At Dartmouth College, we have an ongoing discussion about the role of race in our community. The discussion perennially waxes and wanes. Sometimes it crescendos to a very intense degree -- as with the crew team's "Cowboys and Indians" party and The Review's attack on Native Americans. Other times, the discussion happens on a smaller scale when the issue is not particularly grave -- like the "Hip Hop in the Hood" mini-fiasco.
To someone from Middle America, from a region in the rust-belt, which is heir to the corroded remnants and economy of the coal industry, the idea that an Ivy League Institution is a bastion of racism is utterly silly. Where I live, we actually are dealing with racism (there was a racially motivated murder of an illegal immigrant there quite recently) and so it amuses me (and irritates me) when we act as though race at Dartmouth were practically the plague. When racism resurfaces again here, it will be important to keep in mind that this is a largely overheated issue, and the steam from that heat often functions to obscure our view of what really divides our community most: not race, but class.
By class, I do not simply mean a harsh division between wealthy students and poor students; I mean a much more complex form of stratification -- one that certainly involves our fraternities to a great degree -- but is even more subtle and deep than that oft-debated social-space question.
I'll admit that race is a big divider, and that students are often prone to associate more with members of their own race than others, but I believe that race divides us more in the abstract. Race is a division that occurs in our heads, but not in the concrete make-up of campus life. To discover how class divides us, just take a look around the frat you're in and talk to some of the brothers. Sample the atmosphere and do so comparatively: Is the place warm, friendly and inviting, or is there an air of exclusivity? Not that anybody's kicking you out of their frat for your shabby mode of dress, but is the attitude of the place one that ultimately would reject you or accept you? And on what criteria?
I think that you will eventually see the fine tendrils of a powerful matrix of class-based social interaction at work, creeping into the choices we make about with whom we eat, work and especially drink in our day-to-day routines. Class feeds vanity and a social prestige that is ultimately illusory.
In Bret Easton Ellis's novel, "The Rules of Attraction," one of the characters laments to his girlfriend as she is breaking up with him, "I just want to know you." She responds, "You're not ever going to know me." But why shouldn't we want to know people? Like in Ellis's book, we live in a place fogged over by a social miasma that prevents us from knowing each other as we really are. We are sequestered into artificial designations that have their own stereotypes and baggage attached to them, whether one is a Sig Nu, a Chi Gam or an Amarnite. Why should we try to fit our diverse, dynamic and wholly interesting society into a social system that exists in a way very similar to the one that existed in the 1800s? Can't there be a healthier and more holistic way to structure this place?
The debate about race at Dartmouth further cuts us up, dividing us into neat little slices of humanity. We retreat into our respective cliques, not thinking about the forces that really parse our world to pieces. Our non-debate about class cuts us up more. We don't talk about it, because we do not see it. Yet its effect is clearly there. The Mexican poet and essayist Octavio Paz wrote, "The sterility of the bourgeois world will end in suicide or a new form of creative participation."
The same can be said of the social system here at Dartmouth. We have outgrown it. The society around us has outgrown it. If we do not find a new method by which to relate to each other and discover our common humanity and unity, I am sure that the fraternities and the other forms of social stratification here will collapse. Yet there is an obvious first step to remedying this: If we begin to recognize the way in which class impacts our way of life, it may be possible to at last cut through all this socially mandated garbage and relate to each other on a truly personal basis.
