n A few weeks back, Boston University hosted the Great Debate on affirmative action (“Panel against affirmative action wins Great Debate,” April 5, p. 1), and it seems as if race has pervaded our campus mindset once again this week with the firing of CBS radio host Don Imus for derogatory remarks about black players on the Rutgers University women’s basketball team and the dropping of all charges against the players in the Duke University lacrosse case — another racially charged event.

What aggravates me about the latter two events is the position of the Revs. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson. These two self-appointed representatives of the black community (though they certainly don’t speak for everyone) continually declaim their self-righteous positions of racial anger to receptive audiences, which then climb aboard a bandwagon of blind antagonism. It was Sharpton and Jackson who incited the crowds to gather outside the CBS studios, and it was also Sharpton and Jackson who led the protests against the three Duke Lacrosse players accused of raping a black stripper.

Regarding the Imus case, which Jackson rightly claims on his RainbowPUSH Coalition website as “a victory for public decency,” the two activists took a stance that did, in fact, reflect the better interests of the community at large. This was a rare instance in which Jackson and Sharpton could match their rhetoric with a valid claim and enacted a change that few would argue was inappropriate. However, it is the Duke story that I use as my case study for the more “typical” Sharpton/Jackson agenda.

I am incensed that Jackson and Sharpton marched through the streets of Durham, N.C. as if they were the back roads of Selma, held vigils outside the university and automatically assumed the guilt of these “boys of privilege” with only an accusation as their basis for character assassination and condemnation.

Jackson even went so far as to offer to pay the “victim’s” college tuition, a bit presumptuous considering that little evidence had been provided to either support or deny her claim. Subsequent inquiries found the woman’s story lacked credibility, and that District Attorney Mike Nifong had used his position of prosecutorial power as a pulpit from which to pander to the black vote prior to his reelection campaign. No doubt that somewhere in his mind the influence that Jackson wields in the black community played a role in his overzealous statements assuming the three players’ guilt.

It was a similar scenario in 1987 when Sharpton came to the vociferous defense of Tawana Brawley, a black woman from Wappinger Falls, N.Y. who claimed she had been raped by six white men. Sharpton went on an all-out campaign about racial politics in both the city and the District Attorney’s office, but a grand jury later found her claims without merit, and both Brawley and Sharpton were successfully sued by a member of the DA’s office.

These scenarios lead me to my conclusion: Jackson and Sharpton play a dangerous hit-and-miss game of racialism that often creates more victims than racial progress. The reverends are sometimes right and just in their causes of tolerance and equity, but where have they been when they go too far? Where are the apologies to the three young men from Duke whose emotions were tortured over the last year, with Jackson and Sharpton taking their turns as dungeon master?

Neither man has stepped forward to offer a mea culpa, and I am worried as to whom their next victim of rushed guilt, prejudice and insensitivity might be.

Neil St. Clair

CAS/COM ’08