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University Daily Kansan Friday. April 21, 1961
Student Upholds Intermarriage. Hits Hypocrisy
EDITOR'S NOTE: Following is one of five Spring English proficiency examination papers recently cited for special recognition by the proficiency committee. Two additional papers appear in today's edition.
By David Jones Leavenworth junior
In almost any discussion among members of a family or among high school or college students concerning the country's racial problem, the following question is usually asked sooner or later, by a pro-segregationist: "You wouldn't want to marry one, would you?" He then explain that although you probably don't have any such desire, your children growing up in an environment of racial integration, would not experience any hesitation on choosing Negroes for mates. The pro-segregationist expects, of course, a negative answer to his question. Should you surprise him by answering, "yes," to his question, he'll most probably exclaim, "But think of the children!"
Whenever I'm asked this pet question of family and collegiate pro-segregationists, I surprise or shock (depending on the degree of narrow-mindedness of my interrogator) my interrogator by answering in the affirmative, adding that I see nothing distasteful or harmful in racial intermarriage.
I THINK NEGRO women, on the average, make just as attractive mates as do women of the race metaphorically known as "white" ("white" usually equated with "pure", or "immaculate"). I think this statement can be justified by taking the students of the University of Kansas as examples. As far as physical beauty is concerned (I admit I have to be rather subjective on this point), I think Negro women, on the average, equal, if not surpass, "white" women. Perhaps Negro women have thick lips and kinky hair, but their body and facial structure usually has more solidity and better definition of form than that of "white" women. While Negro women's faces do not have the fair skin of the faces of our "white" "beauties," neither do they have the thick, caked-cream veneer of the faces of our "white" "beauties." And as far as intelligence is concerned, most psychologists accept as a fact that the genetic factors which determine the pigmentation of an individual's skin in no way affect the degree of his intelligence.
But the other objection to racial intermarriage is the more serious one: the harmful social effects on the children of mixed parentage. The pro-segregationist (excluding the ludicrous one who "just doesn't like niggers") argues that such children are socially accepted by neither the Negro race nor the "white" race, and that this discrimination and social isolation makes life almost unbearable for them.
I DON'T THINK this argument is valid. For one thing, it is experi- centially verifiable that the voke of mixed ancestry isn't necessarily unbreakable. For example, Harry Belafonte, a light-skinned Negro, doesn't seem to have suffered exces- sively from his problem. I agree with most existentialist philosophers, part-icularly Jean-Paul Sartre, who say that a man chooses his fate, that he "makes himself," and as did Harry Belafonte he can, if he so chooses, realize his potential.
BOMBARDMENT
At the end of the
Incredible
A child,
Wandering in blood.
And brought for what it was worth. Christ's grace.
16 a Christmas earth.
—H. M. Hershberger
To a Christless earth.
Magazine Rack
When Is News News?
That delightful American humorist, Westbrook Pegler, is off on a new kick: Nixon lost the election because of the bias against him by news reporters. The press supported Nixon overwhelmingly, but those sly reporters bamboozled their publishers and editors and slipped enough pro-Kennedy flavor into their stories to tip the ejection. Pegler got this dope directly from someone who should know and who is strictly impartial: Nixon himself. Pegler disclosed that he has a letter from Nixon quoting pro-Nixon reporter's charge that the slanted reporting against Nixon was "one of my most shameful chapters in the history of the American press." Nixon's reporter friend, who remains anonymous, added: "I'm afraid the idolatry of Kennedy plainly displayed by some of my colleagues made it physically (sic) impossible for them to report speeches revealing woeful deficiencies of the god-like hero. The great majority of the people will never know that they received a biased view unless it is pounded home in the hope that publishers and editors at least will be alert in future contests to the prejudices of men who represent them in the field."
NIXON'S anonymous reporter friend did not single out by name any of his erring colleagues nor did he submit any evidence to support his claims, but whether he understands it or not, the reporter was accusing editors and publishers of a depth of stupidity that not even their worst critics would believe. The truth is that Nixon got more than an even break in the press. It is no trick at all for an editor to spot one-sided reporting, and the claim that any conservative newspaper permitted "liberal" reporters to rig their stories against the paper's favorite is fantasy—to put it mildly.
