By MICHELLE WONG
Editor-in-Chief
 

The student said that his surname was Japanese. He and his classmates recall that the professor then said, "I love ethnics."

As a result of this remark, the student said he felt put on the spot. He remembers his classmates' looks of shock at the comment. "Everyone's jaw dropped," he said.

"It definitely was a moment of silence," said Tonie Taft '98, who heard the exchange in her Advanced Personality Theory class.

Taft said she had never heard a "slip-up" like Wagner's in her four years at Bates.

The questioned student has since dropped the course for academic reasons. He is unidentified because he is a psychology major and fears that this published story can only hurt him.

"I don't think the comment was meant to be discriminatory," he said. "I just thought it was really naive and crass."

Wagner said that being offensive "certainly was not my intention."

Yet the student's initial response was "that it was such a stupid comment," he said. "I expected a little bit more tact from a Bates College professor."

The student said that he thought the professor tried to alleviate the awkwardness of the situation by jokingly asking him the origin of his first name. But this did not make him feel better about the earlier exchange.

Wagner doesn't remember if he asked anyone else the origin of their surnames during class that day.

He said that he realized his mistake, tried to apologize in class and "chose not to pursue the issue."

No students chose to pursue the issue after class, either. "I heard nothing further," Wagner said.

So, if no one involved wanted to talk to Wagner about it, is this one isolated incident worth a newspaper story?

It's not headline news involving, say, violence, defamation of character or damage done to the reputation of a business. But it offended nonetheless.

The student's tale is not quite like the story about Asian-American students who claimed that they were denied service and then were beaten up by security guards after being thrown out of a Denny's restaurant in Syracuse, N.Y., earlier this month. Television and print news sources across the country covered that story.

Nor is it comparable to the recent hate crime against Chopsticks Chinese restaurant in Lewiston. In this incident that took place less than a year ago, a customer claimed that she contracted a sexually transmitted disease by eating a dish containing infected semen.

The Sun-Journal reported the Chopsticks story. It was eventually proven that Chopsticks was the victim, not the perpetrator of the crime. Yet the restaurant's business nonetheless suffered from the allegations.

These are just two of many examples of reported anti-Asian crimes, which are on the rise. Nationwide, they have increased 17 percent since last year, according to a report released earlier this month by the Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium in Washington.

Confrontation occurred in these two newsworthy incidents. Why didn't anyone at Bates confront Wagner?

The funny thing is, the student said he didn't feel discriminated against. He said he

didn't want to play the victim, that he just felt offended. The student was angry enough, though, to tell his mother and friends about it.

So that's where the incident began and ended: with the professor's good intentions, and with the student thinking about what had happened for days afterward.

The professor should have known better. Even if he claimed he didn't mean what he said, he should have thought about the implications of his words before he spoke.

In the politically correct climate at Bates, one might not know what's offensive or inoffensive until he or she makes a comment, and then there is or isn't a reaction to it.

If there's no reaction, then how are people supposed to know what is offensive? How can they get their points across without dumbing up their comments with p.c. jargon?

What if people's thoughts, and not just their language, are offensive - shouldn't they be entitled to them anyway?

Sure. But there's a heavy cost for failing to try to understand other people's feelings and needs, especially when people think they're not affected by discrimination because they themselves are not being discriminated against.

Discrimination against some community members has a negative impact on the whole community, in that as each segment of a community is weakened, so is the whole.

Maybe members of the status quo aren't hurting, and therefore don't care. Maybe since these people don't think enough to care, they don't know how they're inflicting pain on people. This could be because, once again, they're not thinking enough about the implications of what they say.

If people do not want to speak offensively, but are uncertain about how to become educated, there are people as resources to talk with at Bates, such as other students, professors and a multicultural center director. The goal is to be receptive to information about people of backgrounds, lifestyles and points of view different from their own. The idea is to be able to co-exist civilly with people of all kinds.

There's no excuse for being offensive through ignorance. There can, however, be pardons for uncertainty, as long as one has the courage to ask and keep learning about the issues behind such offensive comments as "I love ethnics."

Isolated incidents like the one involving the student happen often at Bates. And chances are, they're only heard, talked or written about in an isolated context.

So these occurrences, like the aforementioned one on campus, won't be front-page news.

But if no one acknowledges that discrimination of this kind happens, then there's no problem, right? It depends on what you think, and who you talk to. End of story.