Cutting Up With Clubs

Just when I thought that Harvard students had come up with all the possible unique names, categories and even sub-categories for cultural clubs, yet another combo emerges. This week's entry is the Half Asian Persons Association (HAPA). This association, formed by Christine Muraski Millett, a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in the department of East Asian languages and civilizations, hopes to congregate students of this particular biraciality to promote discussion of multicultural issues. Although a unique attempt at social awareness, HAPA's existence reinforces the ugly truth that Harvard students need to categorize and label just about everything and everyone.

The student body should not be guinea pigs for continual classification studies. The ridiculous abundance of cultural clubs at Harvard seems to indicate that the only way Harvard students feel social progress will emerge is through division and segregation. That was part of our history, it should not be part of our future.

There are quite a few students at Harvard who are from mixed descent. These students often feel that they are overlooked, simply because they don't fit the profile of any of the specific cultural clubs which already exist. Further-more, the mere presence of these clubs often pressures students to choose a label. And so to maintain their biraciality, students prefer not to become at all involved with these clubs. Feeling left out, students take measures like forming clubs similar to HAPA. Why do students feel that forming a club is the only method by which they can achieve a sense of identity? The existence of these clubs promotes the notion that to be grouped with people of your own ethnicity grants an individual identity. This idea is absolutely ridiculous.

The problem with forming all these sub-clubs is that it stands as testimony that the race itself--the Asian race or the African-American race--is so divided within itself that it can't function as a collective body. It implies that something is wrong within, in this case, the Asian race or the Caucasian race. What should be examined more closely are the reasons why half-Asian students do not feel welcomed in the already existing Asian clubs or with the Caucasian community and feel it necessary to take such a drastic measure such as forming a separate club for their needs.

What does it say about Harvard students if every combination of ethnicities needs to be officially represented by a club? Why can't there be a collective effort to address these concerns? Why do students feel they need to be separated from the student body as a whole to address these concerns? These questions need to be answered. One of the main problems at Harvard is that students regard the formation of a club as a means to provide themselves with an identification. I see it as a means to promote segregation.

Separating and classifying students, especially by race, which is what these clubs do, only leaves minority students at Harvard open to attack, vulnerable to scrutiny by other students. I am not arguing that these clubs are superfluous, however I do believe that some students have gone overboard. Where and when do we stop classifying?

I am afraid that there may be no endpoint to where we separate people. It seems that every time we find a bonding point, we are naturally inclined to also find a dividing point, a point where we can be separated from the next person. Self-identification and individualism are extremely important, vital factors to a healthy individual, but we seem to have lost the pure definitions of these words and exaggerated the limits. If this is our attempt at uniting the student body, we should stop and take a look at how divided the students body has already become.

If we continue on this track, we will exhaust the sub-categories of race and soon find even more things to divide us. Religion and sexual orientation have already been used up. We'll all have to be a little more unique next time. A combination of religion, race and sexual orientation might be an interesting combination for the next divisive club this school decides to acknowledge.

Nancy Raine Reyes' column appears on alternate Saturdays.