The Knox Student

The editors have spent long hours this past week deciding how to handle the publication of student reaction to the column “Racism? Nah, just some truth” that ran last Thursday. While most of the letters we received were from students, staff, and alumni upset that we printed such an ill-informed piece, a significant number of readers have expressed disappointment that we apologized for having run it. This presented us with a problem: how could we sincerely regret printing that opinion last week, and then turn around this week and reprint it in the form of letters to the editor?

After much careful consideration, we have decided to include both sides of this issue in our Discourse section. While TKS has no desire to perpetuate inaccuracies or falsehoods we recognize that, as a newspaper and as a Knox institution that wants to help to solve this problem, we have to present both sides of the issue. We decided that censoring a belief held by a significant percentage of the Knox community would be counterproductive. Only by bringing these opinions into the open can we hope to generate a meaningful dialogue.

As such, please take this week’s Discourse section with a grain of salt. Some of the letters we printed will offend people; some of them offended us, but we’re happy to say that were able to run all the letters to the editor we received this week, and those letters have only been edited for grammar and spelling. Furthermore we encourage the Knox community to attend the forum taking place about this issue in the Gizmo today at 5:30p.m. The TKS staff will be in attendance.

Looking forward we hope some good can come out of this debacle. We want to help debunk not only the myth that African-Americans are better at basketball, but also the myth that there is no race problem at Knox College. If any of you have any suggestions about how we might accomplish this goal, please let us know. This is your newspaper.