A Hope in the Unseen (27 page)

He rushes from the dorm and seeks out a professor for second-semester Spanish. “Check out the textbook, see how it looks to you,” she says, in English, thankfully, allowing him precious scheduling flexibility in which level class he’ll take.

Math will be trickier. This, after all, is his metier—his passion and his expected major. He stops by the office of Professor Jonathan Lubin, who teaches Math 10, a third-semester calculus class, mostly for freshmen with a year of high school calculus and good advanced placement test scores.

Professor Lubin snatches a copy of the syllabus from his desk and hands it to Cedric.

“How does it look?” asks Lubin.

“Hmmm. I know some of this,” Cedric mumbles, mostly to himself, regretting each word as it leaves his lips.

“Really. Like what?”

“Well, L’Hopital’s rule, I mean I already had that,” says Cedric about a rule to define the limit of functions, which he worked on at MIT.

“Really,” says Lubin. “Look it over. What else?”

“Ummm. Techniques of integration, too.” Cedric stops. He realizes he’s dabbled in some of this stuff already.

“What kinds of grades did you get in math in high school?”

“You know, A’s,”

“Of course, even if you’ve done these things, they’ll be done in more depth here. But I think you certainly belong in this class, young man,” says Professor Lubin, smiling broadly. Cedric finds himself gazing at Lubin’s teeth, which might as well belong to a great white shark.

“I guess … well … I don’t know,” Cedric mumbles, backing out of the office.

“I’ll be seeing you later,” the professor calls out.

“Yeah, ’bye,” waves Cedric, already gone, thankful that he didn’t have to mention his satisfactory calculus advanced placement test score—a three out of a possible five—which would land him in this class for sure.

He looks at his map for the physics building and, after a few wrong turns, ends up at the office of his academic adviser, Professor Robert Pelcovits.

“Do you have a minute?” Cedric asks, ducking his head in.

Pelcovits, a nervous, birdlike man, looks at his schedule book. “Who are you?”

“I’m Cedric Jennings.”

Like most other freshman academic advisers, Pelcovits has eight students to meet today, each of whom was given a meeting time on a slip of paper in their orientation packet. Cedric lost it.

“Well, sure, I guess I’ve got just a few minutes right now,” says Pelcovits, searching around for Cedric’s file. “Yes, here we are.”

Cedric takes a deep breath and begins his pitch, trying not to worry about what’s running through Pelcovits’s head as he studies the file.

“I just feel I need to figure out where I stand,” Cedric begins, steadily, having rehearsed this line at sunrise this morning. “I don’t want to get in over my head.”

Five minutes later, he gets Pelcovits’s signature, approving his enrollment for Math 9, a second-semester calculus class a notch lower than the one he just attended. For English, Cedric opts to take Writings of Richard Wright, a freshman literature course. Its prime attraction is that he’s already read and written book reports—in both eighth grade and twelfth grade—on the course’s core text,
Native Son
. As to foreign language, Pelcovits, sensing Cedric’s uneasiness, says he might as well look at both Spanish 1 and 2 and see which one he’s more comfortable with.

Cedric still has one more class to sign up for to get his required fourth for the semester. Pelcovits suggests one of Brown’s liberal arts fortes, maybe Political Theory.

“I’m not sure. It would have a lot of reading,” Cedric says hesitantly. “But I’ll check into that.” He then turns the conversation to the last issue on his agenda, telling Pelcovits he’s planning to take all his classes satisfactory/no credit, or S/NC, Brown’s parlance for pass/fail. It’s an option students tend to use for one class or two, tops, out of the four classes required each semester.

“Are you really sure about that?” the professor asks.

Cedric looks at him for a moment. Which way to go? Inside, he feels his pride being challenged by a choking fear of failure. Maybe they made a mistake by accepting him. If he winds up getting crushed in an academic defeat, he might be forced to return home, shamefully. Pride quickly dissolves, allowing Cedric a clear glimpse at what he needs to
fall back on in order to clinch this approval. “Well, I didn’t come from that good a school and all, a real bad city school,” he says, forcing himself to look down, forlornly, feeling a bit nauseous.

