If I Am Not Inferior, Why the Need Not to Say So

If I Am Not Inferior, Why the Need Not to Say So?

For years there has been a separation amongst the races in which some whites felt superior to minorities. Growing up one has always taught from the jump, just what racial profiling is and who it is mostly categorized with. Being a child, one could never imagine how soon reality would set in. In the case of African-Americans during the Civil Rights Era, the most common opinion of them was that they were less than human. “The Recoloring of Campus Life,” by Shelby Steele analyzes these theories and gives real life experiences of what he had endured growing up and what this generation of college students is dealing with. For some, leaving home for the first time is a battle in itself, but for African American and Caucasian students, the joint feelings of anxiety and guilt play a major role in the emotional and mental states of the students.

African Americans still have to live with the assumption that upon looking at their skin color, they are inferior. The most common stereotypes of African Americans is that they are lazy, ignorant, stupid, loud, always late (CP time), and sexually promiscuous. Some students of the Caucasian race even had the audacity to outwardly harass African American students on college campuses around the country. For example, Steele states that “at Yale last year, a swastika and the words “white power” were painted on the university’s Afro-American cultural center and at Madison members of a major fraternity on campus held a mock slave auction in which pledges painted their faces black and wore Afro wigs” to name a few. Pg. 173-1 Steele also states that he feels as though “these incidents seemed to be prankish and adolescent, though not necessarily harmless. There is meanness in them, but not much menace; no one is proposing reinstating Jim Crow on college campuses.” Pg. 174-3 Being a college student one could never understand the need for another person to pull amateur stunts on them and then turn around and they seem harmless. There is no need for anyone, no matter the race to intentionally belittle someone of the opposite genetic stock. Campus racism was what one would call a factual movie. Any grotesque act done or verbal action made caused a scene. Little did people know that what they were doing was hurting not only themselves, but the people around them as well. In those days it was apparent that “whites” didn’t care whose feelings they may have shattered and whose dreams they may have crushed. They took the approach that whatever they believed was justifiable and right in their eyes, therefore there was no need to compromise and see it any other way. A majority of Caucasians in that time period saw black people as the “limited commodity” and inferior to them.

Is there a difference between the lives of college students during the Civil Right’s movement and today’s generation? Steele states