Racist Asshattery from the University of Colorado

University of Colorado Chancellor Bud Peterson has issued an official apology in the wake of the controversy and outrage surrounding a "satirical" piece that ran in the Campus Press entitled "If it's war the Asians want...it's war they'll get". The editors of the paper have kinda apologized as well, and the matter is being reviewed by the dean of the school of journalism. What's missing from both of these "apologies" is the word "racism", which suggests that this is more about PR damage control than genuine dialogue. Turns out the racist asshat who wrote the piece has a troubled history, which probably isn't all that surprising. For your infotainment and general reading displeasure, here's a bit of his latest:

I'm such a fool for not realizing it sooner. I can't tell you how many times the Asians have treated me like a retarded weasel and I've forgiven them. But now I know that Asians are not just "a product of their environment," and their rudeness is not a "cultural misunderstanding."

They hate us all.

And I say it's time we started hating them back. That's right-no more "tolerance." No more "cultural sensitivity." No more "Mr. Pretend-I'm-Not-Racist."

It's time for war.

But we won't attack their bodies or minds. We will attack their souls.

The first step, or "Phase 1," is to find them all. Anyone who is interested in signing up to volunteer can do so by e-mailing me. Next Sunday at noon, we will all meet at Farrand Field. Each volunteer will be issued an extra-large butterfly net.

The hunt will then begin.

When I blow my whistle, we will scatter in every direction and catch as many Asians as possible. Make sure to pay special attention to the Rec Center, the UMC, the math and engineering buildings and Lollicup. If you're not sure if someone is an Asian, give them a calculus problem to do in their head. If they get it right, net 'em.

Captured Asians will be dragged to my apartment on the Hill and hog-tied. Once they're all secured in my living room, "Phase 2" will come into effect.

So what exactly is being satirized here?

Answer: nothing. It's raw racist hate speech. Pretending that it's satire is simply an attempt to mask the glaring fact that the University of Colorado has allowed its campus paper to serve as a megaphone for racism. That's what happened here, and the longer editors and school officials deny it, the more clueless — and culpable — they show themselves to be.

Comments

[van]

It just beats me how a hateful piece of writing makes it through the editorial process......I am sure at least a few people see something like this before it gets published. It is just scary......

[XP]

I am not surprised at all really, what do you expect from a university that was willing to do anything to kick out Ward Churchill.

[M]

You've got to be kidding me. That piece is so transparently hateful, and it got published? What are people smoking?

[Theriomorph]

Oh, hell.

[Josiah]

What a racist little shit.

This reminds me of the new Rambo sequel, where an aging Sly Stallone slaughters Burmese people, who have now taken the place of the Vietnamese people as a human testing ground for U.S. weapons in the imperialist imagination.

White people (and I'm one) are the biggest motherfucking hypocrites on the planet right now. What never ceases to amaze me is the belligerence and disregard for the humanity of people of color among middle-class white kids (and grown-ups) ensconced in the folds of an imperial power structure that pampers them like Hollywood stars in their trailers. This reminds me of Mia Farrow's recent (and quickly heeded) call for Steven Spielberg to boycott the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, on the grounds that China has investments in the Sudan. Never mind the 1 million+ Iraqis killed by U.S. bombings and the civil war started by the U.S. since 2003 (and the millions of Iraqi refugees, far larger than the number of Sudanese refugees). Or the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the death toll is probably the largest since WWII, and where Freeport McMoran, B.H.P. Billiton, and other mining corporations are sucking in the country's mineral wealth while the Bush administration backs the warlord Joseph Kabila Jr., just like the Clinton administration backed his father, just like Johnson/Nixon/Carter/Reagan/Bush/Clinton backed Mobutu before that, just like Kennedy backed the assasination of Patrice Lumumba before that, just like their predecessors backed the Belgian colonizers before that (who are responsible for 10 million or more Congolese deaths, the bastards).