Pelcovits accedes. For better or worse, Brown gives Cedric the upper hand. A defining feature here is student autonomy, the so-called open curriculum, which students won during demonstrations in the late 1960s. Students, in theory, can take everything satisfactory/no credit. The concept is noble: to encourage students to take intellectual risks, to try out some classes in unfamiliar disciplines they might otherwise avoid for fear of a bad grade. The intended message is to indulge your curiosity, challenge yourself, experiment.

Cedric has fashioned his own message: duck. He leaves Pelcovits’s office having charted a slightly less taxing path, one that will allow him a few extra moments to stop, breathe, and fill what he is increasingly certain are gaping holes in his preparation. Walking back toward the main campus, he feels compromised but relieved, and his mind finally turns to food.

C
edric emerges from the stairwell swinging a Snapple Lemon Iced Tea bottle like a blackjack and sees a crowd gathering in the doorway of the second-floor lounge, just next to his room. It’s 7:30 on Friday night, and a seminal moment of Brown’s right-minded indoctrination is about to commence: the all-important diversity orientation session. Official title—“Community Values: Pluralism and Diversity.”

The diversity workshop is actually the second such meeting of the day. Between 3:30 and 5
P.M.
, they all sat through “Community Values: Alcohol and Other Drugs, and Community Safety.” But that was more a reading of the rules, without too much student participation. Still to come on Sunday night, “Community Values: Sex without Consent—Implications for Brown Students.”

Rabbi Alan Flam, a university chaplain, head of Hillel (the student Jewish organization), and, for fourteen years, a facilitator of unit diversity meetings, welcomes the group as they settle into the lounge.

“To me, these meetings are one of the most exciting challenges of
being here at Brown,” begins the rabbi, a husky man with a trim beard and a passing resemblance to the actor Richard Dreyfuss. “Tonight is the beginning of a conversation that I’m hopeful will continue for your four years, or five, or eight years at Brown—however many you might spend here—and for your life after college. We’ll have a conversation that goes to the core of what being a Brown student is about. So I welcome you.”

With that portentous introduction, the students grow attentive as the rabbi and his student facilitator, Vida Garcia, a Hispanic third-year resident counselor from San Antonio, Texas, explain the first exercise: cultural pursuit.

It’s a takeoff on the board game Trivial Pursuit. Students get a list of twenty culturally loaded questions (like “Knows what ‘Juneteenth’ is”; “Knows what an upside down pink triangle symbolizes”; “Knows the significance of Cinco de Mayo;” “Knows who Rosa Parks is”) that they are not allowed to answer themselves. Instead, they have to find a different classmate for each answer, a classmate whom they think will know the answer, and get him or her to respond. The desire to get everything right, deeply ingrained in these reflex achievers, should force them to rely on stereotypes about who will know what.

And it works. Cedric walks up to a Latino-looking girl for the Cinco de Mayo response—gets it, checks a box on his page—and then is barraged. A steady stream of classmates approaches him, one after another, for the Rosa Parks response. Afterward, back on the couch, his head is spinning. He feels uncomfortable, manipulated, singled out solely because of his skin color. Sure, it’s happened my whole life, he thinks, but he hated it then as he hates it now.

Students talk a while about their mixture of pride and resentment. Cedric, like everyone else, recognizes what just happened. The exercise forced students to act on prejudices—often drawn from obvious characteristics—that they’d rather not acknowledge having.

After a short break, they move to the next step: kids are given a small slip of white paper and told to write one word that tells who they are. Pick an identity—just one.

Cedric looks at the blank piece of paper in his hand and remembers
the furious diatribes of Clarence Thomas. Everyone reduced to one-word definitions. So, he thinks, this must be how you end up so angry.

After a moment, Vida—standing beside a huge pad that rests on an easel—asks for people to call out what they wrote.

There are a few last stabs at resistance. A top-achieving Korean American girl from Massachusetts offers a flavorless “tennis player” as her identity. A girl from Singapore demurs, in halting English, that “I don’t feel very cultural identity.” Rabbi Flam tries to bring her around, probing, “Isn’t Singaporean a culture?”

“Well, note really,” she says, racing through her limited English vocabulary. “Thing is … I’m just me!”—a comment that draws applause, albeit tentative.

