Over the past couple of months, this country appears to have become more racist. Let me start with Northwestern. There was the ski house party, and then last week two students were playing tennis when someone in a purple shirt with white letters on the back (probably a Northwestern student) threw eggs at them and called them “fucking Asians.” All this in an atmosphere recently outraged by the murder of a young man that was the result of racial profiling. Since Trayvon Martin’s death, I’ve had the impression that racism has become a much more visible issue. Instances of racism are reported more frequently, and the response to them has become more vocal. I don’t know whether this is because people have become more open about their racism, or because racism is being called out more often, or if it’s a combination of the two. In either case, I doubt that these sentiments, which have been coming out of the woodwork in various ugly ways, haven’t existed with the same intensity for quite some time. In order to address racism, it is important to understand where it comes from. That is why I wonder if the immediate response to the ski house party- forcing the students involved into an apology- was quite right. In order to really get to the meat of the problem, it would help to know exactly what made the partiers think that their costumes were justifiable. Of course there’s no way to make them disclose this information, either. Publicly exposing racist sentiments is considered taboo enough that people don’t often do it. It’s a tricky problem; society condemns racism, and so people try to hide it, albeit often in very thinly veiled ways. Racism is thus disguised well enough that it is difficult to fully understand where its coming from, but not well enough to keep society from continuously feeling its effects. For this reason, I found Naomi Riley’s recent exposure of her own illogical racism refreshing as well as frustrating. Riley was fired from the Chronicle of Higher Education recently for writing a column condemning African American Studies programs using Northwestern students’ dissertations as examples. The article was titled “The Most Persuasive Case for Eliminating Black Studies? Just Read the Dissertations.” Among other reasons, Riley has received a lot of criticism because she herself had not read the dissertations, just the abstracts. But even in her comments on the abstracts, it is clear that she doesn’t take black issues seriously enough to check some facts and find out if the arguments might be valid. Riley’s criticism of Northwestern Ph.D. candidate Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s dissertation, “Race for Profit: Black Housing and the Urban Crisis of the 1970s,” illustrates this prejudice. Taylor wrote that “the subprime lending crisis, if it did nothing else, highlighted the profitability of racism in the housing market.” Riley responded, “The subprime lending crisis was about the profitability of racism? Those millions of white people who went into foreclosure were just collateral damage, I guess.” While many people suffered as a result of the subprime lending crisis, minorities paid disproportionately, and this is because subprime markets were disproportionately marketed to and originated for Hispanic and African American communities, and that subprime loans were aggressively marketed to minority borrowers who qualified for home loans, as has been illustrated by Jon Prior in Housing Wire and Kristopher Geraldi and Paul Willen in The B.E. Journal of Economis Analysis and Policy. Thus, the subprime lending crisis is a good example of racism hurting everyone when it was intended to profit a small amount of people. But Riley assumes that racism couldn’t have played a role at all while giving no factual defense of her argument. While Riley’s piece is clearly an example of bad journalism, it is useful in that it provides an obvious display of racism, so that every logical hole in the column can be identified and filled. Perhaps a better punishment would have been to force Riley to actually read the dissertations that she so scathingly dismissed, and then rethink her article. This approach might seem naive, but civil rights made leaps when racism was still out in the open, and when people had to answer for it. Defending racism is taboo these days, but it hasn’t stopped it from severely hurting people. When people don’t talk about their racist feelings in public forums, they still show it in uglier and less accountable ways. Ideally a day will come when people cease entirely to treat people worse because of their race. Until that happens, I think we can only benefit if people have the chance chance to explain their racism, so that we can figure out how to break racist thought patterns. Hannah Green is a Weinberg senior. She can be reached at [email protected]