Race At University: Four Viewpoints

(1)

I came here rather than to a State University because of the financial aid. Even though tuition is more expensive, it was cheaper to come here because of the grants and loans I received. If you can meet the academic standard to come here, the University will make it so that you can afford to come.

I felt it is different for myself here than a lot of other students because I am from a visible minority. Often minority students are more united because they feel they have to stick together. For me to have made it to a University of this calibre makes me feel I have to bring it. I have to be on point academically and I feel I have to do everything to the max. There is definitely a lot of pressure.

I come from a family that values education very much. They are from Trinidad and there many people prefer to send their kids away to school if they have the power to do so. It is all about education being the key to upward mobility in your socioeconomic status. Education is a gateway so being able to achieve such a high level is exhilarating but frightening at the same time.

The minority students here are mostly either children of immigrants or immigrants themselves. You don’t see many minority students from families who've been here for a long time.

I do tend to hang around with people like me. I like the fact that they can identify with what I go through and how I think. It’s comforting, especially when you are so far away from home. People tend to stick with what they know and to go to a place where there are people that look like them. I always notice when I am the only black student in my class and if there is another black student, we tend to become friends quickly because we are the only ones in that class. We are still friends with others but I find it’s easier with each other. I also think it’s important to keep our culture; you don’t want cultures to be so diluted that you lose traditions and history.

It’s different for dating because if I want to date someone of the same minority, there are not a lot of options for me. I am either not attracted to them or they are just a good friend so it probably won’t work out or they have a girlfriend. Maybe that will change. I hope so.

Here, there are black parties and there are white parties. A black party is going to be a dancing party, where people might drink. A white party is where there is a whole bunch of drinking and maybe some dancing when people are drunk. Often people will pregame which means they go to a white party first to get tipsy and then to the black party to have fun.

I have been to some good white parties but often there are just beer cans and weird people everywhere, weird games, people making out with random people. It’s just not what I am used to. I hate beer and that’s what most of them like to drink. It smells gross, it’s all over the floor and gets your shoes dirty. It’s a completely different atmosphere. So when people ask me to a party, I tend to ask them which kind it is going to be.

Sometimes if a white person goes to a black party, people have looked at them funny, like they are at the wrong party. That must be stressful for them. I do feel it is easier for black people to go to white parties than white people to go to black. Usually people are really friendly to us, but there is always going to be some ignorant person. One time, a white girl was walking past a party and we were sitting outside; I heard some people call her “snow bunny” which was really disrespectful, I think.

I do have to say that I sometimes notice particular differences that bug me. For example, I have a white friend who used to do things when I was first getting to know her that annoyed me. She would change the way she talked which is a big pet peeve with me. Talk the way you talk, don’t try to change it. Besides, I feel I didn’t talk like that so I told her to stop it. She did, and I know she was embarrassed about it. We got over it, but she did have to be told.

So it does make a difference that I am a member of a visible minority here. But I am okay with it.

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(2)

I came from a middle-class background, and most of the people I grew up with were like me: white. I'd thought that race was something that had been a problem in the past, but that various laws had helped eliminate racism and discrimination, and that as a result the problem was more or less solved. That's what we'd learned in school, perhaps not explicitly, but more by inference. As well, the rather number small number of people of other races that I'd known seemed just like all the rest of us. Some we liked and were close to, others not so much. There was a nearby city, where there were more people of Hispanic and African heritage, as well as a growing refugee community, notably from Africa, but the appropriate way to respond to the newcomers seemed clear. Just be considerate of everyone, and in your interactions with different kinds of people, don't pay any attention to the differences, and there's no problem.

That view had to change when I got here, and began to interact with people who'd lived with racism all their lives. Ask them, “Is there racism?”, and they'll answer “Duh” and give you a dozen examples from their own experience. Just little things, often disguised as something intended to be funny, but unmistakable in their intent. At first I thought, “Dreadful things, but now they're hypersensitive and see it everywhere whether it exists or not”. But then I began to realize, if these things had happened to me, how could I not be continually wary of them everywhere I went? One person especially became a good friend; I visited her at home and stayed for a few days, going around with her to the places she'd grown up. After multiple instances of double-entendres or whispered remarks just loud enough for us to hear, doors closed right in front of her, exaggerated apologies (Oh, I'm s-s-o-o-o s-s-sorry), I found myself becoming even more hypersensitive than she was. I'd only experienced this kind of thing a couple of times before, and then it was in a sexual context. So I realized again what she was getting at. In her words, “Duh”!!

Then there are the people who actually are racist. They make jokes with racial overtones, even when people who they're making jokes about are actually there. If you challenge them, they'll say, “it's just a joke, it's not intended to offend anyone, just get over it”. Maybe they don't realize how offensive they're being, or just don't care. Or maybe they do realize, and do it anyway.

I was interested enough in this topic to take a couple of courses in Race Relations. These helped me to understand the problems and their origins. But the most important things I learned outside the class, just from hanging out and making friends with people who there weren't many of in my life before.

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(3)

I feel that this university sets us up for segregation and racism. They have a dorm for black kids which has a lot of programming about black or African things like celebrating the culture. There is also a latino living centre, an international living centre, and quite a few other dorms for minorities. But it’s hard to get to know people who live in these dorms if you don’t live there too. Most of them don’t come out and mix. If we did see them around, we would say hi but they were not really as friendly.

Once I tried to go to an Asian party but they wouldn’t let us in. They told us it was full but meanwhile, there were people walking in right by us with no problem. The difference was that we were a large group of whites, blacks and latinos and the people they were letting in were Asian.

