CORRECTION APPENDED

You’ve seen the recruitment brochures, you recognize the scene—a mix of black students and white students chatting happily across a table, all smiles, sharing ideas and experiences—really learning from each other. And so the spiel goes: “One of Harvard’s greatest strengths is its diversity.” Diversity of political leanings, race, interests, life experiences—you name it, we’ve got it. But for the most part, all the pretty pieces of our colorful puzzle keep more or less to themselves. The Democrats have their group, and the Republicans have theirs; the football players and the ballet dancers inhabit separate spheres; there’s one organization for the Chinese students and another for the Irish. Yup, we’re all here, but with all of the separation, it isn’t too often that one gets to see our seemingly picture perfect diversity live and in action. That is, until you step into a classroom.

On a Thursday morning not unlike any other, I was sitting in Sever Hall listening to a lecture on African-American humor. Suddenly, my classmates and I were jolted out of our intellectual reveries by the sudden utterance of the word “nigger.” This word came tripping not off of the tongue of our professor, but from a white classmate, in the midst of a comment on a joke that a slave (the “nigger” in question) told to his master. This came as such a shock to everyone not simply because of the obvious conflict between the race of the commenter and the word itself, but because up until that point, no one—neither the professor nor any other student—had referred to the slave that way. [CORRECTION APPENDED]
 
Once the initial shockwave subsided, a scene in stark contrast to the brochure photo came into focus: A set of black students leering in suspicion, frustration, and anger at a white student who was apparently oblivious to his grave error. Recognizing the rapidly changing climate of the room, our professor explained that a certain degree of “tension” was to be expected in a class that dealt with a racial subject.

By mentioning that tension, my professor tapped into the less-often discussed nature of what diversity can mean in a classroom. Rather than the polite and good-natured exchange of ideas and ideologies that’s advertised to us, we find that diversity is sometimes much more difficult than it looks in the pictures. In courses that deal with subjects as sensitive as race, religion, or political ideology, a heterogeneous classroom can often mean discomfort, argument, and uncertainty about what is or is not acceptable to say in front of each other. This is particularly striking in classes in African American, Latin American, or other ethnic studies, in which the very people being “studied” are sitting right there in the room—perhaps for entirely different reasons and likely experiencing entirely different responses to the material than the white student next to them.

In such courses, there’s a temptation to intellectualize the subject of race to the point at which it becomes completely divorced from both historical and present context. Some students may feel that the best policy is to look at the subject of race from a purely historical and intellectual standpoint—perhaps with a genuine wish to divest racial thinking of its power—while ignoring the very real and very present societal and emotional consequences of the subject at hand. However, this is often the very thought process that contributes to the type of barefaced insensitivity that was on display in my Af-Am class.

Such incidents make it clear that some students have truly been taken in by the rose-tinted portrayal of the nature of diversity that colleges throughout the country have begun to sell so adeptly. As much as we might like to believe otherwise, the pretty pictures in the application viewbooks do not represent all facets of reality. To be sure, there are many instances when students of different backgrounds and ideologies interact more than happily, but when this is not the case, the solution is not to ignore it.

No one should be so deluded as to feel like they can say “nigger” in a room full of black people, claim some form of intellectual license, then proceed to look around bewildered when everyone in the classroom is glaring at them. Examining sensitive subjects in an academic setting is all well and good, but we’d all be wise to occasionally put down the history books, take a look at the news, and realize that we’re not out of the woods yet.

People must open their eyes to the simple fact that interaction between all different races, religions, sexual identities, and political ideologies is not all peaches and cream, love and happiness. Failing to recognize this reality in the name of sterile academic neutrality fails to engage the very real human elements and emotions that lie behind our differences, our conflicts, and our tensions. In the end, this breeds more of the very sort of tension that some so eagerly try to ignore, and that many others have been working tirelessly to acknowledge, and then move beyond.

Ashton R. Lattimore ’08 is an English concentrator in Dunster House. Her column appears on alternate Wednesdays.

CORRECTION

The Oct. 4 opinion column, “Diversity and Denial,” was misleading in its statement that a white student was the first person in an undergraduate course on African American humor to use the epithet “nigger” in reference to a slave. While the student was in fact the first person to directly refer to the slave as a “nigger,” the course professor had told a joke in which the slave referred to himself in that manner.