Boy, sometimes you come across an alleged argument on the letters-to-the-editor page that really shows the utter ignorance of some people on this campus.

It seems a few white males, at NIU and elsewhere across this great land of ours, are whining about the issue of White Student Unions.

Their argument is primarily that a WSU would be considered racist, whereas a Black Student Union is not seen as racist.

These people really don’t have a clue, do they?

These are the same people who piss and moan that affirmative action programs create an uneven playing field which is advantageous to blacks.

Well, the real deal is this: the playing field was never level in the first place!

The odds have been overwhelmingly stacked against blacks since the first slaves were dragged kicking and screaming to this great land of opportunity all those years ago.

Blacks in this country never had a chance. Yes, the slaves were freed over a hundred years ago, but what happened when Amendment 13 (talk about an unlucky number) was actually signed?

Blacks still had no money or resources or power. They were forced to become sharecroppers and take other low-level jobs due to a lack of education, among other things.

It’s like when you get out of prison after serving a 30-year sentence—you have no money, job or the means to pull yourself up by the old bootstraps; in effect, you are naked.

Another analogy to the situation is having two people near a big pile of money. One person hits the other one with a shovel and takes all the money. Later, shovels are outlawed. But hey, the one person still has all the money!

The result has been a vicious cycle for blacks in this country. It starts with the lack of money forcing them to live in economically depressed areas (commonly known as slums), which leads to few viable employment opportunities, crime, gangs and high school dropouts; in short, reality.

So affirmative action and minority recruitment programs are really just token measures which don’t deal with the real problem—the deck has been stacked with white aces from the beginning. But right now, they’re the only things being done.

When whites use the “but I don’t own slaves, why should I suffer” response, they are ignoring the fact that affirmative action programs are not intended to bring whites down, but to attempt to balance the scales. Yes, there is a difference.

Besides this point, there are many whites who claim that they are not racist but are still ethnocentric.

That is, blacks can have their success but only if they conform to the WASP culture. For example, most employers would sooner hire a person who spoke like a white than someone who spoke “Black English.”

Why should blacks have to give up their culture in order to achieve economic and social success in this country?

Obviously, they shouldn’t, but that’s exactly what is happening, provided a black can overcome the vicious cycle in the first place.

And in an unrelated note, oxymoron of the week: “City of Rockford.”