According to one institution of higher education, the answer is no – even if that white man was born and raised in Africa.

Born and raised in Mozambique and now a naturalized U.S. citizen, Serodio, 45, has filed a lawsuit against a New Jersey medical school, claiming he was harassed and ultimately suspended for identifying himself during a class cultural exercise as a "white African-American."

"I wouldn't wish this to my worst enemy," he said. "I'm not exaggerating. This has destroyed my life, my career."

The lawsuit, which asks for Serodio's reinstatement at the school and monetary damages, named the Newark-based University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey and several doctors and university employees as defendants.

Filed Monday in U.S. District Court in New Jersey, the lawsuit traces a series of events that Serodio maintains led to his 2007 suspension, starting with a March 2006 cultural exercise in a clinical skills course taught by Dr. Kathy Ann Duncan, where each student was asked to define themselves for a discussion on culture and medicine.

After Serodio labeled himself as a white African-American, another student said she was offended by his comments and that, because of his white skin, was not an African-American.

According to the lawsuit, Serodio was summoned to Duncan's office where he was instructed "never to define himself as an African-American & because it was offensive to others and to people of color for him to do so."

"It's crazy," Serodio's attorney Gregg Zeff told ABCNews.com. "Because that's what he is."

Serodio, who lives in Newark, said he never meant to offend anyone and calling himself African-American doesn't detract from another person's heritage.

Now let’s consider this for a minute. If I argued that it was somehow offensive for a black person to define him or herself as “American” because I’m an American and not black, I’d justifiably be called a racist. It is equally as racist for some blacks to seek to reserve the continent of Africa to themselves, given the multi-ethnic makeup of that continent. After all, while most people of sub-Saharan Africa are black, not all of them are. And in northern Africa, the vast majority are of an entirely different ethnic stock, a mixture of Arab and Semitic peoples among others. Are those individuals to be excluded from their African heritage in order to protect the hyper-sensitive feelings of racist blacks who want to lay claim to the continent as exclusively their own?

What’s more, the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey is a public institution. Is it the place of a public institution to define the race of its students and limit how some students view their heritage based upon those determinations? I would argue that the answer is self-evidently “NO!” To expel an individual from a professional school based upon their ethnic self-identification is simply intolerable. And equally unacceptable was the attempt by school officials to gag the student by forbidding him to speak or write in any public forum about the issue of race, ethnicity and culture – last time I checked, the First Amendment still applied to public institutions.

Why do I defend this gentleman? Perhaps it is because for several years I taught with a young woman who was born and raised in South Africa – a woman who proudly identified herself as an African. Perhaps it is because I do not know how else to identify an individual like Teresa Heinz Kerry, also born and raised in Mozambique, other than as an individual of unambiguously African heritage. And yes, perhaps because I frequently remind my students that the entire human race has its origin on the continent of Africa, and therefore we all have some claim to the continent on which our species emerged – and in that sense we are all African Americans.

H/T Discriminations

Posted by: Greg at 08:16 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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