PLEASE READ THESE POSTS IN ORDER, STARTING FROM THE BOTTOM
When I went away to college, it was to a place that was a front-runner in the diversity movement. All incoming students were asked to read a book about race that we heard a lecture about during New Student Week and then discussed in small groups. My year's book was "A House on Mango Street" by Sandra Cisneros. You should read it. She is amazingly evocative.
During my sophomore spring, there was a big, prolonged whoop-di-doo on campus. Charles Murray, of "Bell Curve" fame, had been invited to campus. Now that I think about it, I'm not even sure how that happened. We had a weekly convocation speaker every Friday, and the variety was rather staggering. But I'm not even sure any more if that was the slot he and his dog-and-pony show had or not. I don't know who invited him or why. I'm guessing they may not have realized what a big deal it would become.
Charles Murray's book "The Bell Curve" was the latest pseudo-academic attempt to present "evidence" for racial superiority and/or inferiority. Unsurprisingly, he thought he was proving that there were biological reasons why black people would never achieve as much as white people. You see why people were upset.
That term, I was taking a sociology class, a religion class and a class on the history of the Civil Rights Movement. So I spent a lot of time talking about this upcoming campus visitor. There were faculty forums organized to discuss the merits of listening to people we disagree with and to ensure that people were sufficiently informed to be able to see through him. We had floor meetings about it in the dorms.
One night, in the midst of this prolonged season of heightened tension/awareness/conversation, I had a dream. It wasn't that complicated of a dream. It was a dream about another floor meeting about Charless Murray coming to campus. What was important was what happened next.
When I woke up, I was mad. I was mad at Charless Murray for taking over my dreams. I was tired of the whole issue. I was tired of thinking about it, tired of talking about it, tired of dreaming about it. I wanted, I demanded a break. And then I realized something: it was only because I am white, and not some other color, that I even have the option of only dealing with race when I feel like it.
As a white person, being interested in race and racism is something I am free to choose. I can do it when I feel up to it, and then set it aside and go onto other things whenever I want. People of color do not have that freedom in our society.
This was a major revelation for me. I went from feeling indignant and mad to feeling ashamed and spoiled in about 4 seconds. That moment has shaped me ever since.
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Interesting - my memory of all of this is totally different! First, I didn't think [our college] was very good at handling diversity - maybe in the 1970s, but not when we were there. I remember lots of very tense conversations with students of color in and out of class about campus climate issues (mainly focused on the tendency of white students to ignore and avoid race and to be ignorant about other cultures), and I still hold a fair amount of resentment about how socioeconomic diversity was (not) handled (recently vented yet again on the alumni survey they just sent out).
As for the Charles Murray thing, my recollection (heavily colored by the fact that I was the editor of the newspaper at the time) was that they brought him in because they thought that it would force the community to actually discuss issues of race - it was intentionally provocative because the administration was concerned that students weren't fired up about...anything. It wasn't a convo - it was on a weekday evening - and I was sitting in the first row (the 'press seating,' which ironically gave us a view of...nothing because most of the action was behind us). There is a pretty embarrassing photo of me and the other newspaper staffers sitting there taking notes while about a bunch of students angrily protested behind us - I think they then walked out? Behind those first few rows of protesters, however, I remember many more students sitting there quietly. It was a very odd scene.
I was pretty jaded about the whole thing because I saw it as setting up a straw man for everyone to get angry at so the college could show that we could show some spark about something - they wanted the little protest and walk-out, as long as it didn't get out of hand. It all felt very manufactured to me, and I don't recall discussing it in any of my classes, although I may have been too wrapped up in the newspaper to notice even if it had been.
I guess I'm glad that it had an authentic effect on someone, though!
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