I was at a 70’s party in Eversole Courtyard a couple of weekends ago. Late 90’s hip-hop tunes blared out of the speakers, but the partygoers gladly ignored this minor incongruency and continued to "party on." A full spectrum of Pomona’s student body was represented on the dance floor, a place where racial lines were crossed and then subsequently freaked nasty. It was a slice of college life straight out of a glossy Tommy Hillfiger ad in Rolling Stone. The atmosphere was completed by the DJ’s scratching over a record by America’s favorite Hometown Hero, Bruce Springsteen. Satisfied with my observations, I went in search of a beer.

The serving area was in the corner and there were two student servers and a campus safety officer checking IDs. The unruly mass in front of them was intent upon getting their glasses filled, not with forming orderly lines. The servers, inundated by a bevy of plastic cups, naturally filled the cups of their friends and frat brothers first and those of people they were less acquainted with after. This is the natural course of things. I noticed though that while everyone else was pushing forward, getting their beers, and leaving, I was stuck behind the same man. He had been standing where he was, in front of the server, for maybe seven full minutes. While others next to him got served a beer–and even a couple more to bring back to their friends–he waited patiently. It was, after all, free beer.

When the Campus Safety officer who was checking IDs brought this oversight to the attention of the student server, the student flew into a rage. "Don’t tell me how to do my job!" he exclaimed. When the officer responded that he only wanted to see this young man served a beer, the student server cursed repeatedly at the officer and then asked for his badge number. He stormed off, taking the tap to the keg with him and effectively ending his service for the night.

The officer and the partygoer in question are both black and the student server is white.

This encounter is reminiscent of the stereotypical accounts of racism that our parents and teachers have told us stories of. It is so familiar that you can, in hindsight, find yourself picturing the races of the participants as the event unfolded.

It could be argued that this exchange was not one of discrimination, merely irritation. That this was not clear-cut racism, but a drunk and frustrated attempt at defying the Man. He did not spit on or curse at the young black man in front of him. He did not avert his eyes and ignore him. I have full confidence in the fact that the young man in front of me would have eventually gotten served had the Campus Safety officer not intervened on his behalf. The black officer’s intervention–and the implication that the Server was intentionally not serving someone because of their race–was too much for that ideologue to bear. Full of righteous indignation, he demanded the officer’s badge number as you or I would upon being slandered. He would have served him eventually; he was not a racist.

In this day and age, things like this should not happen. But to think that race does not affect our actions ‘in this day and age’ is to be ignorant. If you think a professor who gets denied tenure by his peers, a motorist denied his life by police, or a man denied his beer by a frat boy had nothing to do with the fact that they were black, then you have eyes but fail to see…and don’t you remember?

Sincerely,

Patrick B. Resing

Editor-in-Chief