Recently, a noose made of green rope was discovered hanging in the University of California – Sandiego’s Geisel Library. According to university officials, the student who later claimed responsibility was suspended. The incident followed a furious series of angry protests spawned by an off-campus event called “Compton Cookout”—a party meant to mock Black History month by having white members of the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity portray “ghetto” stereotypes of African-Americans.

Adding disarray to the disruption, the UCSD student publication The Koala aired a TV segment supporting the off-campus event, packing it with racial slurs and epithets. And when university officials sought to obtain a copy of the segment, a note was left at the UCSD-TV studio which read “Compton Lynching.” The university’s student government has since suspended the publication’s funding, indefinitely.

Met with a lengthy and complex list of student demands by the Black Student Union; a student walk-out; a student-led occupation of the university Chancellor’s office; and a litany of “Real Pain! Real Action!” protests; the university’s response has been typical.

In a sort of bureaucratic gumbo of distance, admonishment, appeasement, and the usual sterile promises to investigate, the UCSD administration has all but absolved itself from putting its disciplinary action where its mouth is. To the naked eye, its hands are just too shaky and sweaty to redraw a straight line in bold that separates free speech from hate crimes.

Consequently, minority students have expressed anger and a fear for their safety. With African-American students only constituting 2% of the UCSD student body, the university’s lack of competency to protect and defend its students against instances of racial injury is likely to result in more perilous incidents, to come.

“It’s abhorrent and untenable,” UCSD Chancellor Marye Anne Fox said of the noose before a crowd of angry students. But students were still left wondering what she was going to do about it. The university has avoided calling any of the recent string of racial charged incidents a hate crime. And the campus police classified the noose incident as “hanging a noose with the intent to terrorize”—a mere misdemeanor punishable by up to one year in prison under California’s criminal code.

The university has indicated that it wouldn’t leave expulsion off the table for any students involved in the incident, but that has left many students feeling that the university is trying to avoid having to address the more tangible issues of campus racism.

I have no doubt that the impassioned student body can easily bring the UCSD administration to its knees and show it the way to institutional racial justice. But I don’t know if as members of the millennial generation, the UCSD student body can self-correct. Let us not pretend that the individuals who committed these asinine acts of racial discord are middle-aged white Tea Party Mississippi folk; they aren’t. They are young people from liberal California—the post-racial enthusiasts who ushered in Obama on a wave of joyous political unrest, symbolically overthrowing identity politics in the name of progressivism.

They listen to Jay-Z and Kanye West, resurrect their suburban white flight isolation with the unprecedented number of black friends they have, eager to shed a little white privilege for a couple of years while they grade papers in the inner-city for Teach for America.

They are supposed to be absent of the racial hang-ups that held back their parents and grandparents with bigoted suspicion and loathing. They are supposed to be the ones who will undo past shames, ridding the nation of its racial sins not through systemic reparation, but through multiculturalism, education, and even Hip Hop.

As conventional wisdom would have it, higher education is supposed to guard against racial hatred in all of its many explicit forms. By statutory design, universities are supposed to be safe zones for minorities. But as irony would have it, a noose in a university library during Black History month in 2010 can never be a figment of modern day fiction.

No reason to pretend the millennial generation is anymore post-racial than a room of white frat boys in Compton blackface.

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