Cultural sensitivity is an ideal that is becoming more important as our society becomes more pluralistic. Long gone are the days when flippantly throwing around racial, ethnic and gender-related slurs was accepted as a part of life. With so many different groups making up our society, we need to be careful not to exploit or demean another culture when in public.
A group of University of Nebraska-Lincoln students forgot the above consideration on Nov. 7 at a Husker football game against the Oklahoma Sooners. The group of students donned Native American headdresses and brandished signs that read "We Want Our Land Back." Innocent as the incident may sound to insensitive white ears, several Native Americans on campus were highly offended, given the fact that the name "Sooners" has a particular historical reference to Native Americans, especially in relation to the signs displayed.
The University of Nebraska Inter-Tribal Exchange, a Native American student organization on campus, has been trying to get the Association of Students of the University of Nebraska to acknowledge the offense and offer a solution ever since that game. ASUN has not yet directly dealt with anything.
At first, ASUN listened to the complaint and considered it, drafting a senate bill generally in support of cultural sensitivity, but saying next to nothing about the issue at hand. This was not good enough, and, to their credit, UNITE kept fighting. The glib dismissal of their concerns by ASUN was inexcusable. There's no reason a simple statement condemning UNL's village idiots should take four months to release.
Thankfully, UNITE has since had a senator draft an adequate bill which directly addresses their complaint and offers a more direct path to working on cultural sensitivity. Where the first bill, submitted by President Megan Collins, offered no real solution to the problem, the second bill, drafted by Senator Justin Shilhanek, outlined a path to working directly with the athletic department and a specified Fan Behavior Committee to improve cultural sensitivity at UNL sporting events. The new bill also directs the Diversity Strategic Development Committee to pursue educational programming with UNITE to emphasize educational opportunities presented by the incident.
We applaud Senator Shilhanek for having the intelligence to offer an effective bill. Meanwhile, we lament the current administration's failure to meaningfully recognize the seriousness of the issue as well as the initial insensitivity of the fools who wore the headdresses in the first place. Hopefully this bill will improve the cultural sensitivity of UNL as a whole, and will prevent similar incidents from happening in the future.
opinion@dailynebraskan.com