We Gon' Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation (6 page)

One of the men on the other side of the table was a Coloured Muslim named Ebrahim Rasool. He would go on to become South Africa’s ambassador to the United States. During the time Meyer was police chief, Rasool had been in solitary confinement because of his activism with the African National Congress. Rasool had every right to be bitter and angry.

But as followers of Mandela, Rasool and others in the ANC came to believe that a process of truth and reconciliation needed to be a key part of the country’s transition to democracy. The truth would be difficult to speak, but it would be necessary to begin to right the wrongs done to Blacks and Coloureds. Reconciliation would not be a gift, but “an exchange for truth.”
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In other words, peace and justice are inseparable from each other. If the Black and Coloured majority pressed only for justice, it might be doomed to the violent cycle of retribution. If it pressed only for peace, it might sacrifice justice and be doomed to the violence of inequality. It needed to pursue both at the same time, through a moral process with a moral end. This understanding echoed another of King’s ideas: “True peace is not merely the absence of tension; it is the presence of justice.”
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I am not trying to compare relative racisms here. I’m proposing a way to recognize and approach the accumulation and reaccumulation of inequity, which does happen along a spectrum—from unintended offense to racial violence.

Those whose first response to protest is to lecture demonstrators about how students ought to protest signal an utter disdain for the why of the protest. Lost in all the bluster about how students should just grow the f up and also accept everything their liberal professors tell them—contradictory, right?—is a simple truth: campuses, like the country itself, are seeing rising levels of hate and intolerance, the tragic result of over a quarter century of intensifying racial inequality and resegregation and a silence over these selfsame issues.

In 2013 alone, Oberlin, Dartmouth, Carleton College, and the University of California at Irvine were all shaken by reports of racial incidents. Oberlin held a campus-wide convocation on the question of racism and campus climate. When two liberal students were detained and confessed to having caused some of the incidents, conservative websites gleefully reported the arrests as proof of “imaginary racism” and evidence that most campus hate crimes were hoaxes. But Oberlin police had also documented a long list of incidents, threats, and posts that had occurred, the administration said, “on a virtually daily basis over a period of weeks.”

Many wondered how all of this could be happening at small, progressive liberal arts schools. But the following year the protests spread to larger universities. Black students at Harvard, the University of Michigan, and UCLA called attention to campus racism and the personal toll of ongoing underrepresentation. The question became: Are we witnessing a national trend? By 2015, the student uprisings had proven that the answer definitively was yes.

Across the country, no matter what kind of college or university, student demands were surprisingly consistent—more faculty and staff of color, stronger curriculum around difference and inclusion, redoubled efforts to increase recruitment and retention of students, faculty, and staff of color, increased funding for multicultural centers, greater attention to relations with local communities, more diversity training for faculty and staff, the hiring of diversity officers and culturally competent counseling and mental health professionals.
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There are two points to be made here. The first is that the strengthening of speech codes was by far one of the least common demands.
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“Media has really taken a liking to the narrative that protestors … seek to be coddled,” one student, Aryn Frazier, the president of University of Virginia’s Black Student Alliance, told Emma Pierson and Leah Pierson, two student researchers who analyzed the demands. “If anything, the reason black students are protesting is because they have been the opposite of coddled—they have been ignored and silenced and hurt by people and systems at their universities.”
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More important, the top demands were consistent with demands that have been made by students of color for
three decades
now. To the extent that student protest has entered the national narrative, it has been confined mainly to the sixties, a kind of Greatest Generation story about upheaval in cultural norms, mostly starring white boomer men. But historians of the next century may look back to the period that followed as the one in which young people truly reshaped the culture—especially where, because of demographic and social shifts, the category of youth intersected with race, class, and identity. The story of higher education during this period, that place where all of those explosive strands came together, should play an outsize role.

Historically white universities and colleges came to include and accommodate students of color only after two major waves of intense activism. The first began in the mid-1960s in reaction to the rise of the civil rights movement and accelerated after the 1968 Third World Liberation Front strike at San Francisco State College catalyzed the founding of Black studies and ethnic studies programs and the rapid expansion of affirmative action.

The second wave began in the mid-1980s, when students of color became majorities or large pluralities at many campuses. Young activists reacted to the rising tide of hate incidents by demonstrating for the hiring of more faculty and staff of color, demanding that universities create and expand multicultural centers and diversity programs, and redefining the bounds of civility to foster environments of inclusion.

The bureaucratic term for all of this racialized unrest—both the tensions and the protests they generated—was “campus climate,” popularized in an influential 1992 article by Sylvia Hurtado, a University of Michigan professor. Hurtado, a Chicana who had attended Harvard and Princeton, led with a sobering finding that racial conflict had become “commonplace on American college campuses throughout the 1980s.” In 1988 and 1989 alone, she wrote, there were “more than one hundred college campuses reporting incidents of racial/ethnic harassment and violence.” She added, “Instances of overt racial conflict can no longer be viewed as aberrations or isolated incidents, but rather [as] indicators of a more general problem of unresolved racial issues in college environments and in society at large.”
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Student protests became so widespread that they forced administrations to react. Research universities, especially the flagship public schools, led the way in expanding multicultural and diversity programs. But a backlash formed among both liberals and conservatives.

