Society of White Engineers

TomServo
Sat, 22 Oct 2011 19:01:33 +0000

Congrats on pointing out a very obvious double-standard.

My attitude: such a group is no more inherently racist than the Society of Black Engineers (and I doubt that there are many genuine racists in the SBE) but in this country the reasons for an SBE to form don’t exist for a Society of White Engineers. If you are an ethnic/cultural/racial minority in your field, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to spend time with people who share your culture (and that’s what this is really about, culture, not race). If I went to some ultra-lilly-white LAC in New England where everybody came from old money and wintered in Martinique and Summered in France every year, I would feel EXTREMELY out of place, and if there happened to be a “Society of Middle-America Average Students” you can bet I’d join up. I don’t blame somebody who may for the first time in their life be surrounded by people not of their culture for wanting to be involved with other people they are more comfortable with (not that black people all share the same culture, that in itself is a racist/ignorant viewpoint).

But as a white person in America, I don’t really have that (although I am surrounded by Asians, being an eng. physics major, and that’s just fine with me), I’m the majority. Although I do get involved with Christian groups to be around other Christians, and nerd groups to be around other nerds.

I imagine that if you went to Oxford or Cambridge or schools in Tokyo or Seoul you’d find American Student Clubs or something similar.