A tower of glass, not ivory

Minority students within predominantly white institutions of higher learning have become the most visible people on earth. Their tower, instead of being of ivory, is of the most transparent glass. Their environment--college, university, graduate or professional school--is by its very nature isolated from the more anonymous surroundings of business or community life. The minority students' presence within these institutions is relatively new; their acceptance there is often considered "special," and their role is frequently seen as "experimental." All of this causes the minority students to be particularly subject to comparisons, evaluations, theories, prognoses, cheers and groans, condemnation and approval. They are paraded in front of millions of eyes as both the finest specimens of their various races and cultures, and also as examples of America's most pressing domestic problems. Statistics about them are published to both laud their increasing participation in higher education and to decry their still inadequate enrollment; to both proclaim that they have surmounted educational deficiencies and that they are hopelessly incapable of competing within the highest of academic spheres. They are tested, touted, tracked, and tantalized with visions of glorious opportunity.

Not all of this is bad, and some of it is long overdue. But hardly any of it is real acceptance, and almost none of it is honest recognition of minority students as people, as individuals who carry and cope with the double responsibility to self and to race and/or culture. Even the term, "minority student," tends to be lumped with such phrases as "disadvantaged," "culturally deprived," "low testers," "intellectually inferior, "inherited insufficiencies." The reader is familiar with the dictionary of poverty. In fact, the concept of the "minority students" has been so tainted with the publicity about and the generic but false beliefs of minority students' educational deprivation and intellectual inferiority that the person behind this label is faced with one of the most difficult battles of history.

All of these labels and appellations do nothing more than reinforce the historic assumption of minority deficiency and strengthen the expectation that oppressed people will fail. Those assumptions and expectations are not new, but have been long ingrained in the hearts and minds of the white majority and have ben instilled in the psyches of minority groups. The ante-bellum Black Codes, for instance, systematically directed and demanded the infliction of a feeling of inferiority on all Black people in America. And later, the Dred Scott v. Sanford and Plessy v. Ferguson decisions refined and confirmed the white man's right to protect his privileges and power by denying respect and citizenship to the Black man. Even though the most odious of the racists laws have been overturned, and even though we may hope that national awareness may help relieve some of the most oppressed of our peoples, we must face the fact that, to a disturbing degree, the philosophy behind racism and systematic enslavement remains. Its modern expression is veiled in the euphemisms of sociological and psychological language and jargon. Once people catch onto these phrases, they feel they can apply them to their poor and downtrodden, exude a little pity, and go right on oppressing them. The whole battery of the "disadvantaged" language has provided the world's greatest dodge.

In a 1971 issue of the Harvard Educational Review, three correspondents speak to this phenomenon: "Each label," they wrote, "implicitly or explicitly points to an alleged deficiency, weakness, or absence of a quality in the Black American. The deficit model clearly embraces a doctrine in which white middle class culture is the acceptable norm." (November 1971, p. 535)

The yardstick by which minority inferiority is measured is no longer the distinct rule of law, but the far more labile and equivocal "norm of white middle class culture." The barriers erected in front of the progress of minority groups do not change in fact; only in kind. For the minority students, saddled with more descriptions, labels, assumptions and expectations than a miner's packhorse with pickaxes, the white college or graduate school can be an almost impermeable maze of trials, tasks, hurdles and psychological leaps. If the challenges to these students were only academic, as they are to the "norm" students, the stage would be a flat arena, with plenty of room for constructive trial and error. Instead, the setting is a labyrinth, where each decision may mean ultimate failure not only for the individuals, but, they feel, for their entire race or culture. That is what such high visibility does to you.

But let us abandon the facile descriptions and labels for these minority students and ask, "Who are they really?" If we trim down that generality and ask, "Who are these students?" then we may get somewhere. Let us specify at once what they are not. They are not those students whose race, culture, value systems, etc. do figure predominantly in the much discussed "sample." Many of them, though not all, line up along the top edges of the curves used to design national standardized tests. We often hear the claim that they are not numerous enough to constitute a control group, and thus their unique qualifications and potential cannot be adequately tested. It seems very strange to me that hand in hand with this claim goes the much publicized one that, on the basis of reliable I.Q. tests and adequate samples, Black people and other minorities are deficient.

Despite all these negative descriptions, which many read as condemnations, there are more and more minority students in more and more schools. It is interesting to note that minority students are usually described in terms of statistics and standardized tests. In order to get on with determining who they are, we must turn to the more difficult discussion of personality, feeling, emotion. And here we run into trouble, for none of these minority students is all of the things I have said or will say, and there are some who are none of these things. Many are a great deal more. Generalities I may make, with some validity, are that almost all of these students are aware of their statistical characteristics--that there are relatively few of them, though their number increases; that some of them have been admitted on the basis of criteria broadened from those for white students; and that all of them represent in some way to some one their cultural or racial group and as such are watched.

For a while, in the middle sixties, when a few Black and other minority students were being admitted to schools on the basis of other than traditional criteria, many felt that distinction and the new thrusts that were being made for them were praiseworthy. White admissions officers and professors patted themselves on the back that they were becoming a part of the struggle for equality. Although everyone expected these "specially" admitted students to have a rough time, everyone also expected them to work very hard to bring themselves up in the world, and to express the enormous gratitude they must feel. But somewhere in the sixties, things began to change. Universities in general were in upheaval, and Black students in particular were dissatisfied and rebellious. