Despite articles by the New York Times theorizing about a future [url=http://nyti.ms/eizUGN]post-racial America[/url] and diversity offices on elite liberal arts colleges, racism on college campuses is alive and well. Reading this article on Refuse the Silence, an organization devoted to documenting the silences around racism and sexism on these campuses, this revelation is no surprise. However, in popular media and the emerging face of social media, racist incidents on campuses are still often [url=http://bit.ly/foPcxQ]overlooked[/url]. I spend a majority of my free time looking up relevant articles that affect my experience as a women of color in America and my own college campus, and finding coverage of these incidents is still difficult . The silence that pervades the racism and sexism on college campuses is because these incidents are then institutionally reinforced by campuses that don’t take these incidents seriously enough.
My Junior Year of High School I went on a special “diversity weekend” trip organized by my school to Penn State. As a 17 year old, the pluses were it was far enough, a large campus and I’d heard promising things about their liberal arts programs. Within an hour of being on the campus I‘d decided I didn’t want to return, despite that it had already been intoned that the combination of my race, good grades and financial situation would lead to a hefty scholarship. This was for two reasons. The first was our guide briefly mentioning a recent [url=http://bit.ly/gC0Nqq] racist incident[/url] involving the Penn State College Republicans group on campus throwing a Halloween party in which a number of students dressed up as KKK members. The second was the stares from multiple groups of white students on campus at our tour group of ten; more specifically our guide’s response that, “It’s probably because they haven’t seen this many of us walking around in a group ever.” I realized by ‘us’ she meant women of color and that she wasn’t making a sarcastic joke in calling our relatively small group of ten large.
Since this decision, I’ve researched other incidents of racism on Penn State’s campus that have gone relatively unacknowledged and that weekend has affected the rest of my college career. I consciously decided to not attend a small or predominantly white campus because I realized that it wasn’t an environment I would be able to thrive and grow in the ways that I needed to. However, that was my personal decision; as many students of color that [url=http://bit.ly/hye3Ta]transfer out[/url] of these campuses, there’s also inspiring stories of student’s [url=http://bit.ly/boYzkn]fighting back[/url].
Incidentally, despite my attempts to attend a campus that was racially diverse and enforced a zero tolerance policy about campus racism, I still found myself entrenched in a debate about the racism of a campus televised [url=http://bit.ly/dSl2AG]black face incident[/url]. I’ve linked the SUNY Purchase paper issue that came out during these debates over freedom of speech vs. racial sensitivity, but that is all that you will find if you google this. The incident in question including a white student dressing in black face to ‘mock’ another student who happened to be Black, his use of the N-word and use of racist rhetoric to posit Black men as hypersexualized rapists, ended with the student’s temporary suspension.
In the end, whether you go to a campus known for it’s liberal atmosphere or one with a history of racist incidents, makes no difference. Until college campuses make a concerted effort to deal disparities in campus life imbued with racism and policies that silence marginalized groups, the choice of more diverse vs. less diverse will most likely change nothing. And if they won’t, then reading stories about other people of color who have fought back against campus racism will hopefully be the light at the end of the tunnel and spur all of us to take a stand.
