In November of my freshman year at Connecticut College, students flooded the streets in joy, celebrating the election of our first Black President. The next day on our anonymousm message board, “Conn Coll Confessional,” students were complaining that the country had let “monkeys into office.” When later in the year someone posted, on that same message board, that I was dating someone, the first response was, “Who are those people? Are they minorities?” I attended Connecticut College for four years; I was a good student who inTHterned with a judge while I was there and went on to work for the Manhattan DA’s office when I graduated and now I am at NYU School of Law. Other than students who were self-proclaimed allies to the minority community, I don’t know any white people who attended Conn while I did. Connecticut College was, and clearly still is, a segregated community that is not welcoming to minorities.
This is most powerfully illustrated, not in the recent events at Connecticut College, but in people’s responses to them. The majority of Connecticut College alumni are invariably (and justifiably) shocked and appalled at the indecency of racist scrawl in the bathroom stall; however, the disenfranchised minority to whom these acts were directed are simply shaking their heads wearily at yet another attack on our collective humanity. Overt acts, such as this one, do not serve to “start a conversation,” the way as people in positions of power so often like to claim as a way of leveraging atrocious behavior. Rather, they force people in positions of privilege to join in a conversation that is has always been happening all around them—a conversation that they have had the luxury of not engaging in until news cameras to showed up.
We had another incident of student outrage on campus my freshman year, known as the “lobster incident.” A group of students brought lobsters to Harris Refectory and asked the staff to cook them as a way of playing a prank on other students who would have thought they missed “Lobster night”, which was a previously held college tradition. There was outrage on campus as some students took this as a sign of classism and exclusion. At the time, I thought that my peers were blowing the whole thing out of proportion. It was Professor Jen Manion, Director of the LGBTQ Resource Center, who put this into perspective by saying that the catalyst for these conversations can always be undermined and contextualized, but it is most important not to get so focused on the single issue that we miss the underlying problem.
I would urge students who were surprised by the recent acts on campus, those who think that they are one time events not indicative of a larger problem, to engage in conversations with their peers of different backgrounds and not only ask, but listen, to their experiences of racism, sexism, homophobia and other forms of hate. I would encourage the disenfranchised minority not to insulate themselves for protection, but to be open to dialogue from which there can be understanding. When I was at Conn, I served as a consultant to a newly forming group called “White Allies Against Racism,” which employed Unity House and a faculty facilitator to provide white students a place where they could come and learn about privilege and ask questions that would allow them to engage in a more productive conversation in a more diverse setting.
As an educational institution, Connecticut College has a responsibility to its students and to the world to equip its young people with the resources they need to talk about these difficult issues with grace and compassion. These are sensitive topics with a long history of pain, guilt and embarrassment and so the language we use to discuss them is incredibly powerful in facilitating open communication. We all come from places of privilege and dis-privilege whether it is race, gender, sex, sexual orientation, socioeconomic, education, health or a myriad of other things that effect the way we construe our identities. Rather than judging each other’s experiences or comparing them to our own, let’s use our own privileges and dis-privileges as a way to empathize with other people’s perspectives. Connecticut College, being a small community, provides the perfect space for this type of conversation, but everyone has to be willing to engage and understand why an affront to one person’s humanity is an affront to every person’s humanity. Pretending that a problem doesn’t exist, does not make it go away and hate simply begets hate to the point where no is left and no one is safe. •
-Aditi Juneja,’12
