Is anybody out there?

I am a little dissappointed in the response to an article I wrote for the Herald, McCormick’s weekly student newspaper.  I put it up here as What to do With Diversity.  As a matter of fact I am also disappointed there were no comments on the blog post.  I thought that what I was writing was pretty controversial, I guess not.  I had wanted to call out the (especially white) students who complain and therefor probably care about how their educational experience has handled the present diversity.  We really need to start talking about this.  By we I mean white people.  Just like an occupying foreign power has obligations to the people that they occupy to make amends under international law, I think we who have enjoyed the up side of white-privilege have an obligation to at least think about what that means for the people who are on the down side.  Even if you don’t believe that white-privilege exists (quite a few white people don’t) it should still be talked about.  Invite a guest hispanic to talk about it or something!

The only person who has spoken to me about the article is an African-American female student who agreed that we (at McCormick) need to be more intentional about how we handle and engage the diversity we have among us.  It got me thinking…..I feel like most of us have been looking at our community variably as a community of friends or family or maybe fellow learners.  These are all good things.  It seems that we rarely approach each other thinking about what we can learn from each other.  And even more rarely thinking about what can I learn about myself in my interactions with another person.

What really frustrates me is that I want to do something be I don’t have the answers.  I dont think I can find the answers on my own.  This will be a community project, it has to be.  White privilege is perpetuated on a systematic scale.  There will be no chance of doing anything about it unless we can approach it systematically.  Which really should be something that white people would be all about; doing things systematically.  In the meantime and as soon as my school reading for the semester is done (the end is in sight) I am going to start working on the Michael Eric Dyson Reader that I have been meaning to read.  Maybe he has the answers.

~ by ajdele on April 13, 2008.