Behind the bravado it is hard to see this as anything other than political posturing. Throughout Europe there has been a resurgence of the far right, surfing on the current wave of Islamophobia. A book recently came out in Germany condemning the Turkish minority and, instead of being denounced, 61 percent of Germans said they agreed with the author’s arguments. The English Defence League held a demonstration against Islam in Luton. Other countries like Austria and Switzerland have also had to deal with a renewal of intolerance, with far-right parties entering government. Political leaders have been reacting to what they perceive as a shift of the center ground.

The problem with the critiques is that they announce the failure of a system because of a very small minority. Most second-generation immigrants are proud of their home country and of their roots. Being an English Pakistani is not an oxymoron, just as it is not incompatible to be French and English, or Chinese and American.

There seems to be a particular problem with Islam. It is extremely unfair to tar everyone with the same brush. Islam has often been painted as intolerant and disrespectful of other cultures. This view has been extended to all of Islam, not just extremists: One of Cameron’s main accusations was that Muslims were doing very little to fight extremism.

However, all around the Middle East, different communities have been calling out for an end to conflict. After the terrorist attack in Alexandria, one would be forgiven for considering Egypt as an unlikely place for religious harmony. How surprising, then, to see Muslims and Christians forming a human shield around each other during prayers in Tahrir Square, putting their own lives in danger to protect members of other faiths.

It should be obvious to everyone that the problem is not religious but social. If young Muslims in England are turning to violence, it is not Islam’s fault, but because they feel increasingly hemmed in. There is no chance for them to move up in the world. With no hope, it’s no wonder that some may feel tempted by radicalism. When presented with a system that doesn’t seem fair, it’s normal to try to look for a substitute. Just like Communism before it, radical Islam has spread in countries where government is weak and poverty is rife. Instead of taking the easy route and announcing the failure of multicultural policies, Europe’s leaders need to find a repairman for their broken social ladder.

Judy Sawyer was let go as associate director of the engineering school’s dual-degree program in 2006. Four months later, she took a new job at the University in which she copies transcripts in the registrar’s office. When a new assistant dean position opened in the engineering school, Sawyer, then 64, believed that she was passed over for a promotion because of her age.

The employee selected for the new position was 29, though he eventually passed on the job because it didn’t pay enough.

Sawyer, now 66, is still employed in the registrar’s office.

The University informed Sawyer in 2006 that her program was downsizing—and she was let go after 15 years of service.

Sawyer originally filed two charges against the University. The first charge, which was later dropped, stemmed from Sawyer’s termination in 2006. The second charge, of which the jury acquitted the University, resulted from Sawyer not being hired as an assistant dean in 2008.

The jury decided on Judy Sawyer v. The Washington University on Oct. 29. The St. Louis County Court determined that age discrimination was not the reason she did not get the job.

“The jury unanimously found in the University’s favor on the age discrimination claim, we believe, because there was simply no evidence that the applicants’ ages were a factor in the hiring decision, as reflected in part by the fact that the first person whom the hiring manager contacted and attempted to recruit into the position was older than Ms. Sawyer,” Joseph Sklansky, assistant vice chancellor and associate general counsel, wrote in an e-mail to Student Life.

The jury also decided to award the University $12,000 to cover all litigation fees.

Sawyer claimed that she lost over $30,000 in wages and pension contributions because she was passed over for assistant dean.

The University’s defense attorney also cited a past performance issue that automatically disqualified Sawyer from the assistant dean position, but the University did not find out about that issue until court proceedings had begun.

Sawyer declined inquiries from Student Life for comments on the ruling.

Though the University was not charged with age discrimination in the Sawyer case, in February 2009, the St. Louis Circuit Court decided that the University did engage in age discrimination against former surgeon Joel Cooper.

Cooper worked at the Washington University School of Medicine from 1988 to 2005, until he was 65. He claimed that the University pushed him out of his job by cutting his salary after he did not step down.

