Could you imagine the national – no, the international – uproar if the students of a prestigious university raised objections to the selection of a black student as the winner of a beauty pageant and school homecoming queen? There would be marches and rallies and sit-ins and federal investigations of the school, and serious efforts made to address the obvious racial problems at the school. It would be fodder for talk shows for weeks – and Barack Obama would no doubt make a public statement about how the students of the school were behaving stupidly.

Will we get the same sort of uproar over this incident?

Hampton University crowned its first non-black Miss HU Friday, leading to a division on campus that prompted her to write President Barack Obama.

Nikole Churchill, 22, competed against nine black students in the 15th annual Miss HU scholarship pageant. The senior nursing major attends the Virginia Beach campus and is the competition's first non-black winner, according to executive pageant director Shelia J. Maye.

Churchill, who is from Hawaii, wrote Obama on Sunday to tell him that her crowning was met with negative comments because of her skin color. She invited him to visit HU and speak about racial tolerance.

"I am hoping that perhaps you would be able to make an appearance to my campus, Hampton University, so that my fellow Hamptonians can stop focusing so much on the color of my skin and doubting my abilities to represent," she wrote, "but rather be proud of the changes our nation is making toward accepting diversity."

So come on, Barry, show us some of those Nobel Peace Prize winner skills and infuse a little bit of harmony and brotherhood at this historically black university. Unless, of course, racism isnÂ’t a problem when it is espoused by African-American scholars rather than uneducated whites.

Posted by: Greg at 10:27 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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