Letters to the Editor

'Living and breathing'

To the Editor:

On the night of Nov. 14, four black female students were walking to a small party in High Rise South. Three of us were seniors at Penn, and the fourth a visiting friend. Four white boys whom none of us recognized slowly approached us on our left as we were passing in front of Hillel. One of them stared at us as he passed and suddenly shouted, "Hey Zulu Warriors," in the tune of some type of call-and-response melody. He repeated it as we passed, while his friends chuckled.

In the midst of this, all of us were having a hard time mentally processing what this boy was saying to us, because it did not make any sense. Why would this boy be taunting us? We were quietly walking through campus drawing no attention to ourselves and, prior to the outburst, paying no attention to this boy or his group of friends. Immediately, we were not angry enough to taunt them in return, hurt enough to cry or humored enough to laugh -- we were simply confused. When it set in that the shouts were directed at us, we subtly reacted turning to him yelling, "What the hell was that?" The boys continued to walk farther away from us but yelled back more racist taunts. From their yelling, all that we could make out was the phrase "chocolate sauce." After the brief shouting match, we continued to High Rise South where we shared what had just happened with our friends at the party.

As we recounted the story, the bewilderment faded and the event became clear in our minds: this random act of hate was just another log added to the fire of racism that continues to blaze on this campus. And no Penn ID can prevent us nor the people we care about from being singed by it. We were not only upset because of their taunts, but we were also embarrassed because our visiting friend was a prospective student. It may seem strange that we were embarrassed, but these boys represented an institution of which, until that night, we were proud to be members.

Two days later, after running this event through our minds a million times, what upsets us most is that this was not an isolated incident; rather, people of color at Penn are subject to this kind of abuse on a regular basis. Penn refuses to admit that it has a problem, a serious problem, which it needs to begin addressing in serious ways. Student groups on campus continually urge the University to recognize and address its problems with racism in an effective manner, but it becomes clear as case after case of racist incidents emerge in The Daily Pennsylvanian and campus circulated e-mails that Penn is not doing enough.

Our writing of this letter is not an attempt to gain sympathy or pity, it is simply to make record of an event and add it to the truckload of evidence that racism is living and breathing on this campus, not through unidentifiable reified forces, but through individual members of our community.

Charnan Cooke

College '04

Jerlina Love

College '04

Yvonne Shirley

College '04

A great deal at stake

To the Editor:

I was very pleased to see Kevin Collins' column on Bush's "faux-life" policies ("Really a pro-lifer? Bush should choose," The Daily Pennsylvanian, 11/14/03). It surprises and disappoints me that more people are not aware of Bush's anti-choice agenda and that reproductive choice has not been highlighted as a key issue in the upcoming presidential election.

As Choice Week is upon us, now is the time to realize how much is at stake in the battle for choice. All it takes is for Bush to appoint one anti-choice judge to the Supreme Court and we will likely lose the right to choose for the next 40 years. Bush has already appointed 160 judges to lower courts in his plan to slowly dismantle our rights from the bottom up. Several of his most extreme anti-choice judicial nominees are being held at bay by Democratic filibustering, but many have already been appointed.

I am not the only woman distressed by the sight of a group of white, middle-aged men congratulating each other as Bush signed the so-called "partial birth" abortion ban, a law with ominous consequences that these men will never have to face. I applaud all men and women who, like Collins, bring to our attention such an important life-altering issue as reproductive choice.

Lynn Huang

College '04

The writer is vice president of education for Penn for Choice.

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