The jury ruled in Cooper’s favor and awarded him $525,000.

Cooper now works as the chief of thoracic surgery at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, where he earns an even higher salary than he did at Washington University.

Moreover, the University’s contribution to the blood supply is exemplary. Through an innovative model of day-long, multi-site drives that demand cooperation between blood banks, our Community Service Office has vastly increased blood donations over the past three years. The result is that tens of thousands of lives have been saved.

But no blood drive in America is perfect, as any gay man can attest. Since 1983, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has prohibited blood donations from any man who has had sexual contact with a man one or more times since 1977. This policy is wrongful and discriminatory.

The policy was enacted at the height of the American AIDS panic. Outwardly, it was intended as a safeguard against contamination of the blood supply from HIV, which disproportionately affects men who have sex with men. In reality, however, it was and is an example of homophobia on an institutional level.

The FDA policy is prejudiced because it treats men who have sex with men as a high-risk group for HIV instead of people, both gay and straight, who have high-risk sex.

The discriminatory nature of this policy is most apparent in another FDA policy that permits men and women who have had sexual contact with an opposite-sex HIV-positive partner to donate blood one year after the contact. While heterosexuals who engage in high-risk sex get out of jail free, men who have sex with men, whether high-risk or not, face a lifetime ban.

The FDA should revise its ban in accordance with recommendations made in 2006 by the American Association of Blood Banks, America’s Blood Centers and the American Red Cross. These groups advise that men who have sex with men should be deferred from donating blood for the same amount of time as heterosexuals who are identified as at risk, and this approach is both sensible and just.

The University should continue its blood drives but take more action to end the FDA policy. In the short term, the Community Service Office should distribute notices to all blood donors explaining both the University’s commitment to blood donation and its condemnation of discrimination against gay people.

In the long term, University members should get tested for HIV in accordance with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control’s (CDC) 2006 recommendation that all Americans take an HIV test. The best way to end AIDS-related discrimination is to end AIDS, and to achieve this, HIV testing is crucial.

Finally, University members should continue to donate blood and feel good about it, but donors should also be conscious that their ability to give is a privilege that is unjustly denied to others. Students who wish to express solidarity with their gay peers might consider donning equality buttons alongside their stickers professing “I Donated.”

We believe that this change from Laclede Gas is a step in the right direction and shows that the corporation is at least in part listening to the local St. Louis community. Because it has a monopoly on natural gas in the St. Louis area, Laclede Gas’s policies strongly affect Wash. U. as well as the local St. Louis community. This recent victory is a crucial step in the right direction toward ending discrimination based on sexual orientation in the workplace.

However, we should put this event into perspective: though Laclede Gas’ policy change shows the efficacy of local involvement and activism, efforts such as this one must be continuous. It is our responsibility—both as ­students and as citizens—to work within the local community to push for causes such as this one. If anything, Laclede’s recent actions serve to show us that involvement can actually make a difference. We should take the real results of their initative as incentive to take part in our broader community.

This issue should inspire further engagement and activism across the board. Laclede, for its part, can continue to improve the language in its policies, and to make sure that this language invokes real substantive change. Despite Robert Arrol’s confidence in Laclede’s protection of LGBT rights, we should not take it for granted that discrimination in the workplace is no longer an issue for Laclede. For example, the non-discrimination policy still does not include gender identity in its delineations.

Still, Laclede should be applauded for taking a step in the right direction while other companies such as ExxonMobil have refused to address the issue. Hopefully, working closely with groups such as HCR will move Laclede’s policies in the right direction. Ideally Laclede’s F will become an A+ in the near future, though as of now it’s more like a B.

The 25 or so students who attended the roundtable split into committees devoted to specific areas of campus life, including Washington University Police Department (WUPD) affairs, on-campus student awareness, Residential Life, student group interaction and off-campus affairs.

