Bullying is Not a Team Sport

We are ending this school year mid-sentence in an ongoing conversation about what it means to live together in a learning community and treat each other with basic respect and human decency.

I’m sure you can fill in the blanks from incidents in your own school systems or from news accounts of incidents nearby. You know the drill: A group of (statistically white, males) from a (sports team, frat, formal or informal clique) in the name of “just having fun” throws a party or high-energy gathering that for some unknown reason requires harmful behavior directed at a minority group (assaults on women, racially offensive costumes or themes) in order to have fun.

Our community of teachers and learners is still reeling from yet another assault on what seems to be the most basic assumptions of civility and common sense. It’s a narrative repeated on college campuses with painful–and astonishing–regularity. I am outraged.

In the most recent case here, our ski team [2] threw an off-campus party that for some inexplicable reason required members to don racially/ethnically stereotypically offensive and mean-spirited costumes in order for the white male skiers to have fun. I will never understand why a party is way more fun if you’re cruelly mocking someone who doesn’t’ look like you.

It’s 2012. Seriously?

With all the focus on “character education” and the ever-expanding anti-bullying curriculum infused at all levels in schools nationwide, it’s hard to understand how those lessons are missed as youths arrive at college and exhibit a lack of good judgment and basic decency.

Turns out, an African-American student came upon this off-campus party, stopped and documented it with his cell phone. The inevitable public airing of the photographs and descriptions of the event sparked the following arc: outrage, an apology from the ski team, impromptu forums on race relations, letters to the editor, more official community discussions, administration responses, the forced release of a ‘diversity report’ and more discussions scheduled for the fall.

According to the Daily Northwestern, the 65-member ski team wrote a surprisingly self-aware letter of apology that stated they “have no intention of shying away from” responsibility for the incident.

The ski team’s apology was public. “We recognize that actions like ours occur far too frequently and with far too little hesitation by people in groups all over campus,” the team said in the letter published in our school newspaper. “We are ashamed to say that it has taken this incident for us to step back and reassess the values that we hold both as a team and as individuals.”

As teachers, we must decide what is the central lesson we want all our students to learn. Mine is this: We’re all on the same team.

Cytrynbaum is a journalist and instructor at Northwestern University.