Wearing black clothing is racist -- at U of Oregon

We read:

"If Saturday’s game against USC finishes without any racially charged incidents from the student body, it will not be much of a surprise. It probably hadn’t occurred to many students that calling for a blackout at Autzen — that is, wearing black clothing to the game — could have implied anything else.

University senior Austin Berry started a Facebook group called “Autzen Blackout” to encourage the crowd to dress in black at the USC game on Halloween. He said he had seen the unity that dressing in coordinated colors brought Boise State fans on Sept. 3 and wanted to inspire the same for the Ducks.

The Bias Response Team, part of the University’s Office of Student Life, pre-empted the plan with concerns that students could replicate racially insensitive behaviors exhibited at other schools when there were calls for a “blackout,” most notably Oregon State University in 2007 when students wore afro wigs, black face paint and gold chains.

That certainly was not what Berry, whose father is black, had intended. It’s hard to believe any reasonable person would have interpreted the instructions that way, at least before the idea appeared on the front pages of two newspapers and was featured on television news in Eugene and Portland.

After conversations with representatives from the Office of Student Life, Berry changed the name of his Facebook group to “Lights-Out Autzen, Wear Black vs USC on Halloween Night,” an innocuous enough change. More bizarre, however, was the request he add quotations to the phrase “black clothing.” If there is any way to add a racial subtext to this event, the partial quotes seem to be the way to do it. Instructions to wear black clothing say to wear clothing that is black. Instructions to wear “black clothing” seems to add a wink at something else entirely. Punctuation matters.

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