Students in the taskforce on WUPD affairs debated whether some students’ allegations that WUPD officers approach black students more than white ones means the officers are guilty of racial profiling.

While the group did not reach a conclusion, group members agreed that reports of suspicious activity filed by students against other students are a major contributor to WUPD stopping black students more often.

Members of the group said they would like to initiate dialogue between WUPD and students regarding methods of identifying suspicious persons, and also explored the idea of a “walk in your shoes” orientation program in which students would learn about the differences that race makes in daily life.

The “on-campus awareness” taskforce was primarily concerned with the issue of self-segregation in the student body. Group members said they hoped to break down what they termed the “fishbowl” phenomenon: a tendency for important conversations about race issues to remain confined to racially or ethnically homogenous groups.

“I know that as an African American male I have particular conversations with other African American males on campus that pretty much we keep amongst ourselves,” said senior Regis Murayi, one of the six black students rejected from Mothers bar.

The task force proposed mediating conversations about self-segregation on freshman floors. Members of the group also plan to develop initiatives to draw a greater and more diverse body of students to events like Monday night’s roundtable to engage students who might otherwise be uninvolved in the dialogue about diversity issues.

Like the on-campus awareness task force, the ResLife committee offered a plan to spur more diversity dialogue on freshman floors by designing special programming to be led by residential advisors. Group members also planned a conference with Residential Life about making ethnic and racial diversity a priority when forming freshman floors.

The student group interaction taskforce envisioned working with Student Union to create an incentive program that rewards collaboration between student groups. It also proposed the development of a multicultural retreat in which students from diverse backgrounds would bond over a variety of recreational and discussion-based activities.

Members of the off-campus taskforce expressed a desire to raise awareness of racial and class implications of policy decisions behind recent MetroLink service cuts. The taskforce hopes to launch a visual campaign to make the faces of St. Louis residents affected by the service cuts more visible to students.

Senior De Nichols, co-president of Connect 4, said her group would facilitate further meetings of the taskforces created at Monday night’s roundtable to lay out more concrete action steps. The organization hopes that this event will be a first step in empowering passionate students to turn thoughts into action.

Said junior Wanda Savala, Connect 4’s other co-president, “[Students] will start something but they don’t really feel supported. We need to rally those students who are doing something, who have ideas.”

The turnout for the roundtable was short of Connect 4’s expectations, paling in comparison to the more than 300 students who filled Lab Sciences 300 for the town hall meeting.

The large gap in the turnout between the town hall meeting and Monday’s roundtable elicited concerns from some that the enthusiasm exhibited by the general student body in recent weeks will not last as the Mothers bar incident fades into the past.

“[The turnout] kind of made me question how passionate, how committed students are to affecting change in this area,” Nichols said.

Nonetheless, she said she was confident that a smaller group of students would continue to converse and act on race and diversity issues.

“Quite honestly, I am a very optimistic, faithful person,” she said. “The rational side of me says that people are gonna let this die, but I think we have a committed body of students who won’t let this die out.”

“[We] worked for a while with the city of Chicago so that they could do it in the streets, and that was not working out,” Cutz wrote.

Cutz said that students could not find a location for the rally after 12 days of searching. Students planning the event originally wanted the rally to be in the streets, but a street rally would have taken over four weeks for Chicago authorities to approve and would also have required insurance. Students also looked into hosting the rally in Grant Park, but encountered similar prohibitive regulations.

Students then considered hosting the rally at a private venue and worked with Northwestern University’s student body vice president to accomplish this. But these plans were cancelled when Northwestern reallocated the event’s funding to another event addressing the issue of two Northwestern students who dressed up in blackface for Halloween.

Cutz emphasized that the rally’s cancellation does not mean that students are giving up or taking less of a stand on issues of race discrimination.

“It is very disappointing [that the rally is not happening], but at the same time, I hope that our efforts will continue,” Cutz said in an interview. “We have done a phenomenal job of promoting a dialogue not only with the University community but also with the St. Louis and the Chicago communities and really across the nation [and] across the world.”

