Ryan Benjamin | What lies beneath

Normally I wouldn't waste my time perusing a site like Juicy Campus, because it's just a bunch of anonymous kids gossiping and venting anger. But when a fit of boredom recently brought me to the site, I discovered something I never expected.

One of Penn's posts, "Ghetto Tours on Campus," caught my eye. But as I read through the first post, I cringed.

"Anyone else find it utterly amusing and annoying when waves of West Philly kids come around and tour our campus? First, these people have no chance at ever attending our school due to their inability to write their own names, read, or do addition. It's almost like their teachers are bringing them on campus to show them where in the future to set up their enterprise: robbing Penn students."

The main draw of the site is that it's anonymous - all too painfully obvious to me as I wondered who could not only write, but also consciously think, such a thing.

But hold your horses, folks, it gets worse.

The first reply: "haha, so true. especially when i'm minding my business walking to van pelt and then all of a sudden i'm surrounded by 5 teenage nigs on bmx bikes."

The remaining 44 posts morph into a discussion about the way we treat blacks in the United States, whether or not black kids from West Philly have any ambition and if Penn is wasting its time by providing tours to these "ghetto kids." Several are actually intelligent rebuttals.

I'll admit this much: I've never been so simultaneously captivated, amused and horrified by anything I've ever read.

Undoubtedly, one post doesn't represent the views of the entire student body. However, we find ourselves in a new age with sites that tangibly bridge what we say superficially with what we really think - all because of the anonymity afforded to both readers and authors. Which leads me to this question: What if there really is a sizeable bunch of Penn students who believe in the underlying message of this post?

To help answer this question, I turned to Ira Harkavy, the point man between Penn and West Philadelphia as associate vice president and founding director of the Netter Center. "My sense of the Penn undergraduates is that they're largely accepting," he said.

"Penn has made great progress over time, but it doesn't mean that more changes and development do not need to occur."

Under Harkavy and others' leadership, Penn may be unmatched in terms of the resources it devotes to the surrounding community. In the 2007-08 academic year, 1500 students took 56 Academically-Based Community Service courses, deemed so successful that in an editorial last year The Harvard Crimson cited our program as a model. In 2008, 845 Penn students volunteered in eight University-assisted schools.

But Urban Studies professor and 20-year West Philly resident Michael Nairn thinks there's a "sizeable minority" of Penn students who agree with the Juicy Campus post. "Most Penn students come from the suburbs and don't really see the value of being in an urban place with that kind of diversity."

Maybe a considerable amount of Penn students, even after all this University does to promote community involvement, really don't care about West Philly or the "ghetto kids."

Hidden racism will be put to the test nationally in this year's presidential election. A July New York Times/CBS Poll revealed that while only 5 percent of respondents wouldn't vote for Democrat Barack Obama because he's black, 19 percent of respondents said most of the people they know wouldn't vote for a black candidate. Bingo. Same question, more anonymity provided to respondents.

The lesson from Juicy Campus (Who knew?) is that hidden, largely unfair resentment is simmering underneath the rosy picture we sometimes paint of the West Philly/Penn relationship.

And though we've made unbelievable progress over the years, there's still reason to worry.

Ryan Benjamin is a College senior from New Haven, Conn. His email is benjamin@dailypennsylvanian.com. A Connecticut Yankee appears on alternating Mondays.

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