Students at UT Austin are outraged that someone chose to honor MLK Day by egging the campus statue of Martin Luther King, Jr. The statue was found covered in raw egg last Monday. Monday evening, students gathered around the statue to demonstrate their disgust and Tuesday a rally was held to continue the protest. "Students also contemplated the action they would take to draw attention to racist attitudes on campus and around the country," UT's Daily Texan reports today. A rally to raise awareness about racism at UT is taking place today.

Some quotes from UT students and staff:

"This is a disgrace to the integrity of what the statue represents. Unless you empower yourself and not stand for this to continue to happen then everything Dr. Martin Luther King stood for has been in vain." -- Mary Hood, adviser to the Longhorn chapter of the National Association of Advancement for Colored People

"It's a reflection of where we're at in today's society with the issues of peace and equity." --Nicholas Kendall, mechanical engineering major

"George Bush touted the University as being this example of diversity and acceptance and one of the reasons affirmative action should be eliminated. This is a perfect example that racism exists on this campus. It goes beyond racism. It's a hate crime." --Andy Gallagher, a senior psych major

"I'm gonna move on. I'm gonna make something of myself. I will go back to my community, and I will teach them. I will bring up another generation who's not afraid to be active." --Maxine Chambliss, a history and government junior who calls the vandalism "just another example of the way UT has conducted itself" since she enrolled.

"People will sit on the floor before they come and sit next to you" --Jennifer Johnson, a (presumably black) marketing senior

The leap from awful but unexplained event to blanket condemnation of unproven causes has become a common one on campuses, particularly when it comes to questions of race. Last fall, when threatening racist graffiti appeared on the doors of black students at the University of Mississippi, everyone assumed that the perpetrators were white and that the event was a classic white-on-black hate crime. Students, faculty, and staff lamented the terrible racist climate at Ole Miss, demanded sensitivity training and a variety of programs and procedures to increase tolerance and prevent future hate crimes, and called for the perps to be prosecuted under state felony laws or federal hate crime statues. Everyone knew exactly what that graffiti meant and what should be done about it--except that they didn't. The vandals were, in fact, black. (True to the hypocrisy of campus witch hunts, they have not received a fraction of the punishment that they would have received if they had been gratifyingly, satisfyingly white--instead of facing possible prison time, they have been sentenced to academic probation, community service, and fifteen-page essays on what they did wrong. They also have to pay the $600 it cost to remove their "work".)

A similar sort of case is currently brewing at Texas A&M, where students face disciplinary action and sensitivity training because they planned and publicized (but did not throw) a "ghetto party." An anonymous letter to an administrator portrayed the event as racist, and administrators ran with it--even though, as an editorial in today's student paper clearly reveals, the event was nothing of the kind. An annual tradition, it has been happily and freely attended by students of all races. The anonymous letter inflamed administrative sensibilities by mentioning that some party-goers have worn KKK outfits to it in the past. Today's article supplies the essential but hitherto neglected information that the student who wore the KKK costume to a past ghetto party was himself black.

No one knows who egged UT's statue. It could have been hooligans from town, it could have been misguided black students as it was at Ole Miss. But lack of information has not slowed campus activists down one whit--the egging proves what they have known all along, that UT is a racist campus where bigotry runs rampant and unchallenged, and where whites are entirely unreconstructed and unrepentant. So certain are UT students of why the statue got vandalized and who did it that the student government passed a unanimous resolution on Tuesday condemning the defacement and "urging" (this is the word used in the student paper) the UT administration to implement a racial harassment policy. A cynic might think that the unknown vandals could well have been campus activists looking to create opportunities to pressure UT for policy change.

The UT administration has refrained from public condemnations of campus racism because they do not know yet what actually happened on Monday. UT President Larry Faulkner says that "We don't know who did this. We don't know if students or faculty or alumni or anyone associated with the University was the perpetrator. I, of course, deplore any symbolic attack that might have been intended on Dr. King's memorial." This, in turn, has been taken as evidence of further, institutionalized racial insensitivity by campus activists: "This statue means a lot to us, [yet] the administration doesn't seem to put forth the effort to show that they care," said Kimberly Cruse, a sophomore who is president of the Longhorn chapter of the NAACP.

This will be one to watch.