imaginary lines between
us into chasms.

In my earlier column, I used financial evidence regarding
the amount of money spent on Plan 2008 and the Creating Community Initiative to
indicate we were financing goals that were fundamentally immoral. I stand by
that. This time, however, I am hoping to focus on another segment of this
unnecessary system of mandated diversity: “multicultural” student
groups.

Asking this simple question can best approach the issue of
the relevance of such organizations: In their own words, what is the mission of
these organizations? The objective of one of the best-funded and most
well-known organizations dedicated to students of color — the Multicultural
Student Center — is to create an environment in which differences can be
celebrated and understanding between students of color and their white
counterparts can be raised.

But why then is MSC handing out Jimmie Hatz Sexually
Transmitted Disease awareness pamphlets, pamphlets with a supposed emphasis on
the hip-hop community that feature a black man and black woman, with the woman
dressed up as a scantily-clad prostitute?

It is painfully easy to recognize the absurd implications
behind the argument that students of color are more likely to comprehend an
issue simply because the subject literature panders to their supposed
appearance-based cultural preferences. And understanding, if that is the aim
toward which the MSC strives, won’t be accomplished by constantly reminding us
we are black or white and our intimate preferences are expected to follow from
the aforementioned color.

Such a pamphlet is indicative of the message multicultural
student groups perpetuate as a whole: Diversity is only contingent on
appearance, and appearance will always be the best indicator by which to judge
the character and the inclinations of an individual.

But perhaps the best argument against multicultural
organizations can be made by simply walking over to UW’s College Library. I
made such a trip a few days before writing this column, and what I noticed
there is perhaps the most poignant example of why the MSC and all its associate
groups are little more than unnecessary relics, perpetuating the very bogeyman
they claim to be so intent on eradicating.

While in College Library I saw black, white, Asian and
Hispanic students, studying casually — intermingling, if you will — without
any exterior pressure whatsoever to do so. There wasn’t hip-hop music playing
on the loudspeakers for the benefit of the black students, the white students
weren’t constantly reminded of how privileged they were, and no one was present
because they were conscious of a shared desire to “integrate” with
one another.

That whole business sounds corny, artificial and painfully
utopian.

But what is even more artificial is the argument that by
creating the fiction of designated areas or times where integration can occur
through a particular cultural paradigm, whatever its color, understanding will
somehow improve. Maybe, just maybe, instead of creating both a lexicon and an
atmosphere in which minority students are constantly reminded that their color
is, in the end, what defines them, multicultural organizations should have
enough respect to let students start bridging those “chasms” on their
own.

Sam Clegg ([email protected]) is a freshman
majoring in political science and economics.