I’m not sure what to think about this: Officials seek to limit self-segregated dorms at UMass-Amherst. I feel that students of color choose to live with other students of color because of the strength and support that their community gives them.
What do you all think?
Officials seek to limit self-segregated dorms at UMass-Amherst
March 12, 2006AMHERST, Mass. –Officials at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst are phasing out self-segregated dormitories, the latest effort to rid the campus of separate programs for minorities.
“There’s nothing healthy about segregation,” said Michael Gargano, vice chancellor of student affairs and campus life.
Currently, minority students can choose to live in residence halls designated for particular races and ethnicities. There are residential clusters dedicated to students of Asian, African-American, and Native American backgrounds, and one dedicated to students seeking a multicultural. They were initiated as a means of providing comfort and comradeship on an overwhelmingly white campus.
But beginning this fall, there will be no floors set aside for minority students when an 860-bed cluster of residence halls open. The university also plans to discourage students from choosing to live with students of like race or ethnicity, The Boston Sunday Globe reported.
“Students who come to the university need to be exposed to different opinions and ideas. When you have segregated pockets in our residence halls, we are allowing students to shut themselves off, and then they are missing out,” Gargano said.
The school does plan to offer living quarters that bring together people with the same interests. For example, students pursuing African-American studies could choose to live together.
The university also will require freshmen to live with other freshmen.
Nationwide, universities and colleges are struggling with whether minority students should be allowed or encouraged to live together. Some schools continue to embrace self-segregated living quarters as an answer, such as the University of California, Berkeley.
At UMass, the move to desegregate housing follows the dismantling of some other race-based programs. In the past five years, the school has stopped holding separate orientations for minorities and assigning them to separate academic advising offices.
But some students say they like the separate residence halls.
“We are like family!” said Nisha Mungroo, 19, a sophomore, who lives on a floor designated for African-American students. “You come here and find comfort in your community.”
But others say they don’t want to close themselves off.
Anton Pires, a freshman, said he lived in Southwest, a dorm for black students, for a semester, then transferred.
“It can be good to be with people who have had the same struggles as you, people you can be more open with,” said Pires, a native of Cape Verde. “But I didn’t want to close myself off to people. I wanted to get a different feel.”
for me, this is key:
“Currently, minority students can choose to live in residence halls designated for particular races and ethnicities. There are residential clusters dedicated to students of Asian, African-American, and Native American backgrounds, and one dedicated to students seeking a multicultural. They were initiated as a means of providing comfort and comradeship on an overwhelmingly white campus”
if choice is being taken away, by the action of the school’s officials, than i’m against it. it seems at this point in time, if students of color don’t want to live in a “self-segregated” (that’s any interesting framework there) dorm, they don’t have to. the dorm situation is moving from choice to mandate.
When I read this article a week or so ago, I had initial mixed feelings about it, but upon further reflection, I find UMass to be a bunch of… first of all, Michael Gargano is white (I google’d him), so he can not truly understand the experience and struggle that students of color go through at a predominately white institution. The issue shouldn’t be whether they should “desegregate” these living arrangements, but Umass needs to evaluate themselves as to why these students find the need to have these types of living arrangements… why don’t they feel safe or comfortable? What can UMass do to make them feel more comfortable and safe at a predominately white institution, instead of taking their comfort zones away from them and force them to “assimilate” into the dominate culture. These residence halls are just “comfort zones” for them, which isn’t really right, because UMass as an institution should be the comfort zone for them and apparently it is not. “The university also plans to discourage students from choosing to live with students of like race or ethnicity,” so are they going to do the same with white students? It be kinda hard, being that the university is predominately white.. They should just be honest with their intentions and call it the assimilation of minorities into the dominate culture instead of stating it as the “need to be exposed to different opinions and ideas.” So people of color aren’t diverse among themselves in their opinions and ideas?
OSU faces similar criticisms regarding the cultural centers every single freaking year!!! Not only is UMass “desegregating” these student housings, but they are now trying to phase out all race-based programs, which is just messed up!!! Without these programs, who will suit these students’ needs? Who will understand their experience? Their struggle? The adversity that they face? A white man, named Gargano? I don’t think so… By taking these programs away from students of color, the university is further marginalizing them and basically telling them… “why can’t u just be like them “normal” students and not require “special treatments.”"
This is my first post to the Eric Stoller blog.
After reading the article, I also feel UMass is full of you know what. As a reason to take away students’ choice to live with students of similar backgrounds UMass uses the “students who come to the university need to be exposed to different opinions and ideas…” argument. For the most part, if you are a student of color, you are exposed to the dominant society every day, because it is every where! I think the place you live and sleep should be a place that is safe and place you can be yourself. So, first, I think it is wrong of UMass to assume that students of color need further exposure to the dominant society. Second, I think it is unethical for them to take away their choice. I’m with Reagan on this; it feels like forced assimilation. Is UMass taking away the choice of white students to room with other white students?
