Unconventional Wisdom | Racist act degrades Columbia's meaning

Someone hung a noose on the office door of a black professor at Columbia University this month - a hate crime, say New York cops.

Columbia is adjacent to Harlem, which means that the person who defiled Madonna Constantine's door is likely not from the neighborhood.

The perpetrator, Constantine believes, was a student or colleague. In other words, someone with the Ivy League brains to recognize the vitality of imagery and that a noose is a symbol of murderous intolerance.

"Tears sprang to my eyes," Constantine told ABC News. "It felt degrading."

When I attended Columbia, I saw it as nothing less than the place that would save me.

In the blue-collar world in which I grew up, people feared what was different, and worked to destroy it. I had a hard time there. But any black people who crossed the forbidden perimeters manned by racist guardians had it much worse.

I thought Columbia, 90 minutes away by subway, was fine enough to absolve me of the original sin conferred by my neighborhood.

Racism couldn't exist in such a place, I figured, because prejudice based on the color of a person's skin is ignorant. Columbia drew those too smart to hate melanin.

For a semester, I had a room on campus at Teacher's College, the graduate school on 120th Street where Constantine teaches psychology and education, particularly as they pertain to minorities.

I was in awe of the grad students' erudition and acumen. So when John, a white student from Mississippi with a Confederate flag in his room, instigated a fight in our hall with a black student from Ghana named Afrifa, I was uncomprehending.

Afrifa was a great guy who was used to hunting his food, and would literally hang out in the butcher's on Amsterdam Avenue, in awe of the meat. Everyone liked him.

John had a smile for anyone white, but bad-mouthed blacks from day one.

Afrifa never seemed the same after John ended their fight with a vicious N-bomb.

Prejudice, I learned, has nothing to do with brains. Its stink comes from the gut.

Just this week, the white molecular biologist James Watson, who won a Nobel prize for his work with DNA, said that Africans' intelligence wasn't the same "as ours." He added that while he hoped all men were equal, "people who have to deal with black employees find this is not true."

He has apologized, which only means he regrets spilling the filth he stored within.

Watson, like Constantine's symbolic lyncher, carries in his accomplished head a vile enmity. It turns a shining light dim.

The truth is, a hater is a hater, whatever the IQ.