The Daily Egyptian is published by the students of SIU at Carbondale. Except during vacations and exam weeks, The Daily Egyptian is published Monday through Friday during the fall and spring semesters and TWThF during the summer semester."

Are younger blacks too sensitive?

Today's column was particularly difficult to write, because I could not find anything terribly interesting in the news that I felt was compelling enough to dedicate 500 words to. As a side note, I almost wrote about the invasion of Fallujah, but I really did not have a critical perspective on the imperialist invasion of Iraq by the United States, nor did I have much to say about the United States taking over the General Hospital and not letting Iraqi soldiers and ill citizens receive care, or the hostage slaughterhouses found yesterday, where according to the Associated Press "foreign captives were held and killed."

Correct me if I am wrong, but this is a war. Why should we be surprised when an occupied country's combatants kill foreign captives? Isn't that the point? To kill them before they kill you, or at least that is what the president says about invading countries that haven't committed any crimes against the United States.

But enough about the war. Today I would like to talk about something much more important than the war. You guessed it - race.

I know, Tommy Curry is such a single issue guy. I mean every column since February 2001 is about race. Who would have thought that you could fill up so many columns with the same unchanging theme? Could it be that race is complex, and that it demands post-structuralist thinking and critical methodologies to properly understand? No, that could not be the case. Why you ask? Because Black people just aren't that complicated.

I mean we are all the underachievers, the "below one standard deviation-ers," the "44 percent of the American prison population," the deviants, the criminals, the "angry black men," the real racists - because we talk about it just too much. I mean this is self-evident, is it not?

About a month ago, one of the most insightful philosophers I know, Dr. Stikkers, asked me a question. He asked me "if living with a raced identity was just part of the human problematic." As he said, "is that not part of the human project to question and seek to understand that which makes us suffer?"

At the time I said, "No, the human problematic is interrupted by race, because race negates the very criterion necessary for its subjects to be included into humanity," but after being lectured by an elder, I am truly puzzled as to how we (African-Americans) should interpret our journey through life.

As the elder said, "This generation of African-Americans has an inappropriate emotional response because they walk into a classroom and are not treated fairly, but 40 years ago, it was understood that you were not equal," and there was not an emotional response to inequality because it was fact.

So I guess he was saying that "This generation of African-Americans is too sensitive." Do we suppose that the result of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 resulted in a change of people's perceptions and attitudes toward us? I mean if laws don't change attitudes, then it would logically follow that the social climate and personal perceptions of African-Americans have not changed since the 1960s.

So should we be disappointed when we have not received reparations, or when they challenge affirmative action, or when Black faculty are not being hired at SIUC, or when no African Americans work as financial aid officers, or when Bush gets re-elected? The short answer, for those of you who skip to the end of my columns, is that the attitudes are that we just don't belong.

Tommy is a graduate student. My Nommo appears every Thursday. These views do not necessarily reflect those of the DAILY EGYPTIAN.

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