During my events of daily living, I often think—this would be a great topic to hobo about. But alas, I never seem to get around to it. But here’s a noteworthy incident that has stuck in my psyche.

And it’s a repeat topic: Largely that of White Guilt. During the grad student’s last semester, they go through a series of written and oral exams that suck for both faculty and student alike. And during one of the three-full-days-of-oral-comp-goodness, one student was given a case describing the language sample of some 4 year old kid. And by reading the language sample (i.e., African American English, other wise known as AAE), it was evident that the kid in the case was black. So the (white) student that drew this question totally botched the answer. She prepared response was essentially to say that AAE is a dialect, not a disorder. (Which is the current paradigm.) Thus the kid’s language impairments are acceptable. (Despite the reality that there was delayed language regardless of dialect—a reality that she later acknowledged during questioning.) Point being—my student was so ingrained to fear the race issue, that she avoided the question rather than answer it. (i.e., place definitive quantitative and qualitative standards on a hypothetical black child.) Subsequently, had this kid been real, he would not have received treatment secondary to white guilt and fear of the race issue.

And while this train wreck was going on… I honestly thought about asking (or rather stating) to her that she ought never ever let her fear of political correctness impact her quality of care.

But in a sense, I cannot really blame my student all that much. People that consider the south (by default) as discriminatory and racist… well, it’s complete ignorance. Sure some of that goes on, as it goes on everywhere. But to me, the larger problem is the whole white-guilt aspect; it becomes the 500 pound gorilla that everyone knows is there, but all are way too afraid to acknowledge. So when a student is discussed among faculty—even if she is (on paper) average or commensurate with her peers, she becomes a rising superstar dependent on her race. Similarly—while at a football game, I noticed a white lady go out of her way (almost eerily and awkwardly so) to show her appreciation to a concession stand employee for a Coke.

And don’t get me started about the admissions process. That just wouldn’t be a wise thing to do. Suffice it to say that there is a soft bigotry of low expectations prevailing in the air. And nobody will touch it; they won’t even poke it with a stick. I am for the idea of giving students that have had less a chance; however, there becomes a fine line between a "chance" and an oppurtunity to fail by (academic) drowning.

So it just seems to me that this whole race issue is going nowhere when there is this denial of fear and white guilt running around. Stated differently, we're not doing anyone any favors by applying differential standards to people based on fear of the race card and white guilt.