Statistics Project Could Not Reasonably Have Included Latinos

There has been a lot of undue controversy regarding the Statistics 100 project that Mark Veblen and I undertook last spring. Our endeavor was gravely misrepresented in Juan E. Garcia and Edgar Salivar's guest commentary titled "The March of La Raza" (Opinion, October 21, 1996), and in an article by Devi Sengupta, a co-president of the Minority Student Alliance in the Harvard Independent (October 3 1996). It is not surprising that both commentaries completely missed the point of our project since neither of the authors asked for a copy of the our report. One would think that at our educational level, we would be academically conscientious enough to refer to primary sources rather than rely on other people's assessments of them.

The goal of our study, as indicated in our introduction, was to examine inter-house stereotypes by race and concentration, and to look at the distribution of the class of 1999. We decided to do this project because the administration has continually refused to release these statistics. We wanted to provide the information that students in the Harvard-Radcliffe community were clamoring for.

As a member of the Committee on House Life last year, I was deeply concerned about the effects of randomization on our educational and social experiences. I also believed it was important to establish our own record of the distribution of students by race and concentration to serve as a basis for comparison for future reference. In fact, I was a cosponsor of the legislation (along with Robert Wolinsky '97 and Michael Passante '99), signed by Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis '68, authorizing a potential review of randomization in the Fall of 1998. In addition, I was worried that even the Masters did not know the racial make-up of their houses because several of them said they had not seen the statistics in years.

We did the best we could given our statistical background and the resources available to us. We did not hold a plethora of information at our disposal. If we wanted to do a report at all, we had to use house facebooks; nothing else is open to student perusal. Obviously, it is difficult to classify a student's race based on a photograph. I openly acknowledge that to do so, one has to use stereotpyes to a certain extent. I openly acknowledge that there is error in our report; it would be unrealistic of me not to. In an effort to minimize error, however, we consciously chose not to include all minorities within our classification system. We were constrained by both time and information. Nevertheless, our numbers did come close to the general Harvard Radcliffe population statistics, which are open to the public.

Why am I finally responding to the criticisms of our report? Garcia and Salivar's commentary was quite disturbing to me. They state in their Opinion piece that our project "disregarded Latinos; this adds to our invisibility on campus." The Latino community includes people of different colors and religions. It is because of this that I believed it was not proper to include Latinos as a category. I find it exclusive on the part of the authors to assume that it is possible to determine who is Latino based on a picture. According to the stereotype, Latinos in this country have a relatively dark complexion with brown eyes and dark hair. They are from Central America or Mexico and they are Catholic.

I am Latina. I have white skin, blue eyes and light brown hair. I am from Chile. I am Jewish. Would you be able to pick me out of a facebook as Latina? --Nienke C. Grossman '99