Eric, we finally agree. I don’t think there is any excuse for forcing anyone to be with anyone else that they don’t want to be. One of the fundemental rights that we have as free beings is the freedom of association.
I would go further to say that compulary integration in any circulstance involving educational environs is wrong-headed. Numerous studies have showed that blacks and whites/Hispanics learn differently. When blacks excel in a certain educational system, whites stagnate and Hispanics advance at a slower pace. When a system is set up in a way that works with the way white kids learn, then blacks suffer and Hispanics achieve better than they do in the black tailored system, but not as well as when the system is tailored to them.
It’s time that we admit that there are some differences between the races, whether those are cultural, biological, or whatever, it does nobody any good to act as if we are all the same; and it does a lot of harm.
Woah, woah, woah, Poor Boy. I think you’ve radically simplified a very complex situation. Black people and white people do not learn differently. There is nothing intrinsic about race relating it to the way people learn.
Some black people learn differently than some white people, largely because they have different educational needs and expecations due to their socio-economic history, not because they are black or white or Hispanic, etc. This stems from the historic and current educational resources not granted to most African-American neighborhoods that are given to white middle class neighborhoods. We must remember that students have different educational needs not because of the race they are, but because of the way our government and our institutions are racist and classist (and sexist, but that’s another issue, albeit very related).
I agree that studies have shown that black students learn better with black students and white students with white students. But I bet if you created a school that wasn’t racist and that radically interrogated the system and asked students to do the same, that you’d have a place where students of all races could learn together. Of course black students and white students can’t learn together as effectively in a system that is racist.
Like U-Mass. Like any educational institution in this country.
U-Mass’s moves are, apparantly, good natured, but I think they’re eliminating safe spaces for minority students that won’t exist with segregated dormitories.
Michael, of course I simplified the situation, my post was three short paragraphs long. The argument for many, many years has been that blacks and whites would learn the same way, equally well, in an environment devoid of racism. However, I’ve read many studies which contradict that statement. Of course, study results are always suspect, but at some point we’ve got to do what we know will work best for the greatest number of people. As you’ve admited, given our social structure, the best outcomes are based on segregation. The question then becomes whether it is more important that we are well educated, or that we are well integrated.
I understand that we should shoot for an integrated system that educates all people equally well; but we should also live in a society where everyone is wealthy, sexually attractive, naturally intelligent and polite. Sometimes you’ve simply got to be pragmatic.
You’ve read studies that show that blacks and whites do not learn equally well in a system devoid of racism? I’d like to read those studies and find where they took place, because I have never seen a school void of racism. It doesn’t exist.
And one will never exist if we continue segregation. Segregation might work in the short term (if all schools were equally funded, which they will never be with a racist government and populace), but it won’t in the long term, because it will only reinforce racist notions (that black, white, and Hispanic people are fundamentally different, which they are not).
You say that we should live in a society where everyone is wealthy, sexually attractive, naturally intelligent and polite. I agree completely on the last two points. However, don’t you think it would be better if we deconstructed the ideas of wealth and sexual attractiveness altogether. Everyone has a different notion of sexually attractive, but the culture industry forces many of us to believe that a certain type of body is much more valuable than another; perhaps we should value all body types. The whole notion of financial and propertied wealth is a desructive one that only leads to power differentials. Only be destroying the notion that one can be wealthy by property can we end class discrimination.
Yes, there are studies which have been done in lab environments where one could assume that the researchers are honest when they say that racism was pulled out of the mix. I’ll be happy to provide the research information — I’ll try to have it tomorrow, I can’t remember where exactly I read the study that I was refering to with that statement.
I think you’re off base on the “racist society = poor funding for black schools” statement. Kansas City, Missouri has some of the best funded (if not the best funded) schools in the United States (the district is 90% black), yet they lost accreditation two years ago. I’d do some research on the history of the KCMO district (especially since the 1970s when the district was taken over by the Federal Government for forced integration — it remained under Federal Control until the late 1990s) before making blanket statements like that. There’s a documentary that was released about six months ago which talks about the district’s woes, I can’t think of the name of it, but if you Google it I’m sure something will come up.
Class discrimination isn’t about wealth. If you take a Yale educated lawyer and put him on a desert island with a high school drop out, you’ll still have two different classes of people there, even if they never see a dollar bill again. Class is about perception of superiority (or, about true superiority), not wealth. I was raised in the ghetto, if I got a million dollars tomorrow, I still wouldn’t be a member of any elite class, I’d be white trash with a million dollars.
