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Volume CXXXIII, Number 10 |
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Dialogue spurs new insight on diversity issue
HALIDAY DOUGLAS
CONTRIBUTOR
Last Wednesday evening at 8:00 p.m. a group of about seven students gathered at the cafe for the first in a series of informal race and ethnicity talks. The primary impetus behind the discussions is to provide a "safe" space to dialogue about polarized social interactions at Bowdoin. After brief introductions, students then voiced why they came. Responses ranged from desiring to watch people argue to wanting a more effective way to address issues of "diversity" on campus.
One of the more salient "issues" that came up during the discussion pertained to the receptibility of difference inside and outside of the numerous "diversity-specific" student organizations on campus. The consensus was that while "diversity-specific" organizations are necessary communities of support for students, they also contribute to social divisions, which make engaging in open dialogue beyond the groups difficult.
After talking about "diversity" for so long, the group concluded that we don't really know what "diversity" is. Some people think it's just about accepting people with a different skin color, sexual orientation, gender, class, or even cultural background. However, as our discussion progressed, we began to see that although people with varying perspectives coexist on this campus, Bowdoin is not diverse, because it lacks dialogue for students to shift their perspectives and really understand difference. At Bowdoin, "diversity" is essentially addressed and discussed in terms of "black" and "white." Although there is support for many races and cultures, most conversations about "diversity" tend to be subsumed by "black issues." In our group this idea became particularly poignant as we discussed primarily the "Af-Am" society's relationship to Bowdoin culture.
In the case of the "Af-Am"-and this also applies to other groups-we discussed how the group's signature identity often takes precedence over the different ethnic identities that also exist within it. For example, some "black" students felt that in order to participate in the "Af-Am" they had to conform to a perceived "blackness"-manifest through the clothes people buy, the music they listen to, the people they sit with at lunch, etc.-which quieted other parts of their identity that they felt were equally important.
Aside from some of the issues that arose from discussing "diversity-specific," group discussion also focused on the effects of maintaining such singular identities that are ultimately exclusive. In this context we talked about the need for a space in which people don't have to assume particular identities and threaten have the freedom to assert themselves in a fixed identity. In this space, students would no longer have to associate purely on the basis of shared markers of "identity."
As much as we talked about the role of "diversity-specific" organizations on campus, we recognized that this problem of polarized social interactions is probably magnified by Bowdoin's size, its political environment, and its tradition. This becomes important when considering who is (or is not) initiating this conversation at Bowdoin, because it tends to be these three factors that shape the terms of dialogue (or its absence). The College's size accentuates the "problem" of the lack of communication, a lackthereof which would seem impossible unless it was intentional. The political environment is one that's too "correct" to be honest, and the tradition is still invested in stereotypes and assumptions about even the existence of a singular Bowdoin culture. When we considered these three factors, we better understood the need for "diversity-specific" clubs to support individuals by representing singular identities. But this also compounds the need for a different space where meaningful interactions can take place.
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