In a 1992
Time
magazine cover story on “The Fraying of America,” later expanded into a best-selling book-length polemic, the art critic Robert Hughes decried “the culture of complaint,” in which multiculturalists and moral majoritarians marched the nation toward irreparable fragmentation.
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The militantly unironic arch-conservative Dinesh D’Souza—who first gained notice when as a Dartmouth student he took a sledgehammer to an anti-apartheid shantytown—titled his own anti-antiracist book
Illiberal Education
. Writing of the 1989 Howard University protests against the seating of Republican strategist Lee Atwater on the school’s board of trustees, D’Souza called them “a kind of collective tantrum aimed at getting attention” and argued, “What [students] need from the university is not coddling and illusion, but intellectual and moral leadership to prepare them for the challenges they must face as adults.”
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(In this regard, Friedersdorf, Gitlin, Friedman, and French were simply regurgitating tired old culture-war arguments.)

Demography and time proved Hughes and D’Souza wrong. The union did not go the way of the Balkans. On the other hand, the culture warriors did succeed in one regard: their objections cowed universities into moving away from actively addressing campus climate and racial equity.

When attacks on affirmative action intensified in the mid-nineties, some university leaders took high-profile stands to defend it. By then, diversity had proven value. It looked great to prospective students, and demographics counted in the annual college rankings. But there has been less reward in taking care of the students of color who are actually admitted. Inclusion requires attention, which requires staffing and policies and commitment, and it also requires mobilizing tenured faculty, which is like herding moody, drowsy lions.

Beginning in the 2000s, campuses increasingly turned to businessmen to preside over downsizing. When universities should have been turning to enlightened leadership ready to tackle the challenges of a colorizing nation, they instead sought out ruthless corporate types who specialized in market positioning and cost-cutting.

Nearly two decades later, universities continued to function under an austerity mind-set that focused on financial goals over educational missions. The University of Missouri had brought in Tim Wolfe from a software company that had just been flipped. He had no academic experience. Board members expected him to grow and market the university’s “value.” At Mount St. Mary’s University, in Maryland, President Simon Newman, a former private-equity investor, was forced out after trying to implement a plan to improve the school’s retention numbers by pushing struggling students to drop out. He told a professor, “You think of the students as cuddly bunnies. But you can’t. You just have to drown the bunnies … put a Glock to their heads.”
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During this period, ethnic studies programs and multicultural student services across the country were frozen or slashed. Staff and faculty of color who survived told stories behind closed doors about being the last to be hired, the first to be photographed for the brochures, and the first to be cut. And yet demographics didn’t stop. So in the face of another and yet another “most diverse generation ever,” universities continued to admit fewer Black and brown students and provided them with less support than ever.

When Sylvia Hurtado first wrote about campus climate, in 1992, she noted that one in four students perceived considerable racial conflict at their universities. Larger pluralities of all students felt that universities were doing little to resolve the problem.

In 2012, a system-wide survey of over 100,000 students, staff, and faculty by the University of California found that one in four respondents “had personally experienced exclusionary, intimidating, offensive, and/or hostile conduct” on campus.
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Underrepresented minorities, transgender and gender-queer, and undocumented students were much more likely than other students to feel uncomfortable in classes, to have experienced exclusionary conduct, and to state that they did not see enough faculty and staff with whom they identified. One in four students of color and queer students had at some point seriously considered dropping out, compared to less than one in five white students.

What kind of personal toll did this take on those students? The burden of representation—the idea that one has to always attend to the gap between how one appears to others and how one perceives oneself—had always been real. The social psychologist Claude Steele called this “stereotype threat,” and argued that it accounted for the intense pressure Black and brown students faced in the classroom. After affirmative action was struck down across the country, stereotype threat also explained why the most competitive Black and Latino students declined admission offers at places where affirmative action had been gutted, like the University of California and University of Michigan, and instead gathered at historically Black colleges and universities and those private, elite universities that promised community and support. Students increasingly sought what they called, using the language of trauma and recovery, “safe spaces.”

And how might they navigate the new minefield between “diversity is good” cheerleading and the reality of still-hostile, inequitable environments? During the 1980s and 1990s, an ambience of hostility—from slurs carved into bathroom walls to racist Greek-system theme parties—had fueled student protests. “Campus climate” gave universities language to address their changing student bodies. But by the late 2000s, institutionalized diversity and post-racial colorblindness had created a broadly untenable situation for students of color. If hate incidents occurred, university officials and individuals would routinely condemn them. To be fair, “This is not who we are” was an improvement upon “You’re not like us.” But most universities were no better than the rest of the nation at avoiding the same old cycle around race of crisis, reaction, backlash, and complacency. And still, demographics don’t stop.

In order to describe the campus racism of the “post-racial” moment, students turned to Columbia University scholar Derald Wing Sue, who was reviving Harvard psychiatrist Chester Pierce’s Black Power–era notion of microaggressions. Microaggressions were not the same as hate speech or physical violence. They were the moments of daily indignity that, as Sue and his colleagues wrote, “communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial slights and insults to the target person or group.”
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In 1970 Pierce had written, “Most offensive actions are not gross and crippling. They are subtle and stunning. The enormity of the complications they cause can be appreciated only when one considers that these subtle blows are delivered incessantly.”
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In 2010, two Columbia University students named Vivian Lu and David Zhou, angry about racist and sexist flyers distributed by candidates for student government, began a Tumblr blog called
The Microaggressions Project
to document the regular indignities they and their classmates faced. “Being able to identify what these uncomfortable and sometimes painful situations are,” Lu, Zhou, and other members of the project later wrote, “is the first step in changing the society that causes individuals to express ideas that bias and discriminate.”
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