Reflecting on The Diversity Principle

FOUR YEARS at this place I have spent as a student--a Black student. I make this qualification painfully not because I am unhappy about my race but because I came to Harvard wanting desperately the freedom to be first a student, then a woman, and finally a Black person.

I have been neither an innocent bystander nor an active participant in the effort to ameliorate race relations at the College but rather one whose opinions have evolved and who has experienced lows of sophomoric indifference as well as some more productively introspective moments.

Unfortunately, though, two often fluid laws of American social relations are axiomatic at Harvard College. First, it is impossible to feel good about being Black all or most of the time. Second, it is impossible to avoid thinking about being Black for more than two days at a time except sometimes during Reading Period. (Occasionally I hear from a Black student the following: "I don't think about being Black" or "Being Black is not an issue in my life." These statements, which immediately brand the speaker as either a liar or victim of autism, can be isolated as a corollary to the white student's "I don't think of you as Black"--a phrase whose originator must have thought conferred the equivalent of knighthood.)

HAVING GONE, like a lot of Black Harvard students, to a private, mostly white school, my past experiences--and maybe the influence of 1970s pop psychology--inclined me to believe as a freshman that I could detach myself from the race issue through my positive self-image, pride in my background and determination to dismiss any affronts as testimony to the shortcomings of the perpetrator.

Moreover, I did not perceive my role--or the role of any other Black member of the Class of 1987--as being that of a pioneer for the race, scouting and forging ahead into uncharted social territory as did the members of a previous generation. I had what probably were typical aspirations for an Adams House resident: to write for a publication or two, to avoid science courses, and to cultivate that sought-after air of decadence and a skill at strategic snideness.

But from those first hot and drunken September days I found that even if I was not interested in calling attention to my difference, others were willing and eager to do so for me. As they have been so willing and eager for four years, I have been led to conclude that at least some of the responsibility for the intermittent confusion and resentment harbored by all students over the "race issue" during the past few years rests with the goal of achieving diversity in higher education itself.

No one--I hope--would argue that the doors of educational opportunity should be shut behind our generation. However, it is important to consider what is involved when a "balanced" freshman class is engineered with changing numbers of Blacks, Hispanics and Asians. The diversity principle proclaims not only that students of every sex, race, creed, color, religious group and national origin should have access to a Harvard education, but also that the individuals who fill these classifications must participate as part of the whole while remaining as unique as before.

BUT THIS GOAL is entirely unattainable and to some degree immoral. The purpose of a liberal education in an institution which preaches diversity should be as much to enlighten white upper-middle class and upper-class students as it is to integrate or, as the case may be, uplift members of minority groups. These two goals, though, are incompatible. The former places the minority student in the position of being an intellectual diversion for others. Like the Foreign Cultures requirement in the Core, the minority student is programmed into the educational equation as just another variable to broaden the horizons of the average law school or Wall Street-bound undergraduate. The latter purpose of diversity demands that Black students absorb the ethos of the school and find a place within the Harvard tradition.

Within the population of Black students at the College some individuals clearly boast a greater propensity to meet one aim than the other; like those of any other ethnic subgroup, Blacks here have come from a variety of social classes. However, in a number of cases (and I have seen them) the competing pressures that flow from the diversity principle have led to more than a bit of social schizophrenia.

Another problem has been the periodic emergence of bitter dialogue between Black student groups and the administration over the role of minority-oriented activities. Among other things, Black organizations have repeatedly called for a minority student center of the sort found at the other Ivy League institutions. "Separatism"--a term that conjures up images of the Black anger and militancy of the late '60s and early '70s--has been the pejorative buzzword associated with efforts to develop an insular Black community at Harvard. Though a critical percentage of Black students likely have never thought about a student center, the issue itself perfectly illustrates the conflicting implications of diversity.

It is important to emphasize that this tension of competing interests on the part of the University and its members is more than just a story of the strains accompanying the process of assimiliation of an ethnic group. In other situations and in other times students of other non-English ethnicities have felt torn between the desires for assimiliation and social mobility and the need to identify with their ethnic group. For most, this conflict is predominantly internal. For Black students, the battle is external as well, involving the daily, Herculean labor of confronting a broader university population which in one breath insists that Blacks relinquish their blackness (whatever that means and whatever bit they still have) and in another claims knowledge and understanding of Black values, experiences, and dreams.