“Racial battlefield” a myth
History may be in columnist David Jagernauth’s blood, but it is hatred and racial collectivism that is in his mind, and subsequently his pen. He describes our university as a racial battlefield in his Oct. 2 column (“Schoolhouse discrimination,” ODE), not the gateway to opportunity that it truly is. Only the irrationality of racial collectivism would allow him to write such a perversion.
I am a freshman at the University. My first week here has been filled with glimpses of great things to come and not visions of a desperate battlefield. The experience has been altogether liberating.
Maybe your professors don’t really want you to “minimize” your “racial memories.” Maybe they want you to maximize your individualistic capacity for independence.
Freedom doesn’t lie in racial incentives and certainly not in racial warfare. It lies in the power of the individual to think and act for himself. Plenty of white people relate to your “historical feeling.” But an individualist of any race doesn’t act on his feelings, he acts on reason, which your call to arms is sorely lacking.
I find it sickening that you would associate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. with this column. He was a man of peace. Your “reasoning” can only result in war. He valued the content of a man’s character over the color of his skin. As your generalizations about white students show, you believe skin color determines a man’s ideas. There is a time for that belief. It is called the Stone Age.

Chris Potter

Pre-journalism