Suppose on your way home from classes today, as you prepare to get on a Huskie bus, someone deliberately cuts you off. Do you say something to that person? What if you’re black and he’s white—or vice versa?

Suppose an argument ensues. Is this a racial incident or is it just one person’s lack of consideration for another?

My guess is that it’s merely a lack of consideration, but chances are, someone will call it a “racial incident.” There seems to be a lot of these “racial incidents” on campus, especially considering that NIU has been deemed one of the nation’s most “racist” institutions by none other than Time magazine.

Might I suggest that the people who are throwing this word around so freely don’t really know what they’re saying? Racism is defined as the belief that some races are by nature superior to others.

This is the mentality of people who write things like Thunderbolt and black power magazines. These literary wonders have come from sources outside the university, not from within our community. I tend to believe that racism, in the true sense, is not, for the most part, what we’re seeing on this campus.

The tension we experience between blacks and whites is not wholly an incidence of race but is instead a socioeconomic clash that people have been too quick to diagnose as racism. It’s a situation in which you have minorities who generally come from the inner city and schools where they are the majority, brought together with white suburbanites who, quite simply, have never been in the minority and don’t know what it feels like.

These people are brought together in the middle of Corntown, USA and you can bet your buns there are going to be conflicts. But to dismiss those conflicts as being simply racial—and the cure as “ending racism”—is an easy way to throw the whole situation out of proper focus.

Prejudices are bound to develop. Everyone has them and they’re not exclusively a matter of skin color. I believe prejudiced people, unlike racists, can be reasoned with. Stereotypes will always exist but they don’t necessarily have to affect the way one person treats another.

The problem on this campus is that the communication between blacks and whites is so stunted because people are afraid to comment on or question anything, lest someone will start screaming “racism.”

The underlying problem might be the differences in background and upbringing, which are a result of race, perhaps, but race is not the determining factor. It’s very easy to oversimplify the problem by labeling it racism. What’s needed is to somehow enable people to change their perspectives if they so desire. In other words—communication.

There are always going to be people who don’t want to change their misconceptions. They inherit prejudices from their parents, form some of their own, and are quite complacent to go about life in ignorance. I like to believe these people are the minority. Others, many others, want to see an end to the racial tension on this campus. The rest, meanwhile, are just plain apathetic to the whole situation—like most NIU students tend to be about everything, anyway.

When Jesse Jackson came to NIU last year, I think we saw a pretty good cross-section of the attitudes on this campus. The attendance was probably not as high as it should have been. The number of blacks and whites who did attend was pretty much even. The day was complete with our neighborhood idiots who showed up to yell racial comments at Jackson.

The three major groups at NIU were represented: the apathetic, the concerned and the sociopathic bigots.

I don’t have any answers, obviously. All I know is that I’m sick of hearing racism this, racism that. It’s too easy to use “racist” as a label for everything unpleasant that happens. Somehow I feel that if we can start looking at the problems as something more than skin-color-related, we can begin to deal with them on more realistic terms.