Black and Hispanic Students Evacuated at a Christian College

The New York Times ran an article on April 23, 2005 entitled “Christian College Secludes Students After Hate Letters.” In a nutshell, Trinity International University, a small Evangelical Christian college in Bannockburn, Illinois evacuated its African-American and Hispanic students to hotels and off-campus private housing after three students received very violent and very frightening hate mail through the campus mail over the space of three weeks. The authorities were not sure who sent the letters, but they considered them threatening enough to evacuate all of the approximately 200 African-American and Hispanic students on campus. Because the letters contained escalating threats of violence and were received with weeks of the anniversaries of Hitler’s birthday and the Columbine shootings, school authorities sought to take extra precautions. Besides the evacuations, Trinity employed extra security guards and police officers to patrol the campus and true to their Christian roots, they called on a higher power to protect them against racist violence through prayer sessions. The Rev. Jesse Jackson visited the school to meet and pray with students and he praised the students’ bravery and the school’s response to the threats.

Let me preface the following by stating that I have great respect for Rev. Jackson. It is my solemn belief that whatever little wrong he may have ever done springs solely from the fact that he is a fallible human and not from a moment of power drunkenness, equivocation or failure of his love for America and its people. BUT, I disagree with Jesse here. I say this: at least one person other than the sender of the hate mail knows who the sender is. Because of the company the racist author of the hate mail is likely to keep, the person who knows the identity of the author is probably white. Therefore, I think that all of the white students should have been evacuated from campus.

Before you close this blog in an egalitarian huff, hear me out. The Police Chief, Kevin Tracz, told reporters that the threats in the letters were specific to the individuals who received them and not to large groups, yet all students of African-American and Hispanic background were asked to evacuate the campus for the sake of safety. Although those students will be allowed to finish their classes at some later time, during the evacuation they are not staying in the on-campus dorms, nor are they attending the classes for which they have paid tuition. If you view evacuation as punishment for white evacuees, then it is punishment for these evacuees as well. So how do we decide who receives the punishment? The group of inconvenienced colored students (yes, I said ‘colored’) are the least likely to be able to identify the person whose capture will end the tension on campus and heal the rupture of the Trinity community. So why not evacuate the white students? Just as the police think that only three students are in actual jeopardy, the police also think that only one person sent those letters, therefore, it's no less fair to evacuate the racial group of the perpetrator versus that of the victims. In fact, evacuating and thus greatly inconveniencing the white students might have two important effects.

The first, and most pressing effect, is that the person or persons who know the identity of the perpetrator will be motivated to alert the authorities and end his or her own period of personal upheaval caused by having to evacuate. A quick tip that could end this entire affair is in the best interest of everyone involved regardless of race, and the best way to get that tip it is to rock the comfy boats of those who may have the information. Second, evacuating the white students would bring home to them, in a way that conversations and half-empty classrooms cannot, the severity of the situation and the helpless feelings of colored people when we are all grouped together and blamed collectively for the wrongs committed by one of our number.

Being treated as an individual where negative attributes are concerned is an amenity of racial privilege whites enjoy that darker Americans do not. I am going to take a moment to luxuriate in the image of white students being told to evacuate because while the school doesn’t know which of them participated in this horrendous, community-destroying affair, at least one of them did, and to protect the African-American and Hispanic students on campus, they would all have to be evacuated until the perpetrator is in police custody. Cries of “it’s not fair! I’m not a racist!” would soon morph into “when they find this guy, I’m going to throttle him. How dare he cast a shadow on all white Trinity International University students?! Now everyone will think we’re a bunch of racists!" and "making up all the classes I missed is going to eat into my summer break!” Sigh.

I return to reality. And I close with an update on the Trinity International University situation gleaned from Reuters.com. Apparently, the hate mail was a hoax perpetrated on the college community by an African-American female student who wanted her parents to think that the college was a dangerous place so that she could come home without having to admit that she simply didn’t want to be at Trinity. The young woman is being charged with disorderly conduct and a hate crime. Fine. Wag your tongue and “nannie-nannie-boo-boo” me. It turns out that applying my logic to expel the racial group of the perp would have gotten the African-American students evacuated anyway. Go figure. But do not deny me my luxurious imagination; and consider the truth of my argument.