Also, I believe studies have shown that infants will react more favorably toward symetry in faces than to the lack of symmetry. Beauty, then, is symmetry. That’s not arbitrary. Odd, though, that you would automatically assume “body type” when I speak of beauty. Who among us thinks that Queen Latifa is less than beautiful? She’s the spokeswoman for Cover Girl, for God’s sake.
PB:
I am curious about the research methodologies in which “racism was pulled out of the mix.” It seems to me that the historical context that we (everyone in the U.S) live in has been rife with racism since day 1. How can racism be removed when it saturates our existence?
PB:
Regarding the studies, I’d raise the same question Eric just raised.
As for funding of schools that are predominantly black: I haven’t yet done any research on KC, but I think it’s interesting that you bring up a school that the federal government forced to integrate. Let’s jump a few hundred miles east to some de facto segregated schools. East St. Louis, Illinois, is radically underfunded and predominantly black, compared to Bellevue, Fairview Heights, and Collinsville, more middle class and white towns. Lest you think that East St. Louis is an anomaly, Jonathan Kozol examines the same phenomenon in Chicago, New York, and San Antonio in Savage Ineqaulities (excellent book; I highly recommend it).
Why are schools which generally serve black students funded less than schools that serve white students? Well, education is funded by two taxes, generally: property and sales. And rich (often white) places don’t want their tax dollars distributed to poorer (often black) places. Sound racist and classist to you? Cuz it does to me.
Eric, obviously this isn’t an issue we’ll ever see eye-to-eye on. You see racism everywhere, all of the time, I don’t. Since I don’t think this is a fundementally racist society, I’m forced to look for other explanations for variations between the races in such things as educational achievement. One explaination that I find plausible is that due to cultural differences between blacks and whites; the two races learn in fundementally different ways (the study I’m pulling from most basically shows that blacks learn better in an environment of cooperation, while whites learn better in competetive environments of individual achievement. A quick look at the difference between black neighborhoods and white neighborhoods and the way the idea of community is handled in those two environments would help explain way those differences exist).
Michael, my point was that if you claim that money is the root of failure for black districts, then how can you explain a situation in which black schools have more money and still fail, or white schools in poor rural areas with few resources perform well? The question is, then: what evidence is there that better (more) funding creates better (more effective) education? The United States spends more on education than just about every country on the planet, yet we do not have the best performance (obviously). Why is that?
The answer is: in other developed countries, they track students at a young age. In Germany, for instance, students are segregated based on test scores in the 4th grade. If you are a German child who doesn’t test well in math in the fourth grade, then by the 9th grade, you won’t be testing in math at all, because you’ll be in a track that doesn’t include math courses. In otherwords, they (as a nation) are being honest about the way children learn and they are teaching them what they have the highest ability to learn in the ways that best suite those abilities. Our “equality at all costs”, one-size-fits-all approach is the reason that you see such failures. The problem is, that the one-size has been developed mainly for white kids, and black kids are forced to squeeze into that mold because the law, and the politically correct crowd, says that all things must be perfectly equal, regardless of whether it makes sense or not.
Sort of like UMASS forcing people out of their comfort zone and into desegregated living situations, because that’s what UMASS thinks “looks” good.
equal ≠same; equality doesn’t mean that each student in every district, from every background, is approached in exactly the same way. sounds like a strawman to me.
i’m not sure who you mean by the “politically correct crowd,” but most progressive individuals recognize the need for learning environments to be culturally appropriate and for those teaching within them to be culturally competent.
it’s not always a matter of money, especially if that money is being spent poorly in districts that are not “high priorities.” that could easily skew the numbers if money is being wasted. i’d also like to see how exactly “racism was pulled out of the mix.”
well, this is a complicated issue, isn’t it? When i first read this i was reminded of the story of integration from Lies My Teacher Told Me - where Loewen talks about how Black students started to plummet academically after integration. The reason for this, as Loewen points out, is that its hard to focus on your education when you find yourself immersed in a violent environment. It also often meant that funding was then pulled from districts that were all or majority Black and redirected to districts that where largely White but with token students of color. This “self-segregation” is more about support networks, shared experience, and common culture than it is about the implied racism of such a term.
I’d agree with fournier that it becomes a problem when a policy is forced. I also agree with poorboy that there are cultural differences in pedagogy. These differences aren’t necessarily racial, they certainly aren’t genetic, and they aren’t existant outside of a system of racism. That doesn’t mean there wouldn’t be different cultural pedagogies if racism didn’t exist, its just to say that if racism didn’t exist then the differences would no longer be racialized. And I’m not just leary of a study that claims to exist outside of racism, i’d outright say such a study can’t exist within the dominant culture.
