Great Moments in The Hoya’s Racism
Compiled By Otto Foots
1920: The Racist, the campus newspaper founded by Mask and Bauble actor John Wilkes Booth in 1859, is renamed The Hoya after the popular Southern word for “white agenda.”
1930: A Hoya expose reveals the Great Depression is the blacks’ fault. It wins a Bunn Award.
1948: When Georgetown’s first black student enrolls, the staff works overtime feverishly printing updates of his every move and distributing copies around campus.
1956: With advertising profits The Hoya establishes the GUTS bus service so that black students can sit at the back of them.
1963: Martin Luther King, Jr. delivers his famous “I Have A Dream” speech in Gaston Hall. The event makes it onto page A9 of The Hoya.
1964-1976: Every copy of the newspaper is burned by civil rights activists and hippies, so no record or memory of the racist stuff that was printed in this period remains. But trust us, it was terrible.
1984: The black members of the championship basketball team are suspiciously left out of a photo of the NCAA Tournament trophy presentation despite all the players on the team being black.
1986: The Guide reports on the acid-washed jeans and neon leg warmers that will make you the hit of your next lynching.
1994: They hold a chicken fry in Red Square, hoping the smell of fried chicken will attract black students to the table and make them want to write for The Hoya, a justification they yell at every black student who walks by.
2000: Their first black reporter is “promoted” to the editorship of The First This Time, a Hoya spin-off publication for “those people.”
2007: The staff comes to regret concluding their article on the campus Jena Six protests with the sentence “The protestors were intelligent enough to organize themselves and combine words that were not Ebonics into phrases, but they still seemed like people who are too dumb to be able to write ‘RACIST’ on thousands of copies of a campus newspaper or to find someone’s apartment and throw a rock through his window.”
2009: When a sit-in is staged in their offices, the staff decides to go out for a sandwich and finds an empty lunch counter to crowd.
