|
Archives
|
Monday, September 16, 2002
02:46 a.m.
Race and Colgate University - just like on TV, apparently
I was brought up short by this from the Discriminations blog on an article (online to subscribers only) about the school - because the first time I realised that there was a genuine 'Colgate U' (and not a training school for toothpaste testers) was in this PBS documentary (shown over here on the BBC a couple of years ago).
Both the article and the TV show major on race.
The article, written by a black academic at the university, starts
At Colgate -- like other small, competitive liberal-arts colleges with overwhelmingly white, suburban cultures -- the truth of its racial exclusivity, so basic to its social life, is rarely mentioned overtly. Yet colleges like mine seem to reproduce the inequalities of American society in ways that they can't avoid, despite their best intentions. Perhaps it's time to stop pretending otherwise and deceiving minority applicants into thinking that they will achieve the same academic and social success as their white counterparts -- or even be held to similar standards.
Apparently, a white academic at the school sent an email to a black student pointing out
that minority students [at the school] were often seduced into unchallenging courses where liberal professors, who were "sensitive" to their needs, gave them inflated grades.
Needless to say, the shock-horror brigade were all a-tremble. However, the author says that
The specific charges in Shain's message created less of a stir than his breach of the university's racial etiquette.....
In a nutshell, affirmative action lets into college students with abilities inadequate to deal with the courses offered; in order not to make them feel bad, the college look bad, and show up AA as the fraud it is, their grades have to be falsified; and etiquette requires a blind eye be turned.
The author thinks colleges like Colgate should ensure that
Black students should understand such institutions' academic and social milieu from the beginning.
And help themselves by
recruiting black students who have already succeeded in the integrated social and academic worlds of prep schools or elite suburban high schools.
Surely we've arrived in Kafka-land when, in order to make AA work, colleges are told they need to take only upper-class blacks, because they're the only ones who will cope!
There is some hope that the Supremes will grant certiorari in the Michigan Law School case (Grutter v Bollinger) (their decision is at least a few weeks away, apparently). A good deal less hope for a broad decision - comparable to the Brown case in 1954 - cutting the foundations from the whole wretched apparatus of affirmative action, and putting it in the dustbin of history where it belongs - right next to the Jim Crow laws which it rivals in absurdity.
The TV show - which featured a Colgate student whose father was black and mother white - was memorable (unfortunately, I never got to tape it) for showing the de facto segregation in force amongst students; and the complaints that the girl was 'not black enough', and a traitor to her race by crossing the colour line to associate with students of other 'ethnicities'. By her black peers, it seemed she was judged 0% by the 'content of [her] character' and was naturally deeply unhappy.
(The worst of it was during a tour around parts of Nigeria - strange that a bus should be the setting for displays of racial hatred quite different from those of 1950s Montgomery!)
So when the author of the article says students should be warned
that they will live in a world of close social and intellectual relationships between students of different classes and racial backgrounds.
frankly, to judge from the TV show, it's the students who want to integrate who have the problem!
|