re: #29 Belafon

The funny thing about UATX is it’s trying to be the UT Austin of 40+ years ago, the UT Austin I graduated from 40 years ago and to some extent still is today. I looked up UT Austin’s current student stats:

Gender
Women: 56.3%
Men: 43.6%
Ethnicity/Race
American Indian or Alaskan Native: 0.1%
Asian: 22.0%
Black: 4.5%
Hispanic: 25.2%
International: 9.6%
Multiracial (excl. Black or Hispanic): 2.8%
Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander: 0.1%
White: 33.0%
Unknown or Blank: 1.8%

utexas.edu

When I went to UT Austin, the gender ratio probably skewed to more men than women and definitely far more white than minority. (And back then, there was no breakout into Hispanic.) It’s still depressing to see that even though the state population is 14% Black, that UT Austin is still a long fucking ways away from representing the state’s population.

But there’s a whole attitude that Bari Weiss and her friends are reaching for, an attitude that was being recognized for what it was even in the 1980s. Yeah, let’s call it white racism, let’s call it white elitism. And yeah, it was there in the 1980s. I’m still depressed that I walked past the Robert E. Lee and Jeff Davis and Woodrow Wilson* statues for YEARS and didn’t even think they shouldn’t be there, much less gotten a rope and tried to pull them down. This racist, elitist attitude is still there, I’m sure, just covered up. Bari and friends want to bring that back to the forefront and as a grad of UT Austin (class of 1984) all I can say is *blergh*.

* Wilson segregated the Federal civil service. It was decades later when I learned this, and that’s why he got a statue on the UT Austin campus, not because he founded the League of Nations.