Willkie board aims to unite

A collage of news clippings about the backlash against Muslims after Sept. 11, both on campus and around the country, was posted earlier this semester on a bulletin board in Willkie Quad. The artist, senior Emily Roth, prepared the board for a CommUNITY Education Program discussion last Tuesday at Willkie entitled, "Can you be proud to be an American without excluding those who aren't?"\nSome -- who believe the collage sympathizes with Muslims -- were offended, and feel no remorse for the Muslims that were targeted following Sept. 11.\nThe mindset of these people poses at least two problems for IU.\nFirst, arbitrary hatred is dangerous. It is reactionary and implies the intolerant person is uneducated. Such intolerance should be a major concern at all levels in this community. The University's administration has been struggling for a long time to diversify IU and make minorities feel comfortable on a campus that is more than 80 percent white. Uneducated and misguided attitudes threaten that work.\nSecond, on a more acute level, Muslims were physically assaulted after Sept. 11 at IU. There is a lot more happening than the clash of ideas. Violence stemming from ignorance has no place at this University.\nAs evidence of IU's push toward a better-educated and integrated campus, CUE began in 1989 with the intention of promoting diversity and understanding in the residence halls. Today, there are CUE educators in every dorm that "strive to create innovative programs that build community, create dialogue, challenge assumptions and foster acceptance and understanding among our student populations," according to the group's Web site.\nRoth is a community educator. She is one of 13 on a campus of 39,000. She is a gender studies and History major, works as an HIV Prevention Educator with local Bloomington shelters and is planning on obtaining her Master's in social work. She is clearly well-suited for her position and has an awesome responsibility by being involved in such important work.\nThe collage she created was meant to foster discussion among students about the nation's response to Sept. 11. She should be applauded for thinking seriously about such deep issues and pushing her colleagues to think about them also. But some students do not want to have the discussion. Instead, they would rather hold on to their notions of what Islam is and what all Muslims are like. They would prefer to group all Middle Easterners together and write them off as ideologically backward rather than understand the societies they live in.\nSept. 11 was a terrible day. We should neither forget the anger we felt, nor keep it bottled up inside. But we should be careful about what we do with that anger and how we move forward. Roth would prefer we all talk about it.