It was Soul Food Thursday at Howard University last week, and many students were looking forward to their favorite meal: fried chicken, macaroni and cheese, collard greens and cornbread. At lunchtime, however, students discovered that much of the campus had been locked down and that the school's cafeteria was off limits.
Apparently, many of them did not know that President Bush and first lady Laura Bush had arrived for a "youth summit" at the Blackburn Center, where the dining hall is located. Stomachs began to growl, tempers flared, and, eventually, a student protest ensued.
Wow. A very simplistic and demeaning piece, to say the least. Hell; I'm surprised he didn't add watermelon to the menu. I'm sure Howard students probably didn't know Bush was in there, but to say they were protesting because they were missing out on "Soul Food Thursday"? Talk about no respect, nor a willingness to give them the benefit of the doubt. Milloy did everything but call them "coons".
The funny thing about this column is that the column was supposed to be a critical piece on President Bush, as Milloy is an unabashed leftist and Bush hater. According to Milloy, Bush should have known there was going to be trouble, seeing that, well, he shut down the cafe during Soul Food Thursday. He should have anticipated this reaction and changed the venue for a different day or time. He actually had the nerve to compare this incident to the government's response to Katrina.
The comments at the end of the column is what really set Howard off:
Howard is not some hotbed of political activism. The biggest event of the year is homecoming, which features two fashion shows, a step show and lots of hip-hop celebrities. As the rapper Ludacris put it in his summer hit, "Pimpin' All Over the World":
Jump in the car and ride for hours,
Makin' sure I don't miss the homecoming at Howard.
To set off a student protest at this school, you'd have to be politically tone-deaf in the extreme, out of touch and flying blind. And yet, Bush did it.
However, Milloy is having his own Katrina moment, as the column pissed off a lot of people at Howard. On Monday, Howard President H. Patrick Swygert (is he kin to Jimmy? Jus askin) wrote a letter in response to Milloy's column:
I am writing in response to the outrageous and ill-founded comments made by Courtland Milloy in his Washington Post column on Sunday, October 30. One certainly would expect Mr. Milloy to know better than to form his opinions based on a second-hand source, the broadcast that he apparently saw on Fox 5 (WTTG-TV) news. Beyond that, the tone of his column with its appalling stereotyping of the more than 10,000 students at Howard University is quite shocking. And this at a time when the nation is honoring the memory of Rosa Parks, who 50 years ago stood up for the dignity of the African-American community.Milloy wasn't done, though. Here's his response:
It is quite ironic that even in the face of the student protest that ensued, Mr. Milloy would seek to characterize Howard University as a politically indifferent party school. Further, to suggest that the driving motivation behind the student protest was to “break through campus security to get to the cordoned-off cafeteria” was both inaccurate and a misrepresentation. Our students are extremely aware and continue, in the finest tradition of the University, to be at the forefront in the quest for social justice and equality for our community. In recent times, for example, they led the march to the Supreme Court in support of the University of Michigan in Grutter vs. Bollinger. They serve in great numbers as volunteers in the Washington, D.C., area; and they continue to rally to the aid of victims of Hurricane Katrina by welcoming and supporting the students from the disaster-area colleges.
You claim to be upset because I wrote that "Howard is not a hotbed of political activism," and you cite the school's legacy of social protest and political activism. But what have you done lately? A walk down to the Mall for the Millions More Movement, an AIDS Walk and participation in get-out-the-vote rallies does not make your heirs to Walter Rodney or Kwame Toure.Milloy took them to task, and called them out on their reluctance to engage in activism. To show Milloy's leftist credentials, in an interview with Howard's "The Hilltop" (free reg. required) he claimed he was hard on Howard because they were supposedly "The Talented Tenth", a throwback socialist ideal developed by W.E.B. DuBois that claimed only 10% of the black community possesses the skills and abilities to lead the other 90%.
What about honoring the legacy of Roland Scott (chairman of pediatrics at Howard from 1949 to 1973 and the driving force behind the Sickle Cell Anemia Control Act of 1971)? Your school has the Center for Sickle Cell Disease, but the organizers of annual walks to find a cure for that dreadful disease can't get you to participate for the life of those hurting black babies.
The home of Carter G. Woodson, a Howard professor and father of Black History Month, almost fell to the ground before the federal government stepped in to save it. Where were you? And why weren't you at the Optimal Health for Black Men conference, held last month at Howard Hospital? A lot of outstanding black doctors, psychologists, scientists and educators gave presentations. You protest about not being invited to Laura Bush's "youth summit," but you are nowhere to be found when your elders hold a lifesaving summit just for you.
This little spat kind of reminds me of something Thomas Sowell said when he was asked why aren't there any great black leaders anymore; he replied if we still had over 100 black people being lynched every year, we'd have better leaders. Youth are reluctant to get involved in activities like these because there isn't an underlying factor that compels them to come out and do so. They weren't engaged to do so at home, they aren't compelled to do so at school, so they aren't going to do it voluntarily.
If Milloy wanted activism, he got it. He mocked the idea that students were actually preparing a protest in the second column; the next day, there were approx. 100 Howard students protesting (Hilltop - free reg required) outside of the Washington Post. Milloy wasn't there, though, as he was preparing for his son's 16th birthday.
Reading the reactions on the net to this incident, I've seen a lot of people compare Milloy's second column to comments made by Bill Cosby. Sure; there's a comparison. But then they inaccurately analyze this to mean that there's a conservative movement that will grow out of this. Please. As I said about Cosby, this has nothing to do with conservatism; it has to do with elitism. Milloy sounds like a grumpy grandfather that always thinks things were better back in the day. They are on the same side, just not on the same page.
While we should be appreciative of efforts spawned from political movements and activism gone by, to compare those days to the present is ridiculous, especially since those who are complaining laid the path to THESE DAYS. After all; Howard's laxadaiscial students didn't get that way on their own; they were helped by the previous generation. And that could be seen as a good thing and a bad thing, as they helped provide a better environment for them to live and thrive in, yet that comfort allowed contentment and laziness. That's help to create a new span of problems no only at Howard, but within the black community as a whole.
You can't fix 2005 problems with 1955 solutions. The simple fact that Milloy is so willing to talk about what used to happen and try to characterize Howard students in such an elitist and archaic way shows that neither Howard University nor Milloy truly has the answers as to why this happened or how it can be fixed.
