Adventures in politicking

Today was the annual Big Red Welcome street fair at UNL. All kinds of groups, from military recruiters, local and not-so-local businesses, and every student organization on campus come out to the event to set up a table, distribute fliers, pamphlets, and recruit new members or customers. Our chapter of Nebraskans For Peace was there, of course, alongside Amnesty International, Students United for Nebraska, and Progressive Student Coalition.

We did the usual stuff, but also used large printouts of articles on things we did last year, including the September die-in at the Husker-USC football game and the SUN protest against Ward Connerly when he spoke in March. The last bit sparked a conversation with a group of white men a bit younger than myself. They were evenly split on the question of affirmative action, which Ward Connerly is attempting to end in Nebraska. Finally one of them suggested "Why don't the just remove the question of race from job applications? Wouldn't that solved work discrimination?" Not really, and certainly not at the face-to-face interview stage. I argued that this wouldn't have much effect and cited a study done a few years ago showing people with white-sounding names (Joe, Robert, James... or Alex) were 50% more likely to receive a callback for an application than people with a black sounding name. I used the example Teniqua, just off the top of my head. The guy kind of snorted at the absurd sound and said...

"Why don't they just name their kids normal names then?"

Wow. Really? I kind of looked at him with an "are you fucking kidding me?" face. I've never been confronted with such a blatant in-your-face example of white privilege (the idea that "normal" means whiteness) and indifference to other people such as that.