Worst Black History Month ever?

Shane Wade
Opinion Editor

It has been a rough Black History Month.

First came Lay’s chicken-and-waffle-flavored chips, and it was tolerated. Then came the Harlem Shake, and it was dismissed.

But now we have the disgraceful and embarrassing Emory University President James Wagner.

In a column for Emory’s magazine, he wrote, “One instance of constitutional compromise was the agreement to count three-fifths of the slave population for purposes of state representation in Congress.” In a later statement, he apologized for his comments and stated his opposition to slavery.

Although there isn’t an outstanding number of successful compromises reached by Congress, it is intellectually baffling for anyone, particularly a university president with multiple degrees, including a Ph.D from Johns Hopkins University, to cite the infamous three-fifths compromise as a laudable example of leadership, by any stretch of the imagination.

But then things got worse.

In a reception speech for a campus exhibition titled “And the Struggle Continues: The Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s Fight for Social Change,” he stated that he “personally (has) a long way to go” while discussing America’s education on race relations.

While it’s an accurate statement, it isn’t nearly sufficient enough to repair his faulty view of history. To be the president of a university with such a racially divisive background and have such a deep misunderstanding of race relations in America is inappropriate, to say the least.

Admitting that the problem exists is the first step, but for a university that’s only 9 percent African-American and 41 percent white and repeatedly embattled by issues regarding race (in 2012, a student anchor on a student-run news show made a racist joke involving affirmative action; earlier that year a fraternity flew a Confederate flag on campus), it’s time that the Emory administration rethink whom they want representing them to the public.

To add to Emory’s troubles, last August the administration admitted that two previous deans had inflated entrance exam scores since 2000 by intentionally sending incorrect test scores to U.S. News and World Report and the Department of Education for more than a decade. In September, Emory made cuts to a number of departments and programs, areas that one group of Emory students, the Student Re-Visioning Committee, says unfairly target subjects and programs popular with minority students.

An editorial in the Sept. 28, 2012 issue of the Emory Wheel, the school’s student newspaper, found that the cuts made could result in the termination of “25 percent of the faculty of color,” a grave misgiving for a university with a 33 percent minority population.

Racial ignorance, once admitted by the offender, is forgivable. But the insensitivity and ignorance Wagner displayed in his initial comments is indicative of most typical conservative Americans: that America began as and has always been an egalitarian democracy, primarily concerned with the freedom of individuals.

Who is actually considered an individual has evolved over time. In 1776, the word “individual” meant “white male.” His comments were essentially ignoring that fact and by not appropriately prefacing the remark, they functioned as a polite “get over it” to any reader remotely familiar with the Three-Fifths Compromise.

Wagner has since been censured by a Emory faculty group, but the damage has been done. University presidents don’t need to be infallible; our own President Michael Rao has made missteps regarding an unusual confidentiality agreement in 2010, but the proper steps were taken to ensure all concerns were addressed and no grievance overlooked.

Wagner’s intentions may have been well-meaning, but his delivery and ideas were ignorant. He displayed the same standard of misunderstanding commonly seen on the comment section of YouTube.

As much as we, as a country, may want to move past our racial history, consistent attempts by people in power, whether they be black or white, to somehow be “post-racial” are little more than examples of racial and cultural insensitivity.

The time to be nuanced in your opinion about race relations in America, particularly if you’re white, isn’t during Black History Month.