A joke: one day, three campus liberals, one a women's studies major, one a sociology major and the other an education minor, stopped protesting whatever it is they were protesting. No one noticed.
Campus un-liberals: the state of the status quo is strong. The Establishment is unmovable, immutable. Whether the protestors number three or 30, the so-called liberal ethos of the Dartmouth College campus is little more than the feeble, intermittent rants of a select group of students with varied interests. What is interesting to consider is that when a campus brouhaha erupts in the aftermath of events like the ghetto party or the "wah hoo wah" thing, 30 socially minded students, the dubiously-termed "liberals" of this campus, manage to raise themselves from the muck and mire of blissful apathy and vociferate, albeit strenuously, the immediacy of their concerns. But there's the rub. Oftentimes, liberals and conservatives alike treat each incident as a random, isolated case and fail to notice the recurring pattern of transgression, controversy, and blame that happens with annoying frequency in discussion of the Greek system's social improprieties. While conservatives attempt to explain away the gravity of each offense by way of specious arguments and blameless rhetoric, liberals are content to see that the offending parties won't party for a term or two, receiving punishments tantamount to being sent to one's room without milk and cookies. Both groups, liberals and conservatives, have been blind to the root of the problems: the Greek system's image of itself. Where can one find manifestations of this image? Your drawers.
That's right -- to address this issue, I had to rummage through my clothes and pull out my 1998 Greek Week T-shirt, a fanciful depiction of young white people, mostly yellow-haired, frolicking in sport, tossing kegs, washing cars, and playing music. They appear to be enjoying themselves immensely. There's even a muscled figure, a male, standing in the center of the illustration, clad in a toga, arms akimbo, yellow hair floating in the wind, appearing, in his Greco-Roman strength, to be unmovable, unchangeable. Of course, I find two things appalling about the shirt: first and foremost, that I wore it several times my freshman spring (now, I wear it only on laundry days, when there's no other clean alternative); and second is the absence of nonwhite people. (There are no nonwhite people on the shirt -- I've scrutinized the illustration countless times. There is a shadowy figure who appears to be sweeping garbage. When I wore the shirt for the first time, one classmate facetiously remarked, "There's the black person." But I digress.) I've tried to ask myself why the characters on the shirt are all white. Maybe the printer forgot to color some of them in. Maybe the illustrator temporarily forgot about the existence of Indian, Latino, Hispanic, Asian American, and Native American students on this campus. Maybe he remembered by the time the shirt went to the printers, but it was too late. Maybe the illustrator didn't have black or brown ink. No, that's not it. Several of the characters have brown hair and black shorts.
After staring at the shirt for hours in ponderous thought, I began to consider the possibility that this is how the Greek system essentially views itself, a racially homogenous group devoid of diversity, an organization that exists for the express purpose of white people having fun. "How would the addition of a black person change this image?" I asked myself. In answering this, I colored in one of the brown-haired characters with a brown marker. Maybe it's just my coloring skills, but now the character looks angry, and woefully out of place. His presence, sandwiched as he is between two of the yellow-haired characters, literally disrupts the aesthetic continuity of the illustration, making one's eyes see white, then brown, then white again. Now I'm wondering how this person got there, he's so out of place. Did he force his way in? Did one of the other characters invite him to the party? Why is he even there, considering the fact that all the other characters are white except for him? I'd like him to leave, I can erase the brown -- better yet, maybe if I wash the shirt, the brown will eventually come out. My eyes are now continuously drawn to this own person, as I begin to regret coloring him in. Maybe the muscled figure will kick him out.
Greek Week '98's sponsors, as written on the shirt, included the Women's Resource Center and the Office of Residential Life. If even the College supports this presentation of the campus social scene, why must we bother with initiatives?
