Empathy for the Elephant in the Room

A minority group on campus claims they are marginalized, underrepresented, stereotyped and institutionally “silenced.”

Here’s the reaction you’d expect:

“Whine, whine, whine, whine,” mocks the conservative. “Next thing you know, they’ll petition to preface the first amendment of the Constitution with a trigger warning.”

“We must,” screams the liberal, “engage with, acknowledge, affirm, validate, recognize, legitimize, and stand alongside our marginalized, underserved, underrepresented, persecuted, silenced, exploited, suppressed, oppressed, and repressed fellow students in a coalition of trust, assurance, compassion, empathy, and mutual understanding to combat the broadly systematic and institutional norms that oppress them!”

But there is one exception to this pattern, which causes a strikingly odd role-reversal. Namely, conservatives on campus occasionally whine about their own marginalization. And, when they do, empowered liberals are the ones rolling their eyes.

It’s no secret that conservatives are underrepresented at Harvard. Just 12.2 percent of the respondents in the Class of 2019 survey identified as somewhat conservative or very conservative. Partly as a result of their minority status, conservatives often report that they repress their views in class or in the dining hall for fear of facing anger and exclusion among peers. Moreover, because about 96 percent of campaign contributions from Faculty of Arts and Sciences affiliates go to liberal political campaigns (by one estimate), conservative students have voiced fears of grading biases against them.

Furthermore, conservatives have faced clear instances of institutional hostility toward their views. For instance, in one Harvard freshman orientation program, group leaders used signs that read “Honk if you hate Reagan!” to welcome new freshman. In addition, last winter, a Harvard office supposedly geared towards “Diversity and Inclusion” put out placemats that basically said, “Your conservative family is misinformed. Here’s how to lecture the people who raised you.”

Let’s recap: We have underrepresentation and institutional prejudices. So what has the liberal response been so far?

“Whine, whine, whine, whine,” groan the liberals. In my experience, my fellow liberals on campus usually react with apathy and annoyance. One friend even made a Facebook post on the topic accompanied by an image of Mr. Crabs from SpongeBob playing the world’s smallest violin.

For their part, conservatives haven’t been too hypocritical about the whole thing. They mostly say that the onus is on the conservatives to create more dialogue and improve their own situation.

Unfortunately, I think it’s my fellow liberals who are the ones being hypocritical this time.

Liberals give reasons for their uncharacteristic lack of sympathy. Conservatism, they say, uses racism, homophobia, nativism, patriarchy, and classism to forward the interests of the powerful at the expense of the underprivileged. They say we should be numb to complaints of marginalization from those who aim to marginalize others.

But we must understand that the conservatives on campus are not the xenophobic fringe-conservatives who explicitly aim to marginalize groups to “Make America Great Again.” In fact, a majority of Harvard conservatives identify as socially liberal. For instance, a significant majority of conservatives among the Class of 2014 favored same-sex marriages. And conservatives from the Class of 2015 tended to favor Republican candidates with relatively progressive stances on issues like immigration. Even among the more conservative of them, Harvard Republicans generally seem willing to tackle many of the same issues as liberal students—they just usually prefer less government intervention.

Furthermore, Harvard conservatives do not uniformly come from socially powerful backgrounds. Conservatives among the Class of 2019 were spread pretty evenly across family income brackets, and only about 20 percent of the highest bracket identified as conservative. In addition, the proportion of students who identified as conservative among Whites was about the same as the proportion among Hispanic/Latino and American Indian/Native Alaskan students.

Conservatives on campus are not uniformly self-interested white boys who prance through final clubs on trust fund money. For the most part, they are a group of students from a variety of backgrounds who have different ideas about tackling the same issues that most liberal students on campus want to tackle.

I can see why liberals would roll their eyes at a billionaire presidential candidate who complains that “political correctness” unnecessarily stifles his ability to bash American Muslims. But I can’t see why we roll our eyes at our classmates, housemates, and friends who feel they must keep silent in their dining halls lest their peers or placemats make unfair assumptions about their views. It’s unfair. And, by leaving us less prepared to face diverse viewpoints beyond these gates, it hurts us as much as it hurts them.

So let’s start with conversations. We must not only hear the views of our conservative peers but also listen to them. When we criticize, we must make sure it is a criticism of ideas rather than character. By holding our speech and actions to a certain standard of respect, we must create a space that is both safe and intellectually stimulating for everyone involved. While problems like underrepresentation may be difficult to fully resolve, we can do our part as liberal students to make our peers feel more comfortable and respected on campus.

There’s an elephant in the room. Let’s make sure we treat it like the empathetic donkeys we are, rather than like asses.

Dashiell F. Young-Saver, ’16, a Crimson editorial writer, is an English concentrator with a statistics secondary in Winthrop House. His column appears on alternate Thursdays.