They're sitting right next to us

At a recent meeting of the Boston University student organization Latinos Unidos, club president Stephanie Abregu wanted to tackle the issue of racism. She and the group's other officers kicked off the event by asking the two dozen guests - predominantly Latinos with a few blacks, whites, and Asians - a series of questions: Have you heard someone use a stereotype? Did you confront them about it? Did you respond with words or with violence?
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Then they invited students to share their experiences. Toward the end of the event, Jaime Hermonsillo talked about an incident that happened months earlier, two weeks into his freshman year. He had been sitting with friends, chatting about the colleges to which they'd applied.
"One girl said to me, 'Well, let's face it, the only reason you're here is because we need the statistics,' " he says. Hermonsillo, who attended Lake Forest Academy, a predominantly white boarding school outside his hometown of Chicago, told her he'd worked as hard as she had to get into college.
"Then she was like, 'Well, ummm,' " recalls Hermonsillo, 18. "She didn't know what to say. She didn't even apologize or anything."

The subject of racial and ethnic tensions on college campuses has become so topical that a November episode of "Without a Trace" kicked off with a white student calling his black peer an affirmative-action "charity case" during class. Tufts University's conservative student newspaper, The Primary Source, generated controversy a year ago when it published a Christmas carol titled "O Come All Ye Black Folk." Asian students at Boston College complain of drunken alumni and students who shout racial epithets as part of their football game celebrations.

In recent months, nooses, a centuries-old symbol of racial intimidation, have been found at the University of Maryland, California State University at Fullerton, Purdue, and Columbia. "Crossing the Border" and "Ghetto" parties, in which white students wear blackface or crawl under barbed-wire fences to get in, generate outcry when images from these events turn up on Facebook. The blog Vox ex Machina offers a "College Racism Roundup" of incidents on campuses nationwide.

The tensions, says Daren Graves, an assistant professor of general education at Simmons College, mirror a nationwide movement opposed to political correctness that's occurring in response to the advances of the civil-rights movement. [Boston Globe] continue reading