Unless you’re black, you just don’t know. You cannot ignore 300 +/- years of discrimination. People, animals, mammals, etc. have always congregated together since the Earth was formed.
@vistajay:
In a perfect world, you would be correct, but like with issues like LGBT pride and so forth, a lot of the need comes from the sad fact that things like sexual orientation or race matter. The story in question is not segregation, in the sense that they don’t let anyone else attend, but rather the kids sharing common stories. It is kind of like I have heard constantly about LGBT pride events from people who say “why don’t we have straight pride events?”, leaving out of course that our society in many ways is ‘straight pride’ every day of the year.
For the black students at harvard, it is about sharing the accomplishment of getting into an elite school, facing issues with that (and not being black, I won’t pretend to claim that I can really understand everything, but for example, I would assume knowing that there would be more than a few kids going to school with them who would look at their skin color, and automatically assume they were there because of affirmative action or otherwise ‘didn’t deserve to be there’, especially those resentful that buddies of theirs with hyper stats didn’t get in) and having made it I suppose.
You keep making me look back at my original post to make sure of what I said, but looking at it a second time I still see no lamentation that whites should have their own events. The black Harvard students are having a faux graduation event to draw attention to themselves and highlight their identity. That’s fine, but I still think it is ultimately divisive.
There’s nothing wrong with NOT being colorblind. On the contrary, it’s wrong to ignore the reality that different people have different heritages, perspectives, and obstacles to overcome. Yeah, we’re all the same in that we’re all human and deserve respect and dignity, but we’re not the same in that we all have different experiences and cultures.
“Faux”? The event is genuine to them. You haven’t “walked a mile in their shoes”, as the expression goes.
Faux-as in not real. It is not the actual graduation ceremony. It can be genuine to them, but it is still not the actual Harvard graduation ceremony.
I can’t read the article, but maybe some of them skipped the “actual ceremony” and only went to their own ceremony. I’m sure their ceremony is “actual” to them, but not you.
I would think that non-black students who genuinely wanted to participate would be welcomed. Most historically black organizations and activities are open to any and everyone who respects the mission and has an interest.
I doubt that any significant number of them skipped the actual Harvard graduation. That wasn’t the point of a separate ceremony at all. The article specifically says that all of the students will be attending the Harvard commencement ceremony. It wasn’t a “faux” graduation ceremony at all, and characterizing it like that is really setting up a straw man to whine about race blindness.
“Race blindness” is an idea that, as far as I can tell, is exclusive to white people, and part of white culture.
Way back when, both of my kids spent a lot of time at a particular dance school. My daughter did serious ballet for years, and then tap after she quit ballet; my son did tap for five years, and hung around ballet classes waiting for his sister for a long time before that. Every spring, the dance school had a little ceremony after its spring recital honoring its graduating seniors, giving each a gift and saying nice, personal things about each one. Was that some sort of alternative dancer graduation? An exercise in dance separatism? Was it a moral flaw not to be dance blind? Phooey. Of course not.
When I graduated from my undergrad (with a baccalaureate in linguistics), there was the big thousands-graduating ceremony in the morning, and a (much!) smaller just-the-linguistics-and-foreign-languages-graduates ceremony in the afternoon.
I skipped the big one, and only attended the one where I’d actually get to see and interact with the people who’d shared so much of the same experience as me over the preceding few years.
Applying the same measures that some seem to wish applied to the situation in the original link, it was apparently horrible of the linguistics and languages faculties to organize such an exclusionary event, and evidence of terrible discrimination against the wider student body for me to have skipped the morning ceremony.
Or, maybe, just maybe, there’s nothing to criticize there, whether it’s gathering based on shared identity, or gathering based on being a part of a wider group.
My kids also have special stoles to wear that signify their heritage.
I coveted the Hawaiians’ leis.
When people try to force people to all do the same thing and colorlines etc be damned, what you’re really doing is forcing all people to conform to things that were (usually) created for white, straight, middle/upper class males.
Gee, I can’t imagine why people falling outside of those categories would want to have their own thing. Maybe it’s because they’ve been excluded from these things for at least several centuries (and for many groups it’s even more than that).
Being so-called colorblind is ridiculous. You see color. You have biases based on that (good and bad). Admitting it is far more productive than acting like you don’t “see color.” Because you do.
The bottom line: this hurts no one. It makes people happy. It gives people a chance to celebrate with people who have often faced the same obstacles they have.
This shouldn’t be news. Move along.