SOMETIMES the press can display a sensitivity to suffering that tugs at the heart. An example is the press treatment of the twenty-nine electrical companies caught "price-fixing and bid-rigging," in the words of the Justice Department. When nineteen of the firms pleaded guilty and ten offered no defense, only four of the twenty-two large newspapers in the country thought the story rated page one, according to a New Republic survey. Several carried no story at all. Yet this was the largest criminal antitrust action in the history of the Justice Department. The companies were fined nearly $2 million, and many of their executives went to jail. When is news news?
(Excerpted from "This Month" in the March 1961 Frontier Magazine.)
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GRIEF
I found her weeping over tulips,
Foot-stepped into moist earth
All the more so by her tears,
And tried to say,
"It doesn't matter.
Sometimes beauty is trampled
In the rush of small fears,"(
(Hers was the hose snake)
But only I understood,
And she would not hear,
And wept.
— H. M. Hershberger
ETERNITY
Formed on the instant
And cast from promise,
A solitary flake etched its path
Upon the grey slate of day.
Seeking the fall warm ground
In a slashing dive.
I marked its flight,
And hurrying forward,
Stooped to retrieve a loveliness;
All I found was dampness
On a dry leaf.
—H. M. Hershberger
On Campus with Max Shulman
(Author of "I Was a Teen-age Dwarf," "The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis," etc.)
A ROBE BY ANY OTHER NAME
This, I must say, is not the usual question asked by collegians who grab my elbow. Usually they say, "Hey, Shorty, got a Marlboro?" And this is right and proper. After all, are they not collegians, and, therefore, the nation's leaders in intelligence and discernment? And do not intelligence and discernment demand the tastiest in tobacco flavor and smoking pleasure? And does not Marlboro deliver a flavor that is uniquely mellow, a selectrate filter that is easy drawing, a pack that is soft, a box that is hard? You know it!
As Commencement Day draws near, the question on everyone's lips is: "How did the different disciplines come to be marked by academic robes with hoods of different colors?" Everybody—but everybody—is asking it. I mean I haven't been able to walk ten feet on any campus in America without somebody grabs my elbow and says, "How did the different disciplines come to be marked by academic robes with hoods of different colors, hey?"
But I digress. Back to the colored hoods of academic robes. A doctor of philosophy wears blue, a doctor of medicine wears green, a master of arts wears white, a doctor of humanities wears crimson, a master of library science wears lemon yellow. Why? Why, for example, should a master of library science wear lemon yellow?
Well sir, to answer this vexing question, we must go back to March 29, 1844. On that date the first public library in the United States was established by Ulric Sigfaoos. All of Mr. Sigafoos's neighbors were of course wildly grateful—all, that is, except Wrex Todhunter.
Mr. Todhunter had hated Mr. Sigafoos since 1822 when both men had wooed the beauteous Melanie Zitt and Melanie had chosen Mr. Sigafoos because she was mad for dancing and Mr. Sigafoos knew all the latest steps, like the Missouri Compromise Mambo, the Shay's Rebellion Schottische, and the James K. Polk Polka, while Mr. Todhunter, alas, could not dance at all owing to a wound he had received at the Battle of New Orleans. (He was struck by a falling praline.)
Consumed with jealousy at the success of Mr. Sigafoos's library, Mr. Todhunter resolved to open a competing library. This he did, but he lured not a single patron away from Mr. Sigafoos. "What has Mr. Sigafoos got that I haven't got?" Mr. Todhunter kept asking himself, and finally the answer came to him: books.
So Mr. Todhunter stocked his library with lots of dandy books and soon he was doing more business than his hated rival. But Mr. Sigafoos struck back. To regain his clientele, he began serving tea free of charge at his library every afternoon. Thereupon, Mr. Todhunter, not to be outdone, began serving tea with sugar. Thereupon, Mr. Sigafoos began serving tea with sugar and cream. Thereupon, Mr. Todhunter began serving tea with sugar and cream and lemon.
This, of course, clinched the victory for Mr. Todhunter because he had the only lemon tree in town—in fact, in the entire state of North Dakota—and since that day lemon yellow has of course been the color on the academic robes of library science.
(Incidentally, the defeated Mr. Sigafos packed up his library and moved to California where, alas, he failed once more. There were, to be sure, plenty of lemons to serve with his tea, but, alas, there was no cream because the cow was not introduced to California until 1931 by John Wayne.) © 2001 Mac Shulman
* *
And today Californians, happy among their Gucnseys and Holsteins, are discovering a great new cigarette—the unfiltered, king-size Philip Morris Commander—and so are Americans in all fifty states. Welcome aboard!