The past two weeks have been ones of drama for our small college, with outrages being committed and outrage being expressed in reply. Speeches and posters and sundry feel-good activities have resulted -- I myself went to the march on Friday. Despite my attendance, however, I felt then as I do now that such responses were too facile to deal with a problem as deeply rooted as racism. Oh, sure, there'd be a fuss for a while, but in the long run nothing would really have changed. As long as different groups tend to go their separate ways, there will always be misunderstanding and fear.
I do not expect these separatist tendencies to change readily, and I consider my Dartmouth career to be illustrative of my pessimism. Since coming here I have managed to make friends with groups from almost every country and economic background. Yet one group is vastly under-represented -- white, "mainstream" Americans. Why so?
It certainly cannot be because I am one of those feckless minorities who hangs out in some "ethno-centric clique," as some pundits would have one believe all minorities do. It cannot be because of a sharp divergence of interests and cultures -- I have no problems getting along with Americans of any minority racial group, be they of Asian or African origin, and I do not consider my tastes to be that far from the "mainstream." In fact, the problem lies elsewhere.
To be blunt, the problem lies in the fact that many white Americans, though by no means all, cannot get themselves to see a member of a racial minority as something more than an "other," a representative of a strange,
alien mass, devoid of any individuality. For such people, whether a black guy is a basketball wizard or a chess fanatic is of no importance -- all that matters is that he is a Negro, and hence not really worth knowing. Such people may even be well-intentioned; they attend peace rallies, sit in on meetings of the Interracial Concerns Committee, etc. God forbid, however, that a minority member be anything other than a stage prop in their morality play.
Perhaps it would be instructive if at this juncture we examine some statistics I came across recently in The Dartmouth. According to David Hemmer's column on affirmative action, out of a pool of 400,000 blacks in 1993, only 1,700 scored above 1200 on the SAT. Assuming the distribution curve to be fairly normal, examining our normal distribution tables, and taking a single standard deviation to be 100 points, we see that for blacks 1200 corresponds to about 2.5 standard deviations above the mean.
A black person with a score at or above 1500 on the old SAT is thus not even likely to occur in our sample, since such individuals pop up less 1 in 10 million times in a normally distributed talent pool. Thus it is safe to say that the average white person at an Ivy League school is not ever going to meet such an individual in his or her career -- or is it?
For, statistics or otherwise, such people do exist -- I know since I am one of them, and I also know that I am not the only one. So much then, for statistical inferences. Yet these statistics, and others like them, shape the thinking of many individuals and how they deal with minority members. Statistics like these feed the belief in the minds of many that they are automatically superior to all blacks, Hispanics, or any other members of racial groups they fancy to be second-rate. "How can any of those X people be worth interacting with when the statistics tell us that X group members are inferior? I won't treat them badly or anything -- they just don't have anything to say I think is worth hearing."
I am not trying to say that only white people are guilty of thinking this way. I know that there are many minority members who hold such strong hatred for members of yet other minority groups that they make David Duke seem caring. Yet, perhaps because of the fact that they are members of minority groups, and hence are on the receiving end themselves, I have also noticed that minority members tend to be more willing to view individuals as individuals, and not as statistical representatives of their ethnic groups.
It is a shame that people should think in the above fashion, but such modes of thought will not be changed by distributing a few posters and standing out in the cold on a Friday afternoon.
