WHITE MISSION ARIES . . .

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

My first reaction to Marion Bodian's article on Shaw University was absolutely one of dismay. Many reasons point to my reaction--I am black, and I have a conscience, I attend Shaw University, and I too attended summer school during the tutorial project.

It was indeed a very imperceptive article, and was written in the most blatant paternalistic rhetoric. Although Miss Bodian is quite sophisticated in her style of writing, she is very naive and makes gross rationalizations. I too witnessed the insidious effects of a "field day" for white liberals who pursued a missionary impulse. When I was told that there would be a tutorial program with Harvard-Radcliffe and M.I.T., I realized that it was another attempt at acculturation. This in fact was the chief cause of much controversy about the tutorial program at Shaw University.

While vigorously accepting the terms on which they were hired, the whites, students and tutors, realized they had three roles to play. But they were to learn that their triadic roles would later on be the destructive seeds of their aspirations--"To anxiously compensate for the dreary teaching (black) students had gotten." The program was perhaps the most insidious operational assault on black students.

Miss Bodian also stereotypes black people in her article:

According to the myth, the white man can't understand the Negro, but the Negro, through long observation, knows every wrinkle of the white man's mind.

Miss Bodian says that no one, Shaw students or tutors, completely understood the tension that was building, but that it was the Shaw students who first gave it expression. Not only did the Shaw students know and understand the tension, but they did everything in their power to bring this tension to the surface and express it without offending the white tutors. That tension which was felt and understood was not only viable then but as James Baldwin once uttered cryptically, "Every Negro American risks having the gates of paranoia close on him." It was indeed the paranoia which all blacks feel when they are around whites!

Miss Bodian goes on to illustrate that there was a battle of wits going on during the tutorial program. I feel this was badly stated. It was more the psychic war in which all blacks as well as whites engage in order to protect themselves psychologically.

The importance of Miss Bodian's article will indeed serve as a reactivation of the Riesman-Jencks report on the American Negro college. She appeared to believe that it was of no importance, but that now it could have helped her to deal with the situation at Shaw University last summer. Many crucial dilemmas which evolved while the Harvard-Radcliffe and M.I.T. tutors were at Shaw University were not mentioned in Miss Bodian's narrative. It appeared as though the white tutors were in the right at all times. This is a fallacy. A very strong statement concerning a Harvard student's ability was perhaps the chief exponent of the controversy concerning the tutors.

One evening in the student campus inn, a young man from Harvard become so compulsive that he had to declare his supposed omnipotence. Following a heated discussion this young man blurted out: "I know ten times as much English as any Shaw student." Well, as you can see, the trial began and it was not too long after that it ended. The Harvard-Radcliffe-M.I.T. students had packed their bags and were headed for sunnier resorts!

Hired to teach and to give black students a sense of direction, tutors began to dissolve as a group. The stability of the tutors was not favorable; the image the tutors had hoped to preserve was not favorable; and the accomplishments of the tutors were not at all favorable. While trying to create a "white atmosphere"--Be In's, mock trials, and attempts to brainwash black students about black families--the tutors failed to ask themselves questions of the utmost significance: What can I tell black students about black families?

One thing that whites must learn is that every black man is indeed frustrated with advice and information about himself stemming from white sources. That epoch in the Black Revolution is in the past. Now, the most crucial problem which black students have to face is one of independent decision making.

The tutorial program involving Shaw University and Harvard-Radcliffe-M.I.T. last summer was indeed injurious to the mental health of the white tutors. Perhaps Miss Bodian feels as though programs like this should not exist. On the contrary, I believe such programs can be successfully achieved through active and academic concern, which she and the others lacked! Leslie Brown Jr.   Shaw University '69