Word: hrbsa
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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RACIAL HUMOR has long represented a particularly sore point with Harvard's black community, and comic stereotypes of blacks become all the more painful when they appear in on-campus publications like the Lampoon. The board of the Harvard-Radcliffe Black Students Association (HRBSA) made its outrage clear last week when it asked both black and white undergraduates to sign a petition charging the Lampoon with "racial insensitivity" in recent issues. The cover of one magazine last spring, for instance, featured a drawing of a black shining the shoes of John Harvard's statue...
...IMPACT of the Lampoon's mock stereotypes have proved genuinely demoralizing to blacks. In the past few years, black students at Harvard have seen themselves under increasing attack, particularly in the fact of academic reaction against affirmative action. The answer to HRBSA's protest against the Lampoon, therefore, will not come by labelling the magazine as racist. Rather--to borrow from the wording of the protesters' petition--in the future the magazine's editors must be sensitive to and refrain from "Iacial insensitivity" toward the black community...
...rough count Wednesday night, after the petition had been circulated in five Houses and the Freshman Union, showed about 500 signatures protesting the Lampoon's sense of humor. HRBSA will now file the petitions with the College Dean's Office, Chase said...
...newly inaugurated top officials of the magazine expressed disappointment that HRBSA board members had not taken up their private complaints with them--rather than the now-retired officials--before making their grievances public...
...even before George A. Meyer '78, the new president of the Lampoon, could promise to "try to patch relations up with the black community" during his tenure, he found himself defending a magazine piece he wrote this fall that HRBSA signalled out as particularly "tasteless" and "insensitive...