Cutz also encouraged students to continue the dialogue about race discrimination that has been started on campus.

“We should take it upon ourselves as individuals to keep this dialogue going [and] to keep this dialogue going to keep these issues on the forefront of our minds and to really address social justice issues and diversity and discrimination issues the best that we can as individuals,“ Cutz said.

This legal discrimination did not end because of some benevolent act of Congress. Blacks fought for their civil rights with protests, marches and boycotts all over America, many of which resulted in imprisonment, injury and, in some cases, death. They did not struggle for their rights alone: Many whites fought in the civil rights movement. Prominent white leaders fought the injustice side by side with blacks. In the march on Selma in 1965, John Lewis, Martin Luther King Jr. and others joined arms with white leaders like Abraham Joshua Heschel and Maurice Davis to protest the injustices faced in the area at the time. White college students fueled the Freedom Summer of 1964, which aimed to register as many blacks as possible in Mississippi, a state that had only 6.7 percent of eligible blacks registered in 1964. This white dedication to civil rights went beyond marching and organizing.

During the Freedom Summer, the Klu Klux Klan murdered three people working to register blacks: James Chaney, a 21-year-old black civil rights worker; Michael Schwerner, a 24-year-old white social worker; and Andrew Goodman, a 20-year-old white college student.

Even with the threat of violence, whites continued to fight for civil rights. These whites would not directly benefit from the successes of the civil rights movement. They had the right to vote and access to public facilities, yet they chose to protest, boycott and suffer with blacks because they believed what was occurring was wrong. They believed people should not be discriminated against because of who they are. They believed, as King wrote, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

King’s declaration rings true today just as much as when he wrote it in a Birmingham jail cell in 1963. Many of the same injustices the black civil rights movement fought still are applied to members of the gay community. In 32 states, landlords can legally evict tenants because of their sexual orientation, just as landlords could deny housing to blacks based on their race. In 29 states, it is legal for a company to fire an employee based on sexual orientation. This legal right to fire based on sexual orientation is exercised constantly by many employers, including the U.S. military, which has discharged more than 13,000 service members because of their sexual orientation. These brave and loyal American men and women want to defend their country. They were deemed fit to serve and did so, many in occupations the military defined as “critical,” until their sexual preference became known.

This injustice towards gay Americans affects more than just housing and employment. By forbidding committed homosexual couples the same rights as committed heterosexual couples, the government refuses homosexual couples more than 1,100 statutory provisions it grants to heterosexual couples. This includes denying partners the right to visit their loved one in the hospital, refusing American citizens in binational relationships the right to petition for their same-sex partner’s immigration, and forcing estate taxes on property inherited from a deceased partner. It is just to amend the definition of marriage to include homosexual couples just as it was just to amend the definition of marriage in 16 states in 1967, when anti-miscegenation laws forbidding interracial marriage were ruled unconstitutional.

Heterosexuals must stand up with our homosexual peers to demand the righting of the wrongs the government allows, endorses and participates in. We must demand gay equality under the law by signing petitions like the one being circulated by the Right Side of History at therightsideofhistory.org. We must walk arm in arm with the gay community as we fight for the rights these individuals want, need and deserve. Heterosexuals must fight for homosexual rights because injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

In cases of racist activity, however, the wrong that must be rectified is not the act itself, but the sentiment behind it. The impetus behind wrongful acts such as turning customers away from an establishment because of their race begins long before these acts take place.

It is therefore necessary—and appropriate—that the settlement announced this Wednesday between the Original Mothers bar and the six Washington University seniors it turned away on the basis of race does not involve punitive financial damages but rather mandates direct participation in diversity awareness training for the employees of the bar. Because racist acts begin with ingrained prejudices, these prejudices must be removed—layer by layer—if the inherent wrongness of the action is to genuinely be rectified.

