Our broken discourse

Last Friday, the editorial board put together a piece about MLK week, the gist of which was that UNC should do more to make the week’s activities feel relevant to the entire student body. Our premise was that if King’s legacy is one of integration and equality, a celebration in his honor should address the vestiges of segregation on this campus, of which there are many.

The mere suggestion that segregation still exists at UNC elicited cries of outrage, accusations of libel and calls for an apology. My initial reaction was confusion.

Does anyone really think we have a perfectly integrated campus here at UNC, or at any university for that matter?

And if, like me, they think we still have a long way to go, why is talking about it such a taboo? Who gains from pretending that our university is more inclusive than it actually is?

The editorial wasn’t perfect. It certainly could have been clearer. But its goal was to start a discussion about what can be done to improve diversity, not to disparage those on the MLK planning committee, who have clearly worked hard to celebrate it.

If the editorial came across as an affront, it’s my fault. If it read like, as one online commenter put it, “passive-aggressive, short-sighted, ignorant BS,” then the failure was mine, as an editor. But I can assure you the intentions were sterling.

My next reaction to the outcry was, for lack of a better word, sadness. There seemed to be a much larger issue at hand here.

If the dialogue on this campus is so broken that an earnest call — albeit imperfectly executed — for better participation is almost automatically interpreted as an attack, where are we to even begin the conversation?

This polarization is not unique to questions of race. Nor, of course, is it unique to Chapel Hill. One need not look any further than the Republican primary in South Carolina to see that pandering to Americans’ basest, most bigoted impulses is often the best guarantee of a politician’s success.

Down the road at Duke, a similar tendency revealed itself when a team of researchers from the university released a study claiming black students at Duke only performed as well as their white classmates if they took easier classes and chose less rigorous majors.

To be sure, the Duke students’ outcry was merited — many times over. It was clear that the study supported a specific, racist agenda.

But Duke should take this as an opportunity not just for outrage, but for progress. The ease with which the study polarized the Duke community shows that, as an institution, they have a long way to go toward racial equality. This seems like a natural moment for the school to address these problems in earnest.

As college students, righteous indignation should be a starting point, not an end. We gain little from simply proving to the world that we are right and our opponents are wrong. If our conviction is sincere, we should be committed to bringing others around to our way of thinking.

We should try to strengthen our own arguments by hearing as many counter-arguments as possible. Simply putting a position out there and telling people to take it or leave it does little to move the dialogue along.

In its own way, shouting is the most passive form of protest, since it doesn’t look for a response from the other side. UNC students and the Chapel Hill community can do better than that.

We shouldn’t be content with announcing that we are angry, even if we know we’re right. And I’d venture a guess that most 21-year-olds’ conclusions aren’t as airtight as we’d like to think.

And we must strive to distinguish between thinking critically, in the academic sense, and being unnecessarily critical of one another.

Questioning our own beliefs and those of others, challenging convention and taking the criticism of others in stride — this is how we will refine our imperfect beliefs. This is how we’ll continue to make progress.

Maggie Zellner is the opinion editor of The Daily Tar Heel. She is a junior comparative literature major from Lynchburg, Va. Contact her at opinion@dailytarheel.com.