Kim Sherman, an earthy, artistic girl from Tennessee, searching for the common ground everyone enjoyed an hour ago at the dinner table, asks sheepishly, “What about ‘Brown student,’ isn’t that an identity? I mean, after all, we’ve been here almost three days.” There are chuckles, but not carrying the light-hearted “We are the world” esprit that defined the first few days.

Cedric, like the rest of them, feels that spirit quickly dissipating. After Vida scribbles “Brown student” on the easel, she pauses and gazes with dissatisfaction at her short list. The idea is that students, if forced to choose only one word, will probably pick the most obvious identity, the one they may well have been tagged with in cultural pursuit. Ten years back, the easel would have been filled at this point with ethnic and racial designations, with everyone happy to offer their own hyphen. But tonight’s freshmen clearly have arrived knowing that the multiculturalist credo—embrace diversity so that every personal characteristic is cause for pride, not shame—has been criticized for institutionalizing divisiveness. They gag a bit as the medicine goes down, uncertain third-day freshmen not sure what to say or do and not wanting to commit. Vida sees the hesitation and is unfazed, like she expects it. She artfully changes course: “Well, what is interesting are the identities that didn’t show up.”

People start looking up from their shoes, their faces registering relief. Rabbi Flam nudges them. “What about HIV positive?”

“Absolutely,” Vida chirps. And up it goes.

The kids pick up the cue. Through various meetings, they’ve already ingested the sexual codes. Almost in unison, they tick them off: gay, lesbian, bisexual, questioning, transsexual, transgender.

Rabbi Flam: “Don’t forget queer.”

All go up on the easel, including “queer.” Rabbi Flam continues stoking the fire: “What about being a survivor of sexual abuse?” he asks cheerily. The list expands. The neophytes are in groupism freefall.

Weight? one says. Oh yes, says Vida. Anorexia, another offers. You bet! Age? Sure, agism. Learning disabled. Vida’s scribbling madly. Handicapped. Yup.

Ira Volker, a garrulous, politically ambitious Los Angeleno, tries to pull the brake cable: “I have a big problem with that. I think overcoming a handicap would define someone’s identity. But being handicapped or being learning disabled is not an identity, it’s how you deal with it, how you overcome it that would create the identity.”

John Frank, son of a Manhattan psychoanalyst, parses that, saying that “Ira’s point might be partially true, but if I were deaf, then absolutely it would affect everything I’d ever done, it would be who I am.”

“But, I mean,” Ira responds, in a final grope, “you couldn’t overcome some particular limitation if you’re sort of agreeing with it, sort of accepting it as who you are.”

From a couch across the room, Cedric listens intently. That last thing about the danger of accepting limits strikes a nerve in him. He looks down, his mind racing. While his blackness is the identity carrying the highest voltage in this room, or almost any room in America, the sheet in his hand is still blank.

“It’s not that complicated,” Cedric says suddenly, his voice high pitched with frustration. All eyes turn to him. “Your identity, I think, should be something that you are proud of. I wouldn’t be
proud
to say that I had only one leg and I could just barely walk, you know, on one leg. That may be true, but I wouldn’t let it define who I was.”

Everyone begins talking at once.

“Please be quiet!” Vida shouts. “One at a time.”

She turns to Cedric, perplexed. “Say that again?”

“Okay, ummm, I said I think your identity should come from something you take pride in. It shouldn’t be something that just sets you apart from other people, it should be one of those things that, you know, people generally understand is a good thing, something we all share, rather than what separates us. I mean, the things that make up identity are deeper things than skin color or whatever. Things, I don’t know, like character or our faith or how we treat other people. And if we talked, instead, about
that
stuff, I’m sure we could agree on what was good or, at least, on the way we ought to be.”

Vida and Rabbi Flam look at Cedric quizzically as the room grows quiet, the kids turning to their facilitators for guidance.

After a moment, Vida attempts to wrestle Cedric’s point about shared values and common ground back to the preordained narrative. “What you said about pride really sparked something for me,” she finally says, “because I know people who are handicapped who are extremely proud and that’s who they are, or it might be something that is just a part of them, or, you know, the idea that an identity isn’t necessarily positive or negative. But I think it shows all the different ways we think about who we are … umm … and also about how the outside world imposes negative and positive elements on us.”