I am certain that some will criticize the settlement, saying that it is not harsh enough, that a lawsuit demanding punitive damages is justified, that Mothers bar ought to be put out of business because of its actions.

Such a lawsuit, though, would localize the incident and limit the dialogue that it has the potential to create. As members of our community discussed at the Town Hall meeting on Monday, and as several students have alluded to in comments on the Student Life Web site, the fact that students were turned away from a club because of their race was not surprising. The Mothers incident speaks to a larger problem—one that no amount of money could rectify, and one that putting a single nightclub out of business could hardly make a dent in.

The fact is that racism still exists in our society. It exists, however, in ingrained prejudices that cannot legally be manifested, thanks to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and subsequent civil rights legislation.

The great civil rights battle of our generation will not be fought on legal grounds, but rather on social grounds; it is only when owners of nightclubs do not associate gang activity with race that justice will truly be served. This is perhaps a utopian vision, but I believe that it is a goal worth striving for.

By forcing the bar to sponsor fundraisers for socially just causes, and by forcing its employees to undergo diversity training, the settlement begins to rectify a larger social wrong than what happened to the “Mothers Men” last weekend.

In her column this Wednesday, Eve Samborn wrote that we ought to take the response to this incident as a model for student activism. Knowing how the response has played out in legal terms, I’d like to take this prescription a step further: We ought to take the response to this incident as a model of how to resolve acts motivated by prejudice.

The apology to be issued by Mothers should retract the racist sentiments behind the bar’s action. The diversity awareness education programming should force its employees to formulate other, more appropriate, ways of thinking about the relationship between race and culture.

The six students who negotiated this settlement demonstrated an admirable capacity to look past the problem at hand and ensure that the incident creates a larger dialogue about race and social justice. Hearing Wednesday’s news made me proud to be a member of the Wash. U. community.

Kate is a junior in Arts & Sciences. She can be reached via e-mail at kate.gaertner@studlife.com.

Senior Regis Murayi speaks at a news conference Wednesday in the Danforth University Center. Murayi is one of the six black students alleging race discrimination at a Chicago bar. (Matt Mitgang | Student Life)

Senior class president Fernando Cutz and the six black students who allege they were racially discriminated against by the Original Mothers bar in Chicago said at a news conference Wednesday that they will not be pressing charges against the establishment.

Cutz announced at the conference, held in the Danforth University Center, that the students have reached an agreement with the bar, and Mothers will issue a public apology to the students. Managers at the bar will undergo diversity sensitivity and awareness training. The students are receiving free legal counsel from Covington and Burling LLP in their negotiations with Mothers.

Mothers will also hold four charity fundraisers, three at the bar in Chicago and one in St. Louis. The students will determine the recipient of the funds. Senior Regis Murayi, one of the six black students rejected from the bar, said the funds will likely go toward a social justice-related cause.

“As this whole incident is about raising the issue about race relations in the United States, we think it’s very important to contribute to a fund or even a scholarship or organization, something to that matter, that would do the best to promote raising these types of issues,” Murayi said.

Cutz also announced at the conference that Senior Class Council will be leading a “massive demonstration” in Chicago in late November that will include both University students and representatives from Mothers.

Cutz said that Student Union will likely fund bus transportation for students to go to the event.

The students stressed at the conference that they are not seeking compensation from the bar.

“Nothing in the plans had anything to do with us getting financial compensation,” said senior Chuka Chike-Obi, one of the six black students.

“This isn’t power, this isn’t about leverage, this isn’t about fighting, kicking and screaming. This is about really raising the issue about racial discrimination in America and really opening this issue moving forward,” Murayi said.

Cutz said he is pleased with Mothers’ response.

“Personally I’m satisfied with the way that things turned out,” Cutz said.

-With additional reporting by Dan Woznica

This is a Student Life breaking news update. Check back soon for more information.