An article appeared in the Valley News in October, "Affirmation by Separation, Some Dartmouth minorities seek a world apart." In the article, some black students defended their right to live apart in places like Cutter-Shabazz Hall. Since I am white, I had never previously paid much attention to the debate regarding affinity housing for minorities. If blacks feel that living in the white sea of J. Crew-clad Ivyness makes them uncomfortable, far be it for me to condemn them.
This article, however, made me reflect on my six terms of residence and realize that the issue had a direct bearing on my living experience. For four terms I have had black roomates and they exposed me to many issues regarding black culture that I had never previously known existed.
I am not about to claim that living with minority women has sent me scurrying happily down the rosy path of multi-culturalism and policial correctness. I have big problems with the way the AAm treated my first roomate, a woman of mixed racial background. Members accused her of "acting white" and cruelly excluded her.
Friends quit stopping by because they were afraid of my second Afro-American roomate. She could turn every disagreement into a racial issue.
Life with this roomate did not afford an easy, comfortable, at home feeling. She challenged nearly every basic moral and cultural tenet I possessed. She had her own opinions and a lifestyle to match it. If turned away at a frat, she wouldn't hesitate to challenge 10 brothers of giving her 'white attitude.' You had to respect her, because she stared life straight in the eye and apologized for nothing. She drove us crazy and was constantly in our face, and in the end we admired her for it.
That term was not exactly fun, but it taught us a lot about ourselves and our own assumptions. Black students defend living in Shabazz by insisting that they can not relate to whites or feel comfortable around them. I can understand this feeling. There was much about both of my black roomates that I could not understand or relate to. It must be difficult for blacks to be surrounded by people from such different backgrounds. They live apart in self-segregation for the same reason men and women live separate in Greek houses. To live among others who act and think as we do is safe and easy. It makes us feel at home.
In answer to this reasoning, I ask why college should be a comfortable experience. I believe it is unacceptable for us to pass through our four years cocooned among those similar to us in background, race and culture. The tensions and collisions with one another, the exposure to people widely different from ourselves, is what alters and expands our views. Assumptions that are challenged are much greater in value than those which stay with us for lack of any better alternative.
This sort of learning occurs most often in living situations. Only then are we forced together with individuals not of our own choosing. A roomate cannot be ignored or explained away. Four terms of living with African Americans exposed me to a side of American life of which I had been ignorant. It is largely the reason I decided last spring to take the history course Black America since the Civil War.
Thrown into minority issues, I can no longer ignore them. Living with African American women was not easy or comfortable, but now I am grateful for it. These women taught me about themselves and about myself. I learned to empathize with and understand them. That does not mean I always agreed with them.
Our P.C. culture has made tension and disagreement unacceptable; a thing to be avoided and suppressed at all costs. It assumes that any antagonism bred from first hand opposition with someone of a different race automatically breeds racism. I would argue that real education involves pain and difficulty. To avoid that demeans learning and creates a false reality. We need to live together - whites, blacks and other minorities - because the hostility everyone fears will result, and it is exactly that component that expands our minds and moves and shapes us into thinking, questioning adults.
