San Diego Campus Awakens to Uneasy Race Relations - NYTimes.com: ...Students at the University of California, San Diego, held an off-campus “Compton Cookout” Feb. 15 to mock Black History Month, with guests invited to don gold teeth in the style of rappers from the Los Angeles suburb of Compton, eat watermelon, and dress in baggy athletic wear.
Outrage ensued from the relatively small black student population here and their supporters, who grew more inflamed when a satirical campus television program broadcast a segment on the party and used a racial epithet to denounce black students.
On Thursday night, a third incident, a student’s hanging a noose from a bookcase in the main library, spurred a large, multicultural mass of chanting and drumming students to occupy the chancellor’s office for several hours on Friday and fed a simmering, some say much-needed, debate over race relations.
“The campus has been pretty silent about racism and nobody, until now, says anything,” said Aaron Gurlly, 30, an African-American graduate student who was among those occupying the administration building. The fallout from the incidents has jolted this campus in an era when many students and faculty believed that the progress of African-Americans nationwide have made such discussions passe.
