Private College Is Still Racist

I'm crackerjack white. Let's get that one straight. I'm a product of the comfortably white middle class. Not the $100K+ a year middle class, the middle class that is actually among the highest earners in the United States, but the actual upper middle class, the one that makes under $100,000 a year and lives in single family housing in primarily white neighborhoods and works white collar jobs and sends their kids to private college (albeit on academic scholarships with part of tuition).

But, I attended inner city public school in Providence for all twelve years of my government mandated lower education. And no, Rhode Island isn't a giant haven for blacks. It's a state that's 50% Catholic, which means, if you're not Italian or Irish, you're probably Dominican. But nonetheless, I managed to never once attend a school that had a majority white population grade 1 through 12. A plurality white population, sure. Majority, no.

And you know what? I count myself lucky.

Because then I went to private college.

Most of the time, when people talk about college, they talk about how you get a new perspective on things, how your eyes are opened and you begin to understand differences between yourself and other people.

Well, they're right. But somehow, I wish I'd kept my eyes closed.

Because when I had my eyes opened, it wasn't to see that we were all unique and diverse. It was to see the persistent cycle at work, one that guarantees oppression of non-whites. The students at private college were 85% white. 85%. And my college considered itself diverse for comparable small private liberal arts schools. And it was. Whites compromise 60% of the United States. A majority, but not ridiculously so. My high school was ~40% white. I'd somehow wandered into a bizarre new world, one where everyone was exactly the same.

But the most bizarre thing about whiteness at private college was that it was reinforced by racism that permeated the campus. Not out in the open, not for the professors or deans or anyone else to see, but the personal life. The jokes. I heard n----r used more often in my first and second years of higher education than I had in 12 years of inner city public schooling. That's a joke. It ain't a funny joke, it ought to be funny, 'cause it's true, but it's a joke all the same. They imitated rappers, mocked the way non-whites spoke, used epithets freely and then laughed afterwards at the mere usuage. They honestly believed that they were in the right, that as long as they only propogated these ideas behind closed doors, that was perfectly all right.

And the scary thing was: These are the kids who will run this country in 20 years.

Yah, they'd been raised in totally white neighborhoods, the suburbs, and the few that had attended public school had gone to public schools out in those suburbs, where there hadn't been black kids for miles around, and they'd used the same racist slang words then as they did now. Unlike me, they'd had no one to say "Hey, you fucking cracker, use that word again and there will be consequences." Worse than that, they're liable to keep doing it forever. They're the sons and daughters of rich folks. They'll get a great deal of support to do whatever they want, to become the movers and shakers, because in the United States, wealth begets only wealth. And in ten years, in twenty, they'll be in charge and they'll say: "We're sick of feeling guilty for slavery, feeling guilty for continuing those same practices after the Civil War, the ones that made blacks second class citizens, the ones that people had to fight in the 1960s just to get noticed. So, we're gonna stop feeling guilty. We're not gonna stop being racist, or believing that non-whites are somehow specifically inferior, but we're simply going to absolve ourselves of the guilt."

These are people who have no idea how to discuss race, because how can you have a discussion on race if you're all white? In one class, race in America was a unit of the course. And we're sitting around talking about passing, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s piece on Anatole Broyard, and this one girl's talking about how when a whole bunch of black city kids showed up in her white suburb school due to district changes her "black friend" was asked why he wasn't sitting with them. Nevermind that the question itself has the subtext "Why aren't you sitting with the people of your own race when you clearly don't belong with whites?" but what she said. Her "black friend." She might have even prefaced it with her "one" black friend. I can't recall. Certainly, he was the only one she discussed. Anyway, she says this and in my head it was like someone firing a gun in bank. Everything that the class was talking about disappeared and I got lost in the silence of my mind, this one thought that had been nagging me leaping to the forefront: Who in this class isn't white? I looked around. Not a single person. I was suddenly struck by this. And the futility of this class. The class was about non-traditional perspectives on America: Immigrant, black, homosexual, etc. Basically, it was a class about difference. But there wasn't anyone different in this class. Everyone had to preface their own ideas by speaking through an intermediary authority. This student's one black friend. The truth is they couldn't talk about it from their own perspective because they had no perspective to offer.

And I'm not saying that there wasn't something worthy in teaching a class on difference. But frankly, in a country like the United States, a country with a solid immigrant identity, those students ought to never have been in a position where difference needed to be taught in college. College shouldn't be a place where you're exposed to such fundamentals as "not everyone in the world is 'normal' and white." That should be something that is reinforced by daily life.