The Princetonian reported today that the Asian-American Students Association is organizing a formal protest against the paper's racist "Lian Ji" essay. (A 298-member Facebook group formed to protest the piece as well, but that's now a given in any campus argument.)
In the same article, the managing board, which oversaw the story (written by "a diverse group of students -- including several Asians on our senior editorial staff -- who had no malicious intent"), said that it regretted offending any readers. The article was supposed to mock racism, said editor-in-chief Chanakya Sethi. (Sethi and the rest of the managing board will end their terms soon, leaving their successors to deal with the aftermath, says Ivy League blog IvyGate.)
Given all this (and leaving the reader to decide if people are "allowed" to make racist jokes about their own race"), could the problem be less about racism and more about bad writing? After all, with college journalism one should assume ignorance before malice, and plenty of college journalists lose track of their story's direction. In the case of the Lian Ji essay, that lack of direction may have been what rendered it offensive. This could be just another poorly executed story by writers that (as they argue) wanted to mock racism, but weren't smart enough to do it.
Disclosure: I was a college journalist just two years ago and am still inclined to defend my callow brethren.
