At the University of Virginia, it's a hate crime if a white person attacks a black student because of his or her race--but it's not if a black person attacks a white student because he or she is white. John Rosenberg explains in a long and thoughtful post. Read the whole thing--but don't be too hard on UVa. They're just going with the flow, doing what many schools do nowadays to demonstrate their racial sensitivity.

Compare events at UVa to the recent uproar at the University of Mississippi, where there is one standard of punishment for whites who paint racist graffiti and another for blacks who paint racist graffiti in order to frame whites as racist. Consider, too, Michigan State, where it's a racially-motivated crime for white students to criticize black separatism as racist and where double standards of definition and of discipline are firmly in place. Last month, the charred head of a mannequin was found in a tree outside a dorm. Assuming the mannequin had been black and that the perpetrators were white, the campus was up in arms about hate crime and even the NAACP got involved. But when it turned out that the mannequin was white and the perpetrators were black, the event was redefined. No longer a hate crime, the police downgraded it to "just merely three individuals goofing around."

So you can see that Virginia is in good company. You can also see how it is that university administrators are using the concepts of racial sensitivity, hate crime, tolerance, and inclusion to institute a new form of racism on their campuses. That racism is instituted under the misguided notion that it is somehow reparative; in the name of making up for past injustices it creates an eminently abusable situation in which white students--particularly straight white male students--have fewer rights and more responsibilities than minority students, in which they are expected not only not to offend others, but never to take offense when they are the targets of hateful words and deeds.

The great irony of this hypocritical system is that it casts whites in that old, discredited role as the Great Protectors, the chivalric noble souls who dutifully sacrifice their own comfort and convenience for the sake of weaker, lesser mortals. In the disciplinary double standards of schools such as Virginia, Ole Miss, and MSU, we can see how the selective pursuit of tolerance infantilizes minority students (as incapable of taking care of themselves or of behaving appropriately to others) while casting white students as inherently superior (they are not only capable of taking care of themselves, but must also take care of those less capable; if they are frequently found guilty of racial insensitivity, this shows merely that they are--unlike minority students--expected to demonstrate consideration for others). In other words, we can see very clearly in the behavior of such schools how the hot, new concept of diversity actually reinvents patronage as progress and how, in the name of engineering a new order, these schools are perpetuating the very patterns they say they want to end.

Thanks, Erin.
Yeah, I guess you're right. After reading in some detail the goings on at UVa, it is clear that it merely represents a reflection of our greater society in allowing for racial double standards. A criminal court decision last in week in the Kansas City area paints a vivid picture by example. It involved the heinous killings by the brother's Carr. At no time was it considered that these two blacks harbored any racial motivations for the execution-style killing of four caucasians. The fifth caucasian escaped a bullet through her brain when a bullet glanced off her two dollar hair clip. Her subsequent testimony secured their conviction. No need to go into the horrific details over the course of hours leading up to the killings. It would not be productive. However, reverse the races of the victims and their killers and you've got an entirely different story.
Heck, even though I had nothing to do with the events leading up to and including any and all discrimination of blacks, I should be expected to bear partial responsibility of same. It makes perfect sense to me in the spirit of Yin and Yang and the balance of nature. It sure makes for good parlor conversation though.
mshunziker

I'm holding out a little bit of hope (not much, admittedly) that courts will eventually decide that hate crimes are unconstitutional. Thus far, they've upheld them as facially neutral. Separate but equal worked that way for almost a century, too. But once it becomes clear that a facially neutral statute is never going to be applied in a way that is anything close to neutral, it's time for the courts to step in and say "enough."

This is not to say that I'd be all that wild about hate crime laws even if they were applied fairly. But as a constitutional matter, they'd probably pass muster, just as segregated schools probably would have done if the "separate but equal" schools had in fact been equal.

This quote from the "president of the Black Student Alliance" at MSU is pretty telling:

"Even if the mannequin was white, they should not have burned it," Lewis said. "It got everybody worried and concerned."

"Even if"?!?

Thanks for detailing some of the idiot acts that the university thought police. I do not understand why people tolerate these double standards.

The high school kids (black kids) beating up on white/Asian college students is nothing new. It's well-known at Berkeley that the high school kids (all black) come up to the University campus to mug or assault white or Asian students. They rioted because they weren't let into a frat party, claiming it was only because they were black (couldn't have been because they were only high school kids, and certainly not on the list). The list goes on. But it's never called racism, at least in public.