I think the university puts us at a disadvantage by offering minority dorms and special programs. I grew up in a town where everyone is white and it was a shock for me when I got here. I didn’t know what I had gotten myself into. I chose to participate in this special summer program but when got there, I found that was almost all minorities and hardly any white kids. That had never happened to me before. I’m fine with it now but they just kind of threw things like that at people. Most people would refuse to go to things where there would be nobody like themselves there. I feel they should have just mixed people up instead.

I also feel that our university newspaper is racist. They say disrespectful things like how the program houses or dorms are like minority ghettos and they compare them to each other, often not in a good way.

People will always tend to navigate towards people similar to themselves. It’s easier for a black kid to make friends with another black kid; offering all these minority programs; putting minority kids together in dorms just makes it harder for people of different races and ethnic origins to get to know each other. That's what we all tend to do anyway; the University shouldn't make it worse.

Like I said, I wish the University would just mix people up so we can all get to know each other.

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(4)

I'm black. and I'm from a big-city neighborhood that's mostly characterized as "mixed", or "difficult" -- those are some of the more polite terms. Nobody I meet at home seems to have any interest in education: their own or their children's. Fortunately for me, I went to school by bus to a different neighborhood with a different kind of High School. There was a very ethnically-mixed student body, and I was fortunate enough to be able to tutor some people whose English was poor, and in some cases almost nonexistent. Right from the beginning, that did a lot for my self-confidence. Whatever problems and hangups I had, at least I could understand what people said, and I had no difficulty making myself understood either. Fortunately, too, I had a few teachers who seemed happy to support and mentor me. Without these people, I wouldn't be here.

I also made a lot of friends, and as time went on, more and more of them were white, and mostly the high-achievers in the school. I got to know a lot of my friends' families as well, and for the first time in my life I came to realize the meaning of words like "integrated". Not that there were no awkward moments, or people saying things they regretted; but goodwill and good nature were able to overcome most of the problems. I also like to think that many white people understand some of the issues a bit better because their kids were friends with an ethnically-diverse group. In fact I know they do, and I'm proud of the part I played in all that.

So I wasn't at all scared of coming here. Well, I was scared of the academic demands, but not of whether I'd be able to fit in socially with the diversity of people who I knew I'd find here -- after all, I'd had a good deal more experience with more different kinds of people than most of the other people I'd be with. I was right not to be scared; however, there were some things I hadn't anticipated.

In the classes, lectures, seminars, labs and so on, it just didn't make any difference what sex, age, size, or color you were, except that you could tell that some of the students didn't speak English as their first language. Nor did some of the Profs, which could sometimes be a problem at first. In social life, though, things were different. This University is so large that every ethnic and language group can coalesce so that people mix most of the time with people of their own kind. My dorm was mostly caucasian, and some of the people hadn't even noticed this pattern until some of us pointed it out; then they saw it for themselves. Mostly, it turns out, that being in the majority was nothing new for them; most of the people they came across were white, and most of their friends were as well. But black people, hispanics, asians, and other people visibly different from the majority do notice. We're not the majority, so if we want to hang out with people like ourselves, we have to look around a bit more. Fortunately or unfortunately, that's what you see happen. Classes, dorms, sports, clubs (everything official), are fully integrated with little or no problem arising. But students are segregated socially because we do it ourselves. It's not that you never see mixed groups or mixed romantic pairings: you do, and nobody has a problem with them as far as I know. It's just that it's not the norm.

As far as I can tell, black groups don't form sub-groups within themselves. My various groups of friends, for example, include quite a few people from the Caribbean or from Africa. Not many of them are new to this country though; most came when their parents immigrated. Hispanic groups seem more segregated, I think by the country or at least the region they come from.

There's very little obvious antagonism here-- a lot less than at home, even in the suburban school I went to. You can say, if you like, that the antagonism really is there, but that everyone knows how to behave so that it never comes out; they know what will be offensive and don't say it or do it. And it's true that on the few occasions people say something offensive, the reason is usually that they're drunk. Everyone else always reacts in the same way: they're embarrassed and do everything they can to get the offender to stop and to move away from the situation.

But really, if there was more prejudice, I think it would come out more and we'd see it. We are thrown all together pretty closely, after all.

I've come to a conclusion about what's going on. We just feel more comfortable the more similar the people surrounding us are to ourselves. People of about the same age tend to hang out together as well. People from the city are different from people from the country; rich people are different from the rest of us, and the groups they form tend to reflect that. There's a rich person in my dorm who we all get along with, but who spends her free time with other rich people. Some rich kids are snobbish, and go around boasting about their cars, their clothes, their trips, and so on. Most aren't like that, though. It's just that they feel more comfortable being in a group of people similar to themselves.

Even boys and girls often feel more at home in single-sex groups: of course there are mixed groups, but a lot of the time other things are going on there as well. I refer, of course, to sex. Even when nothing is actually happening, there are people inside the group, especially boys (duh!), who hope that something will. And mixed groups tend to be less relaxed; nothing compares with the comfort you can feel inside a group of girls talking about a movie they've all seen, or a group of guys dissecting the plays in the big game.

So although what I've seen here has surprised me in a way, I'm now comfortable with it. It's just the way people are. White people, black people, people of every ethnic origin: it's just one more thing that we all have in common. We all feel more comfortable with people similar to ourselves. But we are learning to integrate ourselves more within the "university community". Even with all the races, religions, genders and cultures, we are learning to focus on the similarities and to see ourselves as one.