As the deadline for spring term course selections draws near, many of us are pouring through the ORC to find classes fulfilling multiple distributive requirements, or to locate that "perfect" third class. Some of us, juniors and seniors especially, anticipate enduring that last dreaded distributive -- a lab science, language, or perhaps a literature class. Still, as this termly ritual continues, some of its variables have changed. And, for some students, these changes represent the first opportunity to learn about their histories and collective pasts in an academic setting. This Winter and Spring, for instance, mark the first offering of an Asian-American history course at Dartmouth. The class is one for which many Asian-American students have been fighting for years. Now that it and other courses like it are offered to the Dartmouth community, the question becomes: who will educate themselves and what will be learned?
Being a woman on this campus, I have often struggled with my gender identity and its implications over the past three years. I began to educate myself in my first-year, taking eye-opening courses like Women's Studies 10, which raised my consciousness as well as affected my politics. Through these classes as well as outside of them, I and others have found a forum to question what it means to be a woman, both at Dartmouth and in general. And, though I have often felt defeated and disheartened at the small number of men in these classes, though I have sometimes felt my concerns fall on deaf, or perhaps just conditioned ears, I have come to embrace my identity as a woman and to ultimately be empowered by that identity.
My experience as "white," heterosexual and middle-class, however, has been rather different. In terms of these identities, I have developed through many stages: ignorance, denial, anger, guilt and recognition. Because I am not stared at when I walk in a store, because I can walk into most Dartmouth classes and study people who look like me, it was easy for me to remain blind to my class, heterosexual and white-skin privilege. It was easy to deny that such privileges existed.
I, like so many of us, have often experienced "whiteness," in particular, as erasure. Whiteness has often felt to me like a kind of void or vacuum, like a complete lack of identity. Still, in many ways, my history has not been erased. I can open most American history textbooks and read about the immigration of my ancestors. I can take a literature course and learn about Long Island poets and women who write about issues that concern me. But, though these classes provide me with a sense of individual history and identity, they do not greatly affect my world view. At essence, these are not the classes through which I've learned the most.
European-American history, religion and literature have long been part of this nation's academic canon. This story is one most of us have learned from grade one. What the canon lacks, however, is a comprehensive view, a window for understanding of the world we live in. For centuries men and women have looked towards oppressed groups as having the responsibility for educating others about their concerns. Isn't it time we began to educate ourselves?
Whether one plans on going into corporate finance, medicine or law, there is much to gain by taking classes outside of the so-called Euro-American canon -- so much beyond the fulfillment of the Non-Western requirement. Apart from the nature of one's professional goals lies the undeniable reality that all of us must live and work within a global marketplace. And, if we, as future Dartmouth graduates, plan on dealing with people as people within this marketplace, it is crucial that we begin to understand the concerns and histories that influence their decision-making processes. It is important that we understand our privilege and our oppression, to understand power dynamics and use the power we do have in a positive way.
Yes, "privilege" is a word many people don't like to hear; it is indeed a scary word that for many evokes feelings of guilt, defensiveness and helplessness. It reminds us that inequality exists and that we, in our own ways, contribute to this inequality. But, it is only through its recognition that we can begin to educate ourselves and to affect change.
Perhaps the day will come when disciplines will no longer be definable as inside or outside of the canon, when the histories of women, homosexuals and people of color will be written into mainstream curricula with the kind of attention these histories merit. Until then, we must educate ourselves through the means available and continue fighting to write those histories into our books, our pasts and our present.
Course selections are due tomorrow. Which courses will you choose?
