Today I am going to share 10 racist things I had to deal with in my first college; Clark University. When I was processing them in 2013-2015, I was met with: "ugh, not again... do you ever talk about anything else? You really need to get over it. It isn't good for you to dwell on these things. People are learning, give them time. I don't believe anyone said that to you! They probably didn't mean it like that." And, the one time I stood up for myself, "well, you didn't have to be so rude about it."
This exercise has three purposes. First, to all my white readers who are saying you are ready to listen to people of color, we are going to test and develop that skill. You will read through this incomplete list without yelling out the first (or second or third) thing that pops into your mind. Then, if you're ready to progress beyond listening to people of color, you are going to leave a supportive comment that you wish your newly woke self had said 5 years ago. Or, if you don't understand why something offended you, you can leave a correctly worded question.
The second purpose is to make you realize that no matter how much colleges and universities want you to think they care about racial diversity, they'll put our bodies on their brochures and turn a blind eye when the white students and faculty damage our psyches.
The third purpose is that I (theoretically) get to feel heard and supported after a pretty traumatic time in my life.
1. In the fall of 2014, the Black Student Union published a list of demands. White students everywhere, incuding roommates, proceeded to call them pushy, unreasonable, demanding and uppity. Yeah - UPPITY.
2. At least two demands were centered around some scandal involving the coach of the men's basketball team. My white girl roommates said that this was ridiculous, because the head of the athletics department was a kind, trusting perosn that they would feel going to with any problem and if the Black guys on the men's basketball team didn't feel like they could talk to her about the racism they were supposedly experiencing, it was their own fault.
3. Another demand was that either people of color or Black get a resource room/safe space in the fancy new student union which was being built. Many white students complained that this was segregation, and some felt like they would need to designate a safe space for white people, too.
4. When I was sitting by myself in the mostly empty cafeteria at 7am on a weekend, two white girls walked by loudly asking why all the Asians never made an effort to integrate into the rest of the student body by always sitting together and talking in other languages. This was the time I stood up for myself by saying that English was my native language so I understood and did not appreciate what she said. And then I informed her that she was probably the reason no international student would want to "integrate" into Clark's society.
5. In the beginning of all three fall semesters, at least three people approached me asking some version of "do, you, know, where, you, are, going??!!!??!?!?!?" in THAT tone of voice.
6. People complained forever about how they were paying a lot of money to go to this school but they kept on getting TAs with thick accents they couldn't understand. So how could they possibly be expeted to learn anything?!
7. People complained endlessly about international students who talked too loudly on the phones in common areas (um, sometimes international calls get worse signal?) or kept them up at weird hours (um, most of their families lived in different time zones?) and were only here because the university wanted their money anyways (um, you're welcome that international students will keep these institutions running so that you can get financial aid?).
8. Clark was in a neighborhood of working/middle class Latino immigrants. Depending who they were talking to, students were either terrified of being robbed at night or acted like they were tough now because they were in a ghetto neigborhood. And of course these people just needed to be saved, especially by education and psychology students.
9. Back to the birth of Black Lives Matter, students used protests as an excuse to get out of class and not enact actual social change (this was brilliantly covered in The Hate U Give).
10. And of course, any incident of racism where no one got physically hurt or killed was subject to be diminished with "well, at least nobody got hurt or killed."
All right, there you have it: racism in universities. I overheard a lot of these comments from more than one white person. Take all the time you need to consider how my experience at college was different from yours or your children's, from my academics to just trying to hang out with friends in the cafeteria. It is worth noting that I never received a microaggression from a profesor, although as a white-acting Asian I am not the person who will receive the worst racism has to offer. And I was serious about wanting to hear your responses.
Thanks for reading! -Anna
Hey Anna, I have been guilty of number 6 as an interpreter. I recall all of us interpreters complaining about interpreting (mostly engineering labs) led by TA's with accents. Looking back, it was probably more to do with our lack of competence in the subject area, but we gladly blamed the TA's accent instead. Most of my interpreting career has been in academia. I've been working for the past 8 or so years at the same university in a graduate program and, so far, I have encountered exactly 1 Black faculty member in that department. And I think he retired. So, now I think it is zero. There is a seminar room where I interpret regularly (or did before the pandemic) that had pictures of all of the department chairs going back pretty much since there was photography. All of them were white. All but one were male. Academia is a big old bastion of privilege and racism. Your response in number 4 is perfect.
ReplyDeleteHI,
ReplyDeleteMost recent racist thing I did was complain about accent of founder of Diamond Approach speaking with a very difficult accent which I had to listen to over Zoom for a whole week... he has been here since at least 1970. I guess if you didn't grow up speaking English it's hard to master the r sound. At least he shaved off his moustache halfway through so we could attempt to read his lips.
I remember when we were going around looking for a preschool for you, and one of the questions we asked at all of them was how many children of color attended. The one that was in the Unitarian Church told us they had pictures of children of all different colors on the walls. I can't remember if we told them we preferred actual children to pictures of them, put we walked out of there pretty fast.
HI,
ReplyDeleteMost recent racist thing I did was complain about accent of founder of Diamond Approach speaking with a very difficult accent which I had to listen to over Zoom for a whole week... he has been here since at least 1970. I guess if you didn't grow up speaking English it's hard to master the r sound. At least he shaved off his moustache halfway through so we could attempt to read his lips.
I remember when we were going around looking for a preschool for you, and one of the questions we asked at all of them was how many children of color attended. The one that was in the Unitarian Church told us they had pictures of children of all different colors on the walls. I can't remember if we told them we preferred actual children to pictures of them, but that's what I would like to have said. We walked out of there pretty fast.
Reply