Jeremiah Keenan | Becoming a racist

Keen on the Truth | Penn culture pits white skin against black when it comes to race relations

By Jeremiah Keenan 10/21/14 9:59pm

P eople assume a lot about me be cause of the color of my skin. First off, I’m a racist. Then, I am rich, unaware, stuck-up and out to keep the black man down.

Now, it doesn’t matter if I say I’m not racist. And it doesn’t matter if I actively research social conditions. And while I earn social credit for attending Penn on more than 95 percent financial aid, mentioning my father’s Ph.D. strips that credit away.

I’m a white guy.

I’m a bad guy.

And I’m all about keeping everybody down.

But sometimes, I wonder how it was that I became a racist. I wasn’t born one, you see. And I wasn’t raised one, either. In fact, nobody thought I was racist because of the color of my skin until I got to the Ivy League.

I grew up as a “foreigner” in China. I was occasionally a devil or a dog, but most of the time I was just a foreigner — or to translate literally, a person from a country outside. It didn’t feel bad to be from a country outside, and I merrily learned to speak Mandarin with a bit of a Cantonese accent. But what was more important was that racism just wasn’t a “thing” for me. There were different colors in the international community, but being white didn’t “label” me. We were all just people from countries outside, and while I learned that Chinese sometimes despise blacks, I thought it was a ridiculous idea.

After all, why? It was just plain stupid.

When I came to Penn, I brought this mentality with me. But gradually I learned that here, I’m a white guy . And a white guy can be one of four things: gay, bisexual, transgender or racist.

My introduction to this idea started in training sessions for tutoring at West Philadelphia High School. I was told that I was white and that over 95 percent of the students I was going to work with would be black. I was told that meant something and was introduced to the phrase “rich white bitch.” That was Racism 101 for me — the first time I’d seriously met the concept outside of history.

At Penn, there is a seething sense of race. If a white person writes on a topic dealing with the so-called “underprivileged” class, and a reader disagrees, it is internet custom to label the writer as a white privileged idiot — instead of just a regular ignoramus.

Correspondingly, blacks are stereotyped as one of four things: criminal athletes, panhandlers, dumb affirmative-action students or wealthy Whartonites from Nigeria.

By the time I completed my freshman year at Penn, I caught myself thinking in terms of white and black.

And I found myself a worse man for doing so.

While many recognize these problems, it seems the only response is a black call for special treatment on account of race. Affirmative action is, perhaps, the most famous example of this in the collegiate atmosphere. Special programs, fraternities and organizations to house racial interests are also ubiquitous. Ta-Nehisi Coates recently came to Penn to argue for straight-up racial reparations.

I do not pretend to have the same knowledge of racism as Ta-Nehisi Coates, and I can understand the well-meaning attempt to address historical structural racism with compensational structural racism. Did a governor once stand at the door of Alabama to block black students? Well, then, the current governor should be there to make sure their grandchildren are the first to enter!

But when this laudable idea is racially coded, it does much to reinforce racial tensions and little to solve real-world problems. Wealthy first and second generation African immigrants flood the Ivy League to fulfill diversity quotas, but they never faced systematic discrimination to begin with. Meanwhile, Asians and whites — especially males, theoretically competing against gender-based affirmative action — are left with a sour sense of unfair treatment and smug feelings of superiority. Many assume themselves to be spectacular performers if they could get into the Ivies despite their racial or gender “handicaps.”

And so the spiral of racial tension continues on down. According to campus culture — whether I want to be or not — I’m a white guy.

I’m a bad guy.

I’m a racist.

But, persona lly, I’d really rather not be.

Jeremiah Keenan is a College sophomore from China studying math. His email address is jkeenan@sas.upenn.edu. “Keen on the Truth” appears every Wednesday.

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