Meanwhile, the U.S. carries out joint military exercises in the Phillipines while Gloria Arroyo's government murders dissidents. And the recently deceased Suharto is remembered as a great leader by certain circles in Washington.

All of this reeks of the moral atmosphere in the city of Rome circa, I don't know, 4008 A.D.?

[Kai]

Van, XP, M, Theriomorph, thanks for your comments. It is pretty hard to imagine the editorial meeting during which this piece was approvingly discussed. I'm guessing that the word "edgy" was spoken. And yeah it's interesting how they deliberately misinterpreted Ward Churchill's words as hate speech but don't see this piece as hate speech.

[Joan Kelly]

I don't know if I am hearing about/noticing more blatantly racist goings-on in the last couple of years, or if there really has been an increase in people's openness about their hatefulness (versus just me not paying attention prior) and/or if the real change is in the widespread shrugging and crazy denying-ness about it all...

It is creepy and enraging regardless, but fuck I just am not having an understanding of what is going on with this shit. I don't mean that I am surprised or wide-eyed about white people being racist, I mean that I feel like somehow there was a culture-wide decision amongst white people really recently that amounted to "hey the problem with saying and doing hateful things towards people of color is not the actual saying and doing, it is the attitude with which one does them! If you insist that it was funny or that you thought *you* were a person of color (really, blonde dude?) and so that gave you squatter's rights to spewing racist shit, then you are home free!"

I have to say though that it brings up other thoughts for me. On the one hand I am sputteringly angry about the flagrant fuckheadedness. On the other hand, it is my experience that prior to this shift, it was more that I personally was protected from hearing all this stuff out in the open, rather than that it wasn't still being said. I mean that as I was writing the above, I was also thinking - so am I saying "goddamn it I miss the innocent old days when white people would just be racist in private around other white people even if they were mistaken in thinking any given white person was on the same page?" Because it is not that people are more racist now. I have not seen any evidence to support the theory that racism is getting more vicious and widespread, only that it is becoming more fashionable, for fucking real.

[Kai]

Josiah, right on. Racism, The White Lens, is a tricky thing in the way it warps one's perception of the world. Ya see, if the Chinese central government has investments in the Sudan, then the Darfur genocide is the fault of "the Chinese" (apparently all 1.3 billion of them), which means that all things "Chinese" deserve to be boycotted, especially for some reason the world's most ambitious international sports event. But if the US government actually drops millions of pounds of explosives on Iraq and Afghanistan and occupies those countries at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives and millions of displaced refugees, and otherwise props up corrupt corporatist dictatorships around the world, it's the fault of the Bush administration or some nefarious sliver of US society. That logic works well for white liberals. And thanks for bringing up the mining operations in the Congo, the Kabila and Mobutu regimes, the assassination of Lumumba, the rule of Arroyo and Suharto; the list of crooked corporatist regimes who have facilitated the brutal shakedown of their own lands and peoples is as long as the tentacles of empire wrapped around the globe.

Joan, yeah I think there has been a change in the atmosphere surrounding racial discourse, there might even be something generational going on. It's as though the era of civil rights struggles has now faded far enough into the distant past (ha!) that a new generation doesn't really take all that stuff seriously and thinks racism is good material for "edgy satire" and "noose pranks" and such. I don't know if white people are any more or less racist than 10 years ago, but I do think they tend to be a lot more clueless about racial discourse. In the age of Obama, racism is no longer a problem, right? Then again, this might be part of an overall dulling of the senses and coarsening of thought and culture. I mean, when I was a kid, "Scarface" was pretty shockingly violent; these days, kids watch actual snuff films on the internet and play video games where they stuff grenades in people's mouths and blow up their heads. I don't know if these cultural trends are related at all, but somehow it kinda strikes me that way. Although, as you suggest, maybe it's not such a bad thing that this quasi-naivete brings racism right out into the open for all to see in its hatefulness. It is what it is. Anti-racists need to figure out the best strategies for not only countering these flare-ups but also of doing deeper consciousness-raising across the board.

