College Forced to Apologize for Serving Mexican Food at Sci-Fi Event Because “Racism”

File this under “Tales of the Strange but True.”

The University of California, Santa Cruz issued a public apology after students held a Sci-Fi event on campus that featured Mexican food as part of the festivities.

Some participants, seeing the event as equating Mexicans with “aliens” because of the food selection, decided to throw a fit about cultural insensitivity or something.

From The Daily Caller:

An administrator at the University of California, Santa Cruz issued an apology to students after some of their peers made the “poor decision” to include Mexican food at a space-themed event on Tuesday.

In an e-mail sent out to students at UC Santa Cruz’s Stevenson College, Carolyn Golz said the planners of the residential community’s College Night program “made a poor decision when choosing to serve a Mexican food buffet during a program that included spaceships and ‘aliens’, failing to take into account how these choices might be perceived by others.”

“We would never want to make a connection between individuals of Latino heritage or undocumented students and ‘aliens,’” Golz insists, and she is “so sorry that our College Night appeared to do exactly that.”

According to the e-mail, Golz says the inclusion of Mexican food at an event featuring aliens as part of the theme “demonstrated a cultural insensitivity on the part of the program planners and, though it was an unintentional mistake, I recognize that this incident caused harm within our community and negatively impacted students.” …

In an e-mail to The Daily Caller, Scott Hernandez-Jason, the school’s Director of News and Media Relations, confirmed the event was held and the apology e-mail was issued. …

Hernandez-Jason said the apology was prompted after “[S]everal students complained at the event and several more complained after the event,” which was attended by approximately 450 students.

Hernandez-Jason noted that students were the ones who made the decision to include Mexican food at the event: “For this event, students couldn’t think of something that was space-related. Since they hadn’t yet had Mexican food for one of these events, they chose to serve that as the dinner.”

He added, “Students ultimately decided” to include the Mexican food.