Of those 5 friends, 4 of them I met at Bob Jones. The school is racially diverse. To be honest, I did not know about the dating rule when I went. I found out my first week on campus. I agree that the rule should not have been in place, but I had already cut all ties to come so I stayed to give it a chance. My african-american best friend and I prayed all the time that the rule would be dropped. The next year it was. Another friend of mine who is a minority and I were approached by the New York Times during the events and we tried not to comment, but she asked a few questions which we finally could not resist answering: No! It is not true that minorities aren’t allowed on campus! Of course they are! Hello… we are minorities standing in front of you No, really, we were kind; but the article that came out in the paper COMPLETELY made up everything that we said. It did not actually report any of our real answers… which said that we were happy at BJ, we had chosen the school voluntarily. My friends are highly intelligent and could have attended prestegious schools elsewhere. Their choice of this school was not by coercion. It was by choice.

Why then go to this school? Because there is more to this school than it’s failure in the racial dating rule. There is the other 99% of what they are doing well. As people we tend to focus on the failures. I know, I do it myself. But I can say that I have received a fine education, made quality friendships for life. I found my life mate (who is also a minority may I add!) and I learned much about how to make failure right in my own life and seeing others make it right.

It’s easy to attack others for their failures. We must be careful though, because if our own lives were flashed upon a public screen, it would not be a pretty sight either. The spirit here I believe needs to be one of repentenance and forgiveness and then restoration. Let’s take care of ourselves and then lets take care of others.

I hope that my sharing is a help. Again, I don’t fit the usual BJU mold of a student. I was not living for God when I first showed up with two tatoos and a naval piercing. But I did show up with a HEART desiring to KNOW GOD and to live for HIM with my life. I found that there, despite the failures of man around me and my own failures within. I hope this shows the “other side of the coin” and that there can be good in the midst of failure.

sincerely,
an ordinary person, with an extraordinary God

We all know that what happened at BJU isn’t Christian or just, but your husband should not base the the South on that school.

As a person from the American South, it’s unfair to generalize the the region like that like that. I do not mean to be gruff when I say that but the South being the haven for racism mantra is getting very outdated. As a person from one part of the deep South, the ATL, I really have to disagree with you and husband’s assessment of it. In the ATL,especially the outskirts of it, I promise that you will find a haven of diversity in it, Even in the smaller towns, you’ll find the same thing.

Sometimes my non Southern friends, especially those from the North bug me when it comes to this issue. They make it seem that because I’m a Black Southerner that I’m supposed to live a segregated life. The ironic thing about my ” enlightened” peers is that thought they were brought up in known multiracial havens like New York and Connecticut, for some incredible reason they cannot grasp the idea of being in one. Everything has to be about only Black people , they( my friends) are so political and pro-Black to the point that they almost have no clue to what true diversity is. For my friends to boast about it,their lives seem far more segregated than mine.

I’m not going to pretend that racism doesn’t in my state, but the problem is no larger than that anywhere else, in some instances there have been to some non Southern places that makes some parts of the deep South look like the Land of Oz.

Racism existed and continue to exist in all parts of the country. I remembered reading an story about baseball great Jackie Robinson. He said that in spite of his mom trying to flee the racial in justices that she experienced in her native Cairo , Georgia, he thought that the racism/segregation that they experienced was just as bad in Pasadena, California. Fredrick Douglass and his wife( who was White) was relegated to racial segregation out of all places, churches in Pennsylvania. The very first state that sponsored slavery wasn’t a Southern state: it was Rhode Island.Even in 2010, racism and (I just don’t mean ” subtle” racism as my friends like to call their racism. Not entirely true. Racism is Racism no matter how it is) continues to thrive not only in North America, but in many parts of the world.

Finally, Bob Jones might have changed its regulations, but I doubt that the attitudes that supported them are gone. How would you have felt if a Christian attended a college dominated by Hebrews, and was denied the right to get to know a Jewish girl?

Grow up.

BJU is an independent Fundamental College and is not related to the Southern Baptist Convention in anyway.

The other thing which makes this BJU thing seem odd is that their position for taking a segregationist stance was based in their theology of the end times. It was their take that the anti-Christ would come to power once a one world government was established. Part of trying to stave that off was to try and keep the races separate and thereby keep nations separate and in due course prevent a one world government from taking place. It certainly was a flimsy shield, but that is what they used to say. Based on that an American shouldn’t marry a Canadian for example.

In reference to colleges, small colleges are not bastions of racism, but they really tend to be bastions of free thought or the road less travelled. The flip side of that is that they may be small because they just suck and nobody wants to go there.

I know where you are about having mixed kids and sending them off to school. I doubt you’ll have a problem anywhere in terms of schooling. Where they will run into difficulty is in dating.

My cousin Matt is mixed and when it came time to date he ran into two problems. He grew up in a white family and naturally liked white girls because that is all he knew. Alot of white families had different ideas about that so he struggled on that front. So he decided to date black girls, but struggled there too because culturally he was so different from them and he actually ran into flack from some girls parents for being from a white family. So there you have it. He eventually married a white girl and has two beautiful kids. Its really fun because his kids are tow-headed blondes with blue eyes, they look almost Swedish. He said he would get the weirdest looks when out in a restaurant with them because here sat a black guy with these two white kids that obviously could not be his.

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