Some Thoughts on Diversity and Community at Swarthmore

Disclaimer: This grew out of my attempt to figure out what I think and how I feel about some of the incidents on campus this semester. Please feel free to disagree with me (constructively) – this is meant to keep the conversation going, not put a stop to it.

In the past semester, discussions of diversity and inclusivity on this campus have been bubbling up. Now, in the aftermath of the fifth reported incident of urination on the door of the Intercultural Center, these conversations have come fully to the surface, resulting in rallies, collections, action meetings, and teach-ins. Through all of this, I have remained silent, listening and trying to understand. I’ve been trying to sort out how I feel about being on a campus where hateful incidents – whether urination on the IC this spring or homophobic chalkings last spring – occur and I’ve been trying to sort out how I feel about the way we talk about diversity and community on this campus.

With the departure of Myrt Westphal this spring, the College is hiring a new Associate Dean of Diversity, Inclusion, and Community Development. When I attended student Q&As with two of the four candidates, I was surprised and upset to see that I was one of very few white students who made the time to meet with candidates for such an important position of leadership in the campus community. Why is it that white students don’t feel they have a stake in diversity?

It’s not that I don’t understand the position of privilege I hold. I come from a wide spectrum of privileges: I’m white. I’m male. Both of my parents are college educated. I come from the “People’s Republic of Cambridge,” where my public high school was down the street from Harvard and my school district spent $13,000 more per student in the 2009 fiscal year than the state average. I grew up surrounded by people from all around the world, with a range of incomes, a range of languages, a range of customs. One-third of the students at my high school were white – another third was black.

Coming from Cambridge, and coming from the high school I attended, diversity at Swarthmore struck me as odd from day 1. I’ll just put it out there – I didn’t understand closed groups. My experiences had taught me that people were endlessly more similar and endlessly more different from me than I could ever expect by looking at them. Why would I want to join a group where people were just like me? What could I learn from them?

In the past three years, I have come to a more nuanced perspective on closed groups – and I have come to see the tremendous value they offer to students who identify in many different ways. I’ve come to see my background, in which my experiences were always validated without question, opened me up to learning about other people’s experiences. But not everyone has been as fortunate. Not everyone has had their own experiences validated and affirmed, and having come to understand the way that this contributes to my sense of safety and security in the world, I see the importance of creating spaces for people to find that their experiences and struggles are shared with others.

However, I would like to challenge our community to do more to support diversity. Approaches to diversity based on similarity are tremendously important, but they are not enough. Students cluster around IC- and BCC-affiliated groups, seeking out others who share an identifier (or even multiple). All of our attentions are on creating small sub-communities on this campus, and none of our energies are going toward fostering a larger community. Last year, after the homophobic chalkings, I was disappointed to hear people deplore an attack on “Swat’s queer community.” The response to the IC incidents has been similar. Dean Wong emailed the members of the “IC community” to report the latest incident – but the email to the college community came from Dean Braun, and called it “a malicious and disgusting attack against the Intercultural Center and by extension the students and staff that are a part of it.”

I’m not saying that some people are not more affected – or that their experiences should be appropriated by others – but that each of us should reflect on how these events do impact us. We ALL bear responsibility for creating the climate on this campus. We need to take ownership of that. Each time a hateful incident occurs, we all need to ask ourselves: How did we fail? How can we do better? We need to remember that if someone threatens members of our community, then the community as a whole should feel that and respond. Hateful speech and hateful actions affect our campus community as a whole – and each of us should feel personally affected and personally invested in finding a solution.

Diversity is a complicated and complex concept. It is about celebrating both similarity and difference. We need to build a community that includes students, administrators, faculty, and staff. Diversity can be about many things: not just the color of our skin, but also our religious beliefs, our socioeconomic backgrounds, our educational experiences, our traumas and our successes. In building connections, and in building community, we cannot rely on the obvious similarities. We must learn to find common ground with those whose life experiences seem to differ from ours, and we must learn to celebrate the differences.

You may be surprised by the way in which your life has been similar from someone who looks nothing like you or the way in which your life has so broadly diverged from someone who looks very much like you. Celebrate that. Learn from that. Admit when you don’t know something. Ask questions. Create spaces where everyone feels safe, where everyone feels like they can talk openly about their experiences, their confusions, their thoughts, and their fears. I would like to think that the Intercultural Center could be that space, bridging gaps inter-culture. But maybe that space is somewhere else, somewhere new. I don’t know.

I would also like to challenge the call for the creation of an Ethnic Studies department and distribution requirements in Ethnic Studies and Gender/Sexuality Studies. I support the call for more courses to address histories of oppression and marginalization in many different communities. Silencing is a mechanism of marginalization. We desperately need to end the silence. We need to have more people studying the experiences of Latin@s in the US, African-Americans, Asian-Americans, female Americans, trans* Americans, queer Americans, etc. But we cannot and should not group all of these topics into “Ethnic Studies.” Separating out our curriculum into “Straight, White Men Studies” and “Everyone Else Studies” will not do anything to change the systematic normalization of straight, white men.

Additionally, we do not need to isolate conversations about diversity into a separate department. Consciousness, consideration, and celebration of diversity must be a part of our discussions across the disciplines – and in our everyday thoughts and actions. We need to teach our peers and ourselves how to treat others with respect and love in the real world. We need workshops and activities and conversations about integrating our academic understanding of diversity into our daily lives. Mandatory academic courses in an “Ethnic Studies” department sends the message that there is a time and place for considerations of difference, and that place is in the classroom, when we are directly analyzing the history of marginalization. What we really need is to learn how to create an environment on this campus where open and honest conversations about diversity are a part of our day-to-day life, where people feel free to speak their minds and people feel free to speak out when they feel they have been wronged. How we go about that, I don’t know, but we need to be having the right conversations first.