Racism runs amok in student orgs

Earlier this year I was almost brutally slaughtered. Yep. My precious, educated and juicy body parts were but a half-second from being strewn across the streets of Buckhead.

I was on my crotch rocket sitting at a red light. When it turned green, I happened to look both ways as I cracked open the burbling throttle of my motorcycle, and it saved my neck. A large SUV barreled wildly through a red light, missing me by inches and causing a million panicked neurons to fire in my body.

Now, I'm a pretty relaxed rider and even though this has happened to me before, it scared the living bejesus out of me. And in that instant of passion, I swore an incomprehensible mess of words at the black female driver so loudly that my ears rang inside my helmet.

Not one second later, the thought trickled into my head that it was wrong to yell a black person because I am white and that it is supposedly racist for me to do so.

The fact is that out of every 10 people who try to kill me on the road, about eight of them are black women. I didn't read this online or in a book, nor did my parents teach me this when I grew up. It has been my subjective experience. Does this make me a racist, or a statistician?

This realization really got me thinking about the realities of modern and popular discrimination. I discovered that as a white male, I am uniquely subject to the following social restriction: to not have an organization by whites or for whites, regardless of how culturally responsible we might claim to be.

The worst part about it is that this standard exists right here at Tech. Stop right now and ask yourself: "How many student organizations can I count with the word 'white' in their very title?" Zero. What about black, Asian, African, Indian, or women? I can count about 15, with my favorites being the India Club, the SWE (Society of Women Engineers), Miss Asian Atlanta, and NSBE (National Society of Black Engineers). While these groups mean well, they inherently construct social walls around themselves and hinder the progress towards a discrimination-free community. In other words, they are racist, sexist and just plain wrong.

I have a wild idea. Let's completely ignore culture, race, and sex for a moment. There are groups that I feel have been neglected through the course of organized minority advancement.

I propose the creation of the National Society of Blue-Eyed Engineers (NSBEE). I mean let's be serious, folks. Blue-eyed people are a clear minority and they have never been adequately represented. I can already imagine the mission statement: "to increase the number of culturally responsible blue-eyed engineers who excel academically, succeed professionally, and positively impact the community." They would of course, welcome engineers with brown or green eyes in the name of cultural equality. Outrageous? Yes, of course it is.

There is a promised land, free of racial or cultural divides, where what you are is always secondary to what you can do. Believe it or not, it is in professional sports. To me it is one of the only areas where race has little impact on selection because all that matters is performance.

It's a social disgrace that this paradigm is not often found in the business world. Maybe it is because millions of people aren't watching you work on TV, armed with figures and statistics to characterize your performance. Instead, there's affirmative action, which attempted to say "Hey! There are too many white people here, you should pay a fine or hire a more diverse crowd." Good in intention, discriminatory in execution.

I would love to see that fly in sports. Just imagine asking Arthur Blank, owner of the Atlanta Falcons, to sign a truly balanced racial palette of players for next year. Let's see, we would need seven Asians, eight Hispanics, three whites, and a few less Michael Vicks. What if the decision were yours? Would you handicap the Falcons as an affirmative reaction?

The point I'm trying to make is that we will never be rid of discrimination until we rid ourselves of the discrimination we currently accept.