In ancient times, every nation and tribe had
a local god that they worshipped. The local gods were to be appeased and feared within their limited domains. With the ascendancy of monotheism as the Western cultural norm, one would think that there would be no need to fear the local gods any longer; in college, this is not the case. Accordingly, I would like to warn the incoming freshmen of the local gods worshipped here: sacred spaces for sacred differences, or more crassly, ghettoes for taboo topics.
In a very illiberal and undemocratic fashion, differences are worshiped here at the College in both the official language employed and in the speech codes enforced. I encourage you to survey the people with whom you are most comfortable, and the persons with whom you sit in the eating places. Notice the color/class divide across campus; like insects, each kind has gathered to their own. We speak here at the College and opine endlessly about "institutional diversity," both buzzwords, and then do nothing about diversity when it arrives. There is a subterranean hesitancy within each of us to breach the forbidden fruit of race and gender politicking; however, we never let it fade from our minds encouraged by the pious pontificating about differences of class, race and gender, compliments of the administration.
One of my friends, a senior, mentioned to me that when he first came here he immediately sought refugee in the African-American Society because "white Dartmouth" was overwhelming given his having lived in intensely segregated conditions. Another one of my senior friends bemoaned her lack of black friends because of the uncomfortableness of the unspoken divide, race, which has prevented an honest rapport from developing between her and blacks. On the "community" level fellow minorities speak about the endless need "to represent" here at the College. Race refused to die.
There was a time when segregation was maintained by force. Desegregation has been largely successful in that the coercive power of segregation has all but died. Integration, however, has been as successful as peace plans in the Middle East. Race divides still because race, and all the emotional and psychological components of this mass delusion, is still noticed and is made to matter in every waking moment. Racism is no longer a problem; race-ism rules today. I often have been asked questions like "What am I supposed to say to a black man?" or "How does one strike up a conversation with a white person?" "Hi, what's your name and where are you from?" is always a great place to start. It is how I have met most of the people -- of all colors, genders and creeds -- that I am lucky to call friends.
I ask all of you new students, whose minds have hopefully not yet been poisoned by the gods of difference, to breach the divide and reach across these lines. It will not, I assure you, be comforting. Here are some tips on how.
Ignore the pious, vapid bombast about diversity. All the hot air has turned a place of learning and inquisitiveness into a wasteland of silence and taboos. The presence of those different from you means nothing if "safe spaces" are created where everyone can be in a majority. There are places for blacks, Native Americans and gays, places for conservatives and progressives, places for Greeks and the anti-Greek, the rich and the poor, places for the enlightened and the religious. To learn, one must enter the blender of democracy where everything one believes in and does is open to public scrutiny and debate. The rhetoric of "lifestyle choices" has covered and hidden the search for the virtuous life with all of its yearnings for definitions of the good and of happiness and with none of the simplistic notions of identity affirmation and pure tolerance advocated today.
Ignore the pieties of unctuous "white privilege" preaching. I assure you that it is no more than "One Minute of Hate" to appease the qualms of conscience from the guilt naturally caused by difference worship. "White privilege" -- or on alternate days, the "Greek system" -- are demons of our collective fantasies conjured to preserve the guilt necessary to propel the jellyfish liberalism of group rights and antiracism from the '60s. We all circumnavigate reality to maintain the current campus atmosphere, which, by reminding whites of their privilege, appears to be the apogee of the Civil Rights movement. In actuality, this entraps both minorities and their "advocates" in a psychological delusion of groupthink that professor and author Shelby Steele calls "the second betrayal of black freedom in America."
I call on the freshman to take up this heavy burden and refuse to crawl into and support the enclaves maintained by the cultural-identity groupies on campus. You are now in college in America; the two, America and the university, have largely the same project. The university: to harmonise the inherent tensions of unity and diversity (hence uni-versity) and America, "E Pluribus Unum:" out of many, one.
