'Got Racism?'

Arizona Daily Wildcat Eric E. Clingan

Unfortunately, dreams are sometimes the most willing co-conspirators in our efforts to see ourselves and the world in an often too-optimistic light.

Indeed, great leaders from Franklin Delano Roosevelt to Martin Luther King Jr. expounded on their dreams so eloquently that, decades later, a delightful comfort now coddles the suburbs of this nation where racism is considered as historic and muted as polio.

Not anymore. New York's Madison Avenue, the heart of American advertising and publishing, is attempting to shake up suburbia with overt messages of racial intolerance.

For example, last month's Sports Illustrated featured a cover story which not only hailed the demise of the "White Athlete," but shamelessly reveled in the supposition that "Perhaps blacks are physiologically superior to whites." Also, a current "Got Milk?" ad holds the white male responsible for continued persecution in our elementary schools. However, have these blatant racial slights provoked controversy? Sadly, a thorough on-line search of major national newspapers produced absolutely zero so-called civil rights crusaders who were willing to recognize these obvious incidents of racism for what they are.

Sports Illustrated relied heavily on statistics, especially those from the National Basketball Association, to distinguish between an increase, over time, in the participation of blacks in professional sports and a decrease in the number of white athletes.

Using these numbers alone (and conveniently forgoing any investigation into physiologically-based evidence) this major magazine concluded that whites just can't compete on the playgrounds or the playing fields.

To reveal just how abhorrent an argument this is, consider the dominance of white coaches at every level of the four major professional sports. Does the woeful lack of black hockey, baseball, football and even basketball coaches demonstrate an intellectual failing of that race?

Additionally, Derrick Z. Jackson, a black columnist for the Boston Globe, computes a yearly review of college football bowl teams and their graduation rates of both black and white athletes. This year, he wrote, "While only two of the forty bowl teams had white player graduation rates that were 20 percentage points behind the campus graduation rate, 20 teams [including the University of Arizona] had African-American player graduation rates 20 or more points behind the student body." Using the racist rhetoric and faulty assumptions of Sports Illustrated, should this difference logically be attributed to an inherent gap in intelligence levels between America's two most prominent races?

In Madison Avenue's advertising for the dairy cooperatives, the successful "Got Milk" campaign, a 30-second spot shows two white male children inflicting egregious wrongs on other kids in the school lunchroom. They steal food from the Asian boy. They mock the black girl. They bear down, edging towards violence, on the white female. In essence, the white male here is portrayed as the bully of the world, out to dominate and subjugate the "inferior" races and gender.

Again, imagine the explosion of outrage which, like a flame to a gas leak, would send shock waves of disgust and protest across our amber waves of grain if a black boy was portrayed as the thug in a similar spot.

Instead, no such lighted match exists and the country is lulled into a threatening sleep by these deadly fumes. To ignore the message of this advertising is to tacitly condone racism, not against any one group, but racism as an idea and, most frighteningly, as a selling point.

Civil rights crusaders once shared in the dreams of their leaders and, subsequently, brought about great sweeping changes which have played a major role in the amazing longevity of an American Ideal. Today, however, they are blinded by the lights of selfish ambition and partisan politics. To conveniently ignore racial sentiments not necessarily directed at their favored groups or cultures brings discredit to themselves and their pet issues, such as affirmative action.

Eric E. Clingan is a senior majoring in Political Science.