I’ve been waiting a long time for a chance to reiterate and clarify a column of mine from last semester, a column that took an opposing position on the issue of university-implemented racial diversity. So when College Jeopardy! celeb Suchita Shah offered to do a point-counterpoint column with me, I was honored. I also saw an opportunity to make another inquiry into a system that, as I asserted last semester, widens the imaginary lines between us into chasms.

In my earlier column, I used financial evidence regarding the amount of money spent on Plan 2008 and the Creating Community Initiative to indicate we were financing goals that were fundamentally immoral. I stand by that. This time, however, I am hoping to focus on another segment of this unnecessary system of mandated diversity: “multicultural” student groups.

Asking this simple question can best approach the issue of the relevance of such organizations: In their own words, what is the mission of these organizations? The objective of one of the best-funded and most well-known organizations dedicated to students of color — the Multicultural Student Center — is to create an environment in which differences can be celebrated and understanding between students of color and their white counterparts can be raised.

But why then is MSC handing out Jimmie Hatz Sexually Transmitted Disease awareness pamphlets, pamphlets with a supposed emphasis on the hip-hop community that feature a black man and black woman, with the woman dressed up as a scantily-clad prostitute?

It is painfully easy to recognize the absurd implications behind the argument that students of color are more likely to comprehend an issue simply because the subject literature panders to their supposed appearance-based cultural preferences. And understanding, if that is the aim toward which the MSC strives, won’t be accomplished by constantly reminding us we are black or white and our intimate preferences are expected to follow from the aforementioned color.

Such a pamphlet is indicative of the message multicultural student groups perpetuate as a whole: Diversity is only contingent on appearance, and appearance will always be the best indicator by which to judge the character and the inclinations of an individual.

But perhaps the best argument against multicultural organizations can be made by simply walking over to UW’s College Library. I made such a trip a few days before writing this column, and what I noticed there is perhaps the most poignant example of why the MSC and all its associate groups are little more than unnecessary relics, perpetuating the very bogeyman they claim to be so intent on eradicating.

While in College Library I saw black, white, Asian and Hispanic students, studying casually — intermingling, if you will — without any exterior pressure whatsoever to do so. There wasn’t hip-hop music playing on the loudspeakers for the benefit of the black students, the white students weren’t constantly reminded of how privileged they were, and no one was present because they were conscious of a shared desire to “integrate” with one another.

That whole business sounds corny, artificial and painfully utopian.

But what is even more artificial is the argument that by creating the fiction of designated areas or times where integration can occur through a particular cultural paradigm, whatever its color, understanding will somehow improve. Maybe, just maybe, instead of creating both a lexicon and an atmosphere in which minority students are constantly reminded that their color is, in the end, what defines them, multicultural organizations should have enough respect to let students start bridging those “chasms” on their own.

Sam Clegg ([email protected]) is a freshman majoring in political science and economics.