The September issue of "The Beacon" contained an article that lamented the unfortunate state of race relations at Dartmouth. The article, though flawed in some respects, contained an accurate observation: People of similar skin color tend to hang out together at Dartmouth. However, this phenomenon does not stem from racial bias and is not confined to race relations. It is a symptom of a much more deeply rooted problem.
The root cause of this segregation is an unwillingness on the part of the Dartmouth student to make a conscious effort to intermingle with people whose backgrounds and interests are different from his or her own. And the racial segregation that we see on campus is nothing but an application of that trait, because differences in race usually translate to differences in background and interests. Racial segregation just happens to be the most visible form of segregation among a host of other forms of segregation.
There is also intellectual segregation at Dartmouth. The lack of a public debating club is partly a symptom of our lack of desire to communicate with other groups. (The debating team is not a public forum where anyone can express his or her views. So that doesn't qualify as a means of communication between groups.) There is political segregation at Dartmouth. The sticker found on many doors that says "Do not deliver 'The Dartmouth Review' here" is another symptom of lack of communication between people holding different views. There is segregation based on sexual orientation. One just has to look harder to find all these other kinds of segregation, and a sure sign that groups are segregating is a lack of effective communication between them.
Human beings tend to socialize exclusively with others of similar background. This has had a tendency to create problems for us in the past. Racism, sexism and a host of other problems ailing society are natural byproducts of a society that encourages the division of its citizens into airtight compartments. And Dartmouth is pretty well compartmentalized. The culture here tends to inhibit people from different backgrounds from mixing. We are on the lookout for people who are very similar to us and arecontent to hang out with them. Few people are inclined to make the effort to make use of the statistical diversity that we have at Dartmouth and go out of the way to get to know someone from a different background.
Learning to be comfortable with people who are different from ourselves is perhaps the single most important component of our education. And this does not come naturally, any more than physics or math comes naturally. One has to make a conscious effort to learn it. Too often we think that getting to know a person with a different skin color says everything about the diversity of our relationships.
But diversity is not about differences in skin color. It is about the differences in culture that tend to accompany the differences in skin color. Analyze a friend from a different ethnic background and it will more than likely turn out that he shares little more with his ethnic community than his skin color. In all other respects he is like us. So much for diversity.
Dartmouth has a lot going for it as far as desegregation is concerned. We are a small and diverse community, and segregation is pretty difficult when there aren't large numbers of any single type of person around. It just so happens that acquainting oneself with different kinds of people is not a priority for Dartmouth students. And you can contribute to the remedy by making it a priority for yourself.
