I have long believed that trouble between the races is seldom what it appears to be. It was not hard to see after my first talks with students that racial tension on campus is a problem that misrepresents itself. It has the same look, the typical pattern, of America’s timeless racial conflict—white racism and black protest. And I think part of our concern over it comes from the fact that it has the feel of a relapse, illness gone and come again. But if we are seeing the same symptoms, I don’t believe we are dealing with the same illness. For one thing, I think racial tension on campus is the result more of racial equality than inequality.
How to live with racial difference has been America’s profound social problem. For the first 100 years or so following emancipation it was controlled by a legally approved inequality that acted as a buffer between the races. No longer is this the case. On campuses today, as throughout society, blacks enjoy equality under the law—a profound social advancement. No student may be kept out of a class or a dormitory or an extracurricular activity because of his or her race. But there is a paradox here. On a campus where members of all races are gathered, mixed together in the classroom as well as socially, differences are more exposed than ever. And this is where the trouble starts. For members of each race—young adults coming into their own, often away from home for the first time —bring to this site of freedom, exploration, and now, today, equality, very deep fears and anxieties, not fully developed feelings of racial shame, anger, and guilt. These feelings could lie hidden in the home, in familiar neighborhoods, in simpler days of childhood. But the college campus, with its structures of interaction and adult-level competition—the big exam, the dorm, the “mixer”—is another matter. I think campus racism is born of the rub between racial difference and a setting, the campus itself, devoted to interaction and equality. On our campuses, such concentrated micro-societies, all that remains unresolved between blacks and whites, all the old wounds and shames that have never been addressed, present themselves for attention-and present our youth with pressures they cannot always handle.
1. According to the author, （ ）.
2. Nowadays racial tension on campus most probably starts with（ ）.
3. The phrase “coming into their own’’ on Line 8 of Paragraph 2 probably means（ ）.
4. When young adults enter college for the first time, （ ） .
5. The passage is mainly about（ ）.
