Amidst the chatter regarding the growing unease on campus following the departures of several female minority staff and faculty members, I have been enormously gratified to see a push for positive change where once there was complacency and apathy. But there are also those who are not and have never been apathetic about the College, but hold active, engaged stances against affirmative action and equal opportunity initiatives. I have encountered several opinions that diversity in hiring practices is unnecessary, because it is racist to presume that students of color would need people who looked like them to be their supervisors and mentors. Why, some argue, couldn't these students learn from and identify with white professors, advisors and faculty members as well? Let's all be colorblind! It's the post-racial 21st century, or something.
I'll get to that in a second, but first I want to talk about the experience of being a white person in a room during an intense discussion about race involving people of different races. Explosive emotions ensue, and there are usually a lot of girls who look like me crying and saying things like, "What can I do? Help me understand. It's not my fault, I'm sorry!" It's so uncomfortable that it's painful the guilty desperation of being past the point of achieving a genuine, non-theoretical understanding of another person. When you've never had to think about race and then it suddenly starts mattering on an intellectual level, it's like trying to learn a new language. You become incapable of thinking of people with entirely different experiences from yours outside of the theoretical part of your brain. Maybe you understand on an intellectual level that racism is bad. But do you try to develop friendships with people who are not like you and are not like the people you have known? If you didn't grow up doing these things without conscious intent, it won't come naturally to you.
We all want the same things from life. We're not that different. I don't want to discount the fact that race usually plays a huge part in the identity of any person of color (especially one who has lived most of his or her life in a predominantly white community), but the elements of our lives that most make us who we are as individuals do not fall strictly along the lines of race.
It's that time you peed your pants in second grade, or the moment you got into Dartmouth College, or the fact that your mother suffers from multiple sclerosis, or that you've dedicated your whole life to hockey, or you're bilingual, or maybe you come from an abusive household. No single thing defines us, and though it is a privilege for me as a white person to let race define me least of all, I don't also have to immediately define other people by it. To ignore it or pretend I'm "colorblind" would also be ignorant and absurd, just as pretending you don't notice someone's gender would be absurd. But you can only gain an artificial understanding of a person at best when you corner them and ask them to explain their experience to you so that you can recover from your debilitating disease of privilege. It's not presumptuous to think of another person as being like you when their experiences may be different from your own. It is presumptuous to think that someone can sit down with you over lunch and explain to you what it's like to be black.
This is why diversity in hiring is important. Yes, I've been secretly making that point this whole time. White students need to learn from and look up to people who aren't like them just as much as students of color need representatives who can actively stand for their concerns in the administration. We need a community in which students who come from privileged white backgrounds and all-white towns and prep schools develop genuine, unforced connections to people of other races, ethnicities, experiences and mindsets than their own, so that they stop thinking of people who are different as a strictly theoretical and altogether alien group. Diversity in all aspects of experience is important to the development of a full character to imagine it is just for the benefit of minority students is only to endorse the notions that there are unbridgeable gaps between us and that we each have a prescribed role at this school. Shouldn't we all have a stake in our community?
The sense of alienation at Dartmouth is widespread I know this because of the enormous feedback I received in response to my column last week, many from students who shared this feeling and they were not just students of color. A white male alum who suffered from mental health issues while at Dartmouth was denied medical withdrawal, and shared with me a complete stranger his story and his feelings of not mattering to the College. Why would he feel compelled to do that? Because we are members of the same community, and because he identified with what I said. Not because I was trying to be his spokesperson. These are my values too.
I could easily have been born into different circumstances, like my mother who is from a tiny coal-mining town and grew up thinking she was rich because her family could afford real meat instead of dog food like the other kids. Or my best friend, who works her own way through school and will have to pay off loans for years after graduation. Or any number of people who blitzed me saying that they hate this school and feel as if they were just shipped in as statistical window dressing to compete with the diversity of other Ivies, but have no support and no identifiable community here. There's no reason why I'm not in the position of any of those people other than chance and circumstance, so why shouldn't it be vitally important to me on a personal level to work to create a community in which everyone's interests and needs are actively promoted and met? It's not guilt it's common humanity.