[Theriomorph]

I'm guessing that the word "edgy" was spoken. I have no doubt. And nothing like openly carving fame and career out of other people's skins. Backchanneled you about this one Kai, but for here: it just makes my skin hurt that this kind of racist swill is an option for people as a means for attention, that the 'free speech' positioning becomes a free pass to calling (hello, UN-protected) hate-speech 'transgressive,' that as juvenile and small as this is its consequences to real people are neither small nor casual, on and on.

My head hurts.

[Vincent]

WTF! This is not just a racist diatribe. It is a blatant rally to mass hate crime. I do not consider that an overstatement in anyway. If we replaced Asian Americans with African Americans in this "piece of", oops "piece", this would be on CNN, MSNBC, and on every news outlet. That disturbs me. It seems to me that our Asian American brothers and sisters do not get the backup we all deserve. I pray my all POC rise up against this as if someone was threatening to hurt their family....BECAUSE THEY ARE!

Thanks for this. I will inform myself and do what I can.

peace,

v

[Theriomorph]

there might even be something generational going on. It's as though the era of civil rights struggles has now faded far enough into the distant past (ha!) that a new generation doesn't really take all that stuff seriously and thinks racism is good material for "edgy satire" and "noose pranks" and such. I don't know if white people are any more or less racist than 10 years ago, but I do think they tend to be a lot more clueless about racial discourse.... might be part of an overall dulling of the senses and coarsening of thought and culture.

Sometimes I think that 'edgy' crap is simply a developmental stage extremely privileged people go through - usually white men, usually in their late teens into late 20's - thinking of the 'Death Camp in a Prada Hatbox' creep right now as being similar in attention-sucking style, but there are many others, iconic examples in every generation of privileged people who think they personally invented hate speech and isn't is just so clever.

But I do think something is different - and always come back to the national level of shift: hard-core xenophobia and white supremacist defense of 'national identity' has become institutionalized under the Bush administration (re: Mexican immigrants and the border). This actively supports every form of racism and othering - add in systemic and institutional support for pretty much every kind of good ol' boy (you know, of the Yale/CT stock market cowboy variety) capitalization on the bodies of others for profit, and there *is* more support for this stuff happening out loud, being acted upon. Not saying it's better under the rug, or solely a reflection of this administration, etc. - but I am a fan of historic moments when bigotry is at least not actively sanctioned and aggressively modeled by the fucking government.

If there are any.

[R. Mildred]

To be fair it's not a new thing really - the thing that's happened is that it's gone from a product of "po' white" racist/nationalist subculture to an attitude that is safely accessible to frustrated mediocre middle class college students - because that is where it really seems to be increasing more than anywhere else, in colleges and other dens of middle class iniquity.

Which, if i was to guess, is most likely one furhter byproduct of the gradual diploma creep of people who will never in their lives actually use anything they learn at college going to college and getting diplomas anyway (itself a byproduct of babyboomer mysticism about how "our" sort of people go to college just because their grandparents didn't - making it a class status thing ultimately) because now you have the real bottom of the academic barrel going to college and succeeding sideways through the system without ever obtaining an education, which leads to frustration and all sorts of problems as these silly little boys try to make some sort of mark in society (something which emulation of highly bigoted shockjock figures from the 80's and 90's pop culture seems to provide for them).

And of course the far more direct problem which is, fundamentally, the way that the Right, far Right, and the general psuedo-fascist crowd (to utilize david neiwart's term) have spent most of their time since the 80's specifically targetting the college going crowd more and more with their laissez faire coded -isms, in part of a trend to normalize the thing through out society.

At least that what it appears like anyway.

[nezua]

Ugh. I don't even know what to say to this. "Waste of a human oocyte" is usually my response to such vile idiocy.