Discrimination? Here?

Last week, as most students were concentrating on course selection, a “Harvard senior” posted a personal ad on Craigslist for an upcoming party at his final club.

He began, “My final club has a reunion this fall… There is no real way to describe how ornate the club is, but I guarantee that it will be the most upscale experience of your life. Think back to your high school prom, take away the terrible music, and multiply the experience by ten.”

He continued, as most personal ads do, with a description of his desired mate: “You must be white, 5’6”-5’9”, young, blonde, attractive, and intelligent. You must be in school, preferably Tufts or Wellesley but BU and BC are acceptable (definitely not MIT). You should be able to hold a conversation, know when to be quiet, and polite in all your behavior. I have seen unruly guests embarrass members before…This event is black-tie, and I am willing to procure an evening gown for you. I hate to sound so harsh, but I have expectations to live up to. No Black, Asian, overweight, or unattractive women please. Picture required.”

There is, of course, no way to know if the ad is real. It may have been a crass joke, or an attempt to embarrass final clubs by depicting a blatantly racist, classist, and misogynist member. Yet on email lists and around dinner tables, students wondered whether or not the ad was real. And, somewhat surprisingly, a near unanimity of 14 final club members, both male and female, with whom I spoke, said that they could imagine a Harvard senior writing the post in earnest.

Even those who brushed off the post as merely a tactless joke admitted that the “joke” is based, however remotely, on reality: that some final club members are frighteningly pompous about their “ornate” clubs, and that criteria for an “ideal” date at most of these institutions would not correspond with the Harvard admissions office’s pamphlet on diversity.

Whether or not a Harvard senior is truly as “harsh” as the post proclaims will likely remain an unanswered question. Perhaps this is for the best—a witch hunt would only worsen matters—and the ad’s authenticity is ultimately less important than the disturbing belief, widely held among students, that this post is possibly real.

This feeling—this pervasive sense that a final club member’s date is expected to be blonde and white, and that a date who does not fit these criteria is potentially “embarrassing”—is what deserves conversation. As a shared understanding, it undermines the similarly popular idea that sexism, racism, homophobia, and other forms of discrimination are too backwards for Harvard. Students and professors who complain of them, so this thinking goes, must be overly sensitive, crying “injustice” where none exists.

In the aftermath of last spring’s Quad incident, when police were called on black students misidentified as “Cambridge kids,” unsurprising denials were given: It wasn’t because of race! We just didn’t know them!

Yet even that defense is loaded with race issues that this campus faces reluctantly, if not purposefully avoids. Why did 100 black students—many who lived in the Quad—appear so foreign to the vigilant Quadlings that day? One conventional answer is self-segregation: Black students stick to their own, so others are slow to recognize them. The blame shifts—inappropriately—to the campus’s minority groups.

And there the conversation ends. Students feel progressive, on average, while no one is surprised that a few bad eggs exist in the semi-secret world of million-dollar mansions filled with portraits of dead white men. We can rest easy, it seems, for even if clubs do not welcome blacks, Asians, or gays, final club devotees constitute a mere 15-20 percent of students—a minority themselves. Many members of final clubs, too, can justify their affiliation by distancing themselves from the occasional public relations disaster: “He’s not my close friend,” or “not in my club.”

Still, when something awful surfaces, like this Craigslist post, we wonder—as we should. More than anything else, discussing this ad will hopefully erode the communal pride that prevents us from recognizing discrimination in its many forms at Harvard, both inside and outside of final clubs. While final club dating protocol may be an extreme example, its outlandishness does not excuse forms of bigotry that are less “harsh” or conspicuous.

And while I may personally wish for an end to final clubs and their destructive influence as institutions, I and most other people on this campus have little power over that closely protected world. What we can do, however, is create a school-wide atmosphere that takes claims of discrimination more seriously and that neither underestimates nor downplays the biases in each of us.

Andrew D. Fine ’09, a Crimson associate editorial chair, is a social studies concentrator in Eliot House.