Obesity is not the only neo-epidemic facing America these days. Sweeping across the nation in astounding and increasingly obvious numbers is the black plague of ignorance.
There was the silver-haired woman who obliviously informed John McCain of her ignorance during one of his rallies when she associated the rumors of Barack Obama’s supposedly Muslim roots with her own stereotypes and labeled him an “Arab” – which shouldn’t be a stigma anyway. “Terrorist” is a stigma. “Arab” should not be.
Then there was the West Hollywood couple who thought it would be OK in the name of Halloween fun to hang an effigy of Sarah Palin from a noose. He would certainly not hang Barack Obama and, although Palin is white-bread Caucasian, the noose will always be a symbol of hatred in this country.
Closer to home, another noose brought even more outrage when Cal Poly’s Crop House residents unwittingly exposed themselves to the fury of the rest of us when we learned of their noose and Confederate flag display.
I, like everyone else who heard the news, at first thought it was a blatant attempt to proudly trumpet the residents’ racism to the world.
However, I was willing to try and give the residents a chance to explain and maybe help me understand where they were coming from. Where they were coming from wasn’t too far from the two aforementioned examples.
In anonymous interviews with the Mustang Daily, the students behind the offensive display said that they were innocent in their supposed ignorance.
It is hard for me to believe that they thought it was nothing more than “stupid and immature and ignorant” and that one of the men interviewed said he didn’t even associate the Confederate flag with America’s infamous legacy of racism.
It is sad on two fronts; if the residents interviewed are lying about being ignorant, they can get away with it because as in the aforementioned examples, America is ignorant. If they are telling the truth, well, it’s almost not a huge surprise as inconceivable as it seems. Despite the requisite American History 101 classes we all had to take, some of us still don’t get it.
Even if, as the men claim, they did not create the display, they should have known better than to keep it up. If one of them is dating a Hispanic girl, as he told the Mustang Daily, then why didn’t she ask them to take it down? What about the minorities that they claimed had lived or live there? Where were their voices in all of this?
Even on the eve of an election where our next president could be one of those minorities, Americans need to realize that ignorance is one of our greatest enemies. We continue to be divided due to this epidemic when we can’t associate historically racist symbols with what they have stood for for so long and think that anyone wearing a keffiyeh or a hijab (look them up) is by default a bad person.
Whoever our next president is, he needs to be able to address this epidemic and help us step by step to create the cure.
Breehan Yohe-Mellor is a journalism senior and a Mustang Daily reporter and copy editor.