Daily Mississippian

It's very easy to look at the University of Mississippi and say that we're an integrated campus. In the legal sense of the word, we are. In a practical sense of the word, the results are somewhat mixed.

Obviously, we're not doing a bang-up job at making our minority population feel welcome if we're carving racial slurs into residence hall elevators, "whiting out" halls and allowing a system of social segregation to continue unabated.

Former ASB President Drew Taggart ran on a platform of social integration. Out of this, we have the One Mississippi group, whose members have really hit the ground running to try to get the black students more involved with the white institutions. Well, guess what, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls of all ages: I have another one of my trademark brilliant plans.

With all due respect to the wonderful people at One Mississippi and the William Winter Institute, it's time to try something a little more direct. We have to do something with the BSU to get more participation in campus life from our black students.

Think about it: Having a separate organization for black students might have made sense when there were only a couple dozen on campus (and they needed people they could relate to and put a familiar face on college). But now the fact is that minority students make up 19 percent of a student population of 13,000-odd young adults, it's ballooned beyond its original purpose.

Now, you can make the argument that we do have a de-facto white Student Union to act as a counterpart to the BSU in the ASB, and that argument would carry a great deal of weight. Taking this year's senate as an example, it was by far majority white. Of the 52 ASB Senators, only two or three were black. The one Hispanic only joined the body three weeks before the end of the semester. This is, to quote a Powerthirst "ad" on YouTube, "UNACCEPTABLE."

BSU is indisputably one of the largest organizations on campus. But it doesn't do a single thing that couldn't be done in conjunction with the ASB or the Student Programming Board (SPB) - that is, exposing its members to student government and hopefully inspiring them to run for office. We need more diversity in our student senate to bring in ideas, which otherwise probably won't be heard by the university administration. We have to get the BSU more involved in student government outside of a debate in February and an endorsement afterward.

With a campus that has a nearly 20 percent minority population, having a student government that is somewhere around 90 percent white is not going to succeed at bringing minorities in, no matter how many Directors of Diversity Affairs the ASB president employs. The people who do the programming for BSU could work with SPB to bring entertainers and speakers to campus that would appeal to a broader range of students.

The new ASB motto is, "A student voice for a student vision." Let me make it clear that this student voice and student vision will not be complete without more participation from minority students. And this participation will not come without integrating a group which divides our student body and prevents the full and complete integration of the University of Mississippi.

We need to have the BSU as involved in our student government and as effective in unifying our entire student body as it is in unifying the black student population. We need to make good on a promise made by the Supreme Court in 1954, presidents from Eisenhower to Johnson and various federal laws dating from the 1960s. It just makes sense. Let's integrate Ole Miss for real.

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