End Racial Humor

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.

In response to the association's charges, Lampoon editors have claimed that material like the John Harvard drawing is not intended to ridicule blacks, but white stereotypes of blacks. They say they consider it unfortunate that black students should take the periodical's humor so seriously. While the Lampoon's justification is understandable, the problems involved in the group's protest merit more than a defensive sigh of regret.

THE 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.