A public discussion on race and racism at the University of Pennsylvania has emerged in recent days following an opinion piece in the Daily Pennsylvanian last week from a black student who was the victim of racial slurs by drunk white students.
The first line of student Christopher Abreu’s piece is perhaps the most damning for the university. He writes:
I’m no stranger to racism. Being a minority, it comes with the territory. However, because of a recent experience, I cannot in good faith recommend that minorities come to Penn.
City Paper expanded the story today and raised the issue of how Penn students deal with their surroundings in majority black West Philadelphia. The article doesn’t really dig too deeply into relations between students and the community. Any thoughts? Leave a comment below.
April 29th, 2011 at 11:15 am
Perhaps when Penn finishes developing a pill to cure alcoholism, they can start on one to cure racism.
June 11th, 2011 at 12:29 am
Look, America was built WITH racism. Racism supported it’s rise as a world power. Is it small wonder that the elite American institutions of,
so-called, higher learning would house a fair number of racist individuals?
After all, many of the students are from wealthy, elite families … isolated from any fine tuned knowledge of Blac Americans. They come to a mixed race experience with stereotype instructions.
When I was a Penn student no one called it stereotyping.