It was with a sarcastic laugh that I read Friday’s story on who was behind the round of threatening e-mails at the University of Iowa. Instead of being the work of some college-aged, hate-filled, white male student, it was the ramblings of a mentally unstable, black female student.

I know everyone in the press would love to bury the story, but I think what happened there is endemic of a problem faced by all of society.

Before Tarsha Claiborne was arrested, everyone on the U of I campus believed that black people were oppressed, whites were to blame, more needed to be done to correct the problem of racial hatred, and we should all hold hands and take back the campus with some cheap candles purchased at Wal-Mart.

Yet this event should have forced us to realize the opposite is true. Black people aren’t being oppressed, white people are not the root of all evil, we’re already doing plenty to stop racism, and those candles are pretty worthless, even as a symbol.

This is not the first time something like this has happened. According to Saturday’s Des Moines Register, a similar event happened in Iowa City in 1995. You may also remember we had our own such hoax a few years back.

In the Fall of 1996, a black student named Deantrious Mitchell reported being assaulted by a group of white men while he was on duty as a Union Drive Association student security officer. The alleged incident took place early on a Friday morning in a parking lot behind Helser Hall.

While student leaders and the Department of Public Safety vowed to find the attackers and bring them to justice, the medical staff at Mary Greeley determined that the wounds, including a few cuts with a pocket knife, were all self-inflicted. A day or two later the student recanted and admitted making the entire story up.

The fact that all three incidents of racial intolerance and bigotry occurring on Iowa campuses were hoaxes perpetrated by a few members of the black community is not surprising. The three people responsible were raised by a culture that drills into them how they are continually oppressed because of the color of their skin.

While that may have been true in the deep South a long time ago, this is the present day, and the last time I looked Iowa did not constitute the deep South. It is the Midwest, which for the most part strives to be educated and enlightened. Does anyone else notice that Rev. Fred Phelps was not a product of this state; that we had to import his form of hatred?

One problem with each hoax is that the persons responsible are essentially crying wolf, and it won’t be too long before society stops believing the cries of injustice. But the real problem is that the only hatred and racial bigotry that exists are the ones those people just made up in their own minds.

The truth is, that if black people are being oppressed, it is being done at an individual level. Widespread oppression exists only in the minds of a few minorities. The culture that produced hatred based on skin color is dying and has less members with every passing year.

Hate crimes based on color are few and far between; otherwise they would not generate the attention and outrage they do. The fact that those hate crimes reported on Iowa campuses in the last five years have been hoaxes proves how rare such occurrences really are. They would not have existed if some person with delusions of persecution had not made them up.

My question is: Why do these feelings of persecution keep cropping up?

When I was a kid I lived in an ethnically diverse town, and everyone played together. If you watch little kids on the playground today, you’ll see no segregation according to skin color.

But, when I went to high school, ethnic groups started segregating all on their own. Black friends that I had known since childhood stopped hanging around, and it was then that I heard the first whispers of oppression.

I know none of my friends became bigots over night, so the feelings of oppression and hate had to originate somewhere else. As best I can tell, the black culture that spawned people like Tarsha Claiborne still believes it is being persecuted. Since no evidence exists to suggest that there is widespread persecution, their cultural belief is probably little more than a self-perpetuating myth.

It exists as all myths do, which is to explain something that you don’t have an answer for. In this case, the widespread oppression of black people by white society is just a story made up to explain some other problem. It is a way of placing blame on someone other than themselves.

It would be nice to blame white society for an ethnic group’s perceived problems, but unfortunately, the claims don’t hold much water. Instances of hate-based crimes or white oppression are few and far between and definitely not enough to make a blanket statement that one entire society is oppressing another society.

What really bothers me is that when slavery was abolished in the 1860s, white people in the North believed that black people were equal in every way. Yet across the country, there seems to be of no shortage of people claiming to be oppressed. Even the one black man in North Dakota got in on that lawsuit against Denny’s.

Making white society the scapegoat for one’s problems is the same as Hitler blaming the Jews for all that was wrong in Germany, and if racism exists in this country, it is flowing in the other direction.

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Aaron Woell is a senior in political science from Bolingbrook, Ill.