I love this! It’s an opportunity to celebrate and feel justly proud of student accomplishments. It doesn’t detract from any other group’s celebration or pride in itself. With so much student jadedness and negativity, I love seeing an outlet for unabashed enthusiasm and cheer. I sincerely hope my daughter attends as a guest when her graduation year arrives.
There are a bunch @ D2’s college this year. A “Lavender Graduation” (put on by a LGBTQ resource group on campus), a Black one, Asian/American Pacific Islander one, a Chicano/Latino one, and one for International students. I see no problem with it. None are on the day of the whole college graduation itself.
Seriously…
This type of stuff only helps to maintain racial divisions. Not very progressive IMO…
@fractalmastr:
The answer to that is very simple, white/caucasian only events have typically been designed to exclude non whites, they weren’t celebrations of white culture or heritage as much as being about keeping non whites out, and yes it would trigger a very strong reaction and rightfully so, because “white only” was a legal part of a significant portion of the country for many years and is still de facto present in more than a bit of society. More importantly, do you object to for example when Jewish groups have commencement events or the Christian fellowship students or the LGBT students or the Italian student association or the Asian student association or similar groups? This isn’t a separate commencement and at most universities such events would likely run into trouble if they didn’t allow people who wished to to go and celebrate with the group involved, this isn’t a ‘black only event’, it is an event that is there to allow black students to celebrate as a group, and if others wish to celebrate with them, no problem as far as I can tell.
There don’t replace the main graduation, and unless these are very different than the ones I have been to they are more like an end of school celebration, event, they don’t give out the diplomas there, they aren’t giving out honorary degrees and so forth, they might have speakers, but this sounds like an addition to the main commencement, not a minus.
@vistajay:
I didn’t say you said there should be white only events, I was explaining why, in answer to your comment that in a perfect world these kind of things wouldn’t be needed, why in our imperfect world they are needed:). My other post was explaining about those who object to these kind of things and what the 'why shouldn’t whites have their own event, then" and what that translates to IME.
Again, my question would be what would be the purpose of a ‘caucasian commencement event’, when that boils down to one thing, and one thing only in my opinion, skin color, because other than that, what do the various caucasian people have culturally in common that they could celebrate? Caucasian includes various groups of Jews, Poles, Italians, folks from Appalachia (Scotch-Irish and other), Slavs, hungarians, Germans, Irish, hispanic whites, and so forth, and what do they have in common? For better or worse, because blacks and others have been in a sense isolated from mainstream society, persecuted, they have distinct cultures, as do groups like Jews and the Christian Fellowship kids and others related to faith/faith community, likewise there are aspects to kids from Italian and Irish and other backgrounds that are unique, but given the size and diversity of the "caucasian’ label, what unique attributes can you say comes from being caucasian? I can’t think of any, other than the single orientation of skin color, there is no common ‘caucasian’ culture per se. I have had some try to tell me that "caucasian culture’ is “american culture” but that is ridiculous, American culture certainly wasn’t created by caucasians alone and was influenced by a lot of things, the melting pot may be a myth in some ways, but American culture, music and art and customs and language came from the various pieces that make up ‘caucasian’ Americans but also took a lot from non caucasions (think about popular music, very hard to claim that is ‘caucasian’ culture).
I would argue that is no longer the case with the vast majority of the country, so why live in the past? What good does that do? White America certainly has some dark history – I will agree with you there – but dwelling on that history, rather than moving forward is no way to get the country to progress… IMHO
I do object. When you purposefully exclude/differentiate yourself from society on the basis of sexual identity/race/etc, then you really have no room to complain when people identify that exclusion and/or treat you differently.
Personally, race/sex/identity, none of that matters… at the end of the day, we are all human beings. I don’t care if you graduated from college as a black/asian/jewish/gay person… you graduated from college.
We have to remember and “dwell” on history, because otherwise, we’re doomed to repeat it. And if you listen to the news, you would/should know that history keeps repeating itself.
Dwelling on history perhaps wasn’t the best choice of words on my part. I agree with you here… I just meant that if we want to achieve progress on human equality then we should not be dividing everyone up by their race/sexual identity/etc. We don’t need special commencements for Jewish, Asian, etc students… this does not help to eliminate discrimination. IMHO.
Most white people (according to the paper linked from the following thread) are worried about the changing ethnic makeup of the US, perhaps indicating that those worried about it are somehow afraid of being in a minority group, with the implication that they do not really expect equal treatment for minority groups to be fully the case.