Ethnic Groups Reach Beyond Blood Ties

Maya E. Frommer ’07 might have been an anomaly at Chinese Student Association meetings two years ago, when she was an officer of the group.

For one thing, she’s not Chinese.

“I’m completely Caucasian,” said Frommer, a government concentrator from Chicago.

Frommer might have stood out at the group’s meetings, but on Harvard’s campus, she epitomizes a trend—undergraduates who are crossing traditional ethnic lines in their extracurricular choices.

Joseph A. Pace ’06, a social studies concentrator from Dallas, is the former vice president of the Society of Arab Students. But, Pace said, “I’m actually Jewish. I don’t have a drop of Arab in me.”

The Chinese Student Association and the Society of Arab Students mark just two in a series of campus ethnic groups attempting to escape their homogenous image by opening their doors—and sometimes their officer boards—to members from other ethnicities.

‘COLOR BLIND STUDENTS ASSOCIATION’

In an opinion piece in The Crimson last spring that raised an uproar on campus, Jason L. Lurie ’05 charged that ethnic groups and the Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations “exacerbate the already intractable problem of self-segregation.”

Lurie criticized ethnic organizations for “concentrating on what superficially separates us—like skin color or where our ancestors came from.” He called for a “Color Blind Students Association” to take their place.

The Harvard Foundation was formed in 1981 by University administrators who wanted to “improve relations among racial and ethnic groups,” according to the foundation’s website.

A quarter-century later, some of the ethnic mixing at Harvard is occurring within ethnic organizations themselves.

For example, the current membership of Native Americans at Harvard College (NAHC) actually looks a lot like the Color Blind Students Association that Lurie called for.

The Native American group counts three board members with no American Indian ancestry.

Students who choose to join organizations based on ethnicities other than their own do so for a variety of reasons. “I’m really interested in Asian culture,” said Frommer, who is currently traveling in Japan and is preparing to write a senior thesis on health care in that country.

Pace said that it was his political views that led to his involvement in the Society of Arab Students.

As he read about the Middle Eastern conflict, Pace said, he “became more sympathetic to the Arab point of view.”

“So when I got to Harvard, largely because of my politics, largely because I was a non-Zionist Jew,” Pace said, the Arab students organization “sort of took me under their wing, in a manner of speaking.”

Merritt R. Baer ’06, a social studies concentrator from Denver who is the alumni coordinator of Native Americans at Harvard College, said, “My little brother is of the Oglala Lakota, and we adopted him as a foster child, so that’s sort of the basis of my involvement in the Native American community.”

She said that the campus group seeks to incorporate indigenous peoples’ perspectives into courses that often omit mention of Native Americans. “I think that’s important, not just for Indian people but also for people that are not Indian,” Baer said.

‘THE LARGER PICTURE’

Data on student groups at Harvard suggests that, indeed, more and more students such as Baer place importance on ethnic organizations.

In 1969-1970, just five of the 67 registered student organizations on campus—about seven percent—were ethnic or cultural groups.

By 2003-2004, the most recent year for which full data was available, the College counted 52 undergraduate ethnic and cultural organizations—19 percent of the total number of registered student groups.

And increasingly, according to one longtime observer, these groups are bridging ethnic boundaries.

“I see more of an effort of students of all backgrounds at Harvard to reach out across racial and ethnic lines and to embrace people of different backgrounds,” said the Harvard Foundation’s director, S. Allen Counter, who has worked with cultural groups on campus for the past 25 years.

The growth in the sheer number of ethnic organizations on campus does raise some concerns from administrators.

In an interview this month, Associate Dean of the College Judith H. Kidd said, “When more and more groups are formed around smaller interests, people are less likely to see the larger picture.”

“On the other hand,” Kidd said, “no one wants to disagree with the notion that students want to associate with whom they want to associate with.”

But leaders of campus ethnic groups rejected the notion that their organizations have a self-segregating tendency.

“I think with any ethnic organization, people might say that the reason they exist is to be self-segregating, but I think that’s a narrow view,” said former Fuerza Latina president Diana C. Montoya-Fontalvo ’07. “Our membership isn’t only completely Latino. We have a good number of prominent members who don’t have a Latino connection at all, except an interest,” she said.

RAINBOW COALITIONS

The growing number of ethnic organizations on campus increases the opportunities to form cross-ethnic coalitions among student groups.

“Ethnic organizations, ours especially, really do work a lot with other ethnic organizations,” said the former Society of Arab Students president, Rami R. Sarafa ’07. As an example, he cited an Earthquake Relief Banquet held in the aftermath of the Oct. 8 quake that devastated parts of India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. The banquet was co-sponsored by the South Asian Association, the Harvard Islamic Society, Fuerza Latina, the Society of Arab Students, NAHC, and the African Students Association, among others.

Ethnic organizations themselves often function as coalitions of students from one part of the world or one racial background who—despite that common bond—exhibit divergent cultural identities.

For instance, the South Asian Association’s area of focus includes over 1.3 million people and dozens of languages.

The group’s co-president, Arjun Vasan ’07, said that South Asian students used to be members of an even broader cross-ethnic coalition of Asians.

But in 1986, South Asian students moved to “shoot off” from the pan-Asian group and concentrate on a narrower geographic base, Vasan said.

“South Asia, it’s a very complex region of the world, and I think lumping it with the rest of Asia just doesn’t give it justice in that sense,” Vasan said.

Nonetheless, the group’s constitution still specifically mentions eight different countries—from Sri Lanka to Pakistan—in its area of focus.

‘YOU DON’T LOOK CHINESE?’

The president of the Black Students Association (BSA), Nneka C. Eze ’07, pointed out that the 300 members of her group span not just several countries—but entire continents.

“Whether they are from Africa, from the Caribbean, second generation, 10th, 20th generation...there is such variation within the students in BSA,” she said.

And nearly 20 members of the BSA identify as white, according to the group’s former president, Lawrence E. Adjah ’06.

As leader of the BSA for a year starting in the spring of 2004, Adjah made no effort to count the number of whites within its ranks or to identify them specifically. “Everybody was equal,” he said.

But even when campus organizations don’t single out members who are transcending ethnic barriers, these students do sometimes stick out.

“People would ask me, ‘Oh are you Chinese? You don’t look Chinese,’” said Frommer.

She added, though, that she felt her presence contributed to the Chinese Student Association’s mission.

“I think the point of the organization is not only to gather people together that are of the same background, but to educate [other] people about the culture,” she said.



—The next story of the series will consider the complexity of interracial dating at Harvard.

—Staff writer Laura A. Moore can be reached at lamoore@fas.harvard.edu.