Poorboy, i think the disagreement over the pervasiveness of racism may have a lot to do with working from different definitions (tho, maybe not). I’m talking about racism not as a set of actions, but also as a state of mind - something that we learn and teach without even knowing that we are learning and teaching it. Its pervasive. Like, say, capitalism. Capitalism isn’t a natural state, its a construct. Yet i can point to several examples at the school where i work where children as young as two express very capitalist viewpoints. Not because we are necessarily talking about how great capitalism is all the time, but because its just that pervasive. Its something we think of as natural because its all that many of us know. I’d argue that what some call racism is usually something that goes unlabeled in our lives because its so pervasive that we just think its the natural order of things. We believe that racism is a Black man hanging from a tree, or a bigoted lexicon, or something that we can easily recognize as rooted in racialized hate. But, in fact, there is so much more to it than that. That’s why i don’t usually use the word racism. It doesn’t exactly summarize what it is that we are really talking about.
I think there are two ways of looking at poorboy’s suggestion that compulsory integration is wrong-headed. The first is from the point of view of not wanting forced integration because it would somehow degrade the White school districts to have some people of color in the classroom. The second is from the point of view that to force a persyn of color out of a learning environment where they are supported into one where they are attacked. The latter is why i’m against forced integration, the former is fucked up and rooted in White Supremacy.
Vegan, you’ve gotten closer to the point that I was making than anyone else. In fact, you’re dead on. Although you almost seem to argue that if the white kids are adversely affected then that’s alright, but if the students of color are affected then something is wrong. You may not be saying that; that’s how it read, though.
I would also agree that whether or not one believes that there could be studies in which racism was not present depends greatly on how one defines racism. As far as I’m concerned, if researchers brought in a number of students of various races and similar academic achievement, put them in a room and studied them for a period of time when given access to the same teachers, same educational materials and so on, then you’ve controled for racism. If, however, you believe that the researches themselves are neccesarily racist because they grew up in the culture, then you’re liable to believe that no such study could be done without an element of racism.
It’s also way of topic, but I don’t agree that capitalism is somehow an unnatural state. Human beings are a social animal, and so some level of cooperation is to be expected, but like other social animals, there is also an element of hierarchy based on physical, mental or creative superiority which is the economic basis of capitalism. Two year olds will show capitalist tendencies because by that age a human being understands how to manipulate it’s environment to earn the greatest level of satisfaction possible. If socialism was the natural state of man, then we’d have altruistic two year olds; I doubt such a beast exists regardless of the society in which they were raised.
Vegan Kid: excellently put!
Poor Boy,
you write: …if researchers brought in a number of students of various races and similar academic achievement, put them in a room and studied them for a period of time when given access to the same teachers, same educational materials and so on, then you’ve controled for racism.
What you immediately bring up is that if you believe the teachers in racist because they live in a racist system, then there is no way to remove racism from the equation. This is where I stand, yes; however, you limit it by just looking at the teacher’s ideology. What about the ideology of the texts? I believe that, as artifacts and rhetorical acts of a racist society, they too are most likely racist. In fact, as a former middle school teacher and someone who studies pedagogies and has looked at a number of textbooks (and read Lies My Teacher Told Me), I am certain that most textbooks are classist, racist, and sexist. There is no way to remove institutional oppression from a situation in order to make it a “clean slate study.” Also, what about the students, who, if raised in this society, probably also have preconceived notions about people from other races?
Also, I think you’re conflating ideas when you discuss capitalism as competition and socialism as cooperation. Socialism is not solely cooperation; there must be competition in discourse in order to create meaning. Meaning is not created without conflict. You are right in that we an inherently conflicting species. We live in conflict and create meaning and society through conflict. However, we are not inherently capitalists. There are many other economic structures that can exist, and many civilizations have used other models. History alone shows us that we are not inherently capitalist, since capitalism did not arise in the West until the modern era (post feudalism). Capitalism was formed by the intersection of various ideologies and historical movements; additionaly, to argue that the West was headed toward capitalism no matter what (predestined?) would be folly.
Michael, I never argued that there weren’t other economic structures which can exist — I’m simply arguing that none has been developed which so takes advantage of human strengths while minimizing the effect of human weakness as does capitalism.
On the issue of racism, I’ve decided to remain humble when discussing the issue on this site in particular — agreement is not something that we’ll achieve. Of course, we won’t agree on anything else either. Begs the question of why I continue to comment here, huh?
PB,
I think I am glad that we have agreed to disagree. We are still conversing which I think is good. If I wanted agreement, I would have never approved your comments. I have learned a lot from our dialogues. After all, we have been communicating via the blogosphere for a while now!
Yeah, we’re almost a couple. I want to be the man, though.
PB,
I’m not looking for agreement, either - I love talking and writing about this. I think the world would be a very dangerous place if we all agreed…which brings up many things I won’t go into.
Re: Coupling: why can’t you both be the men?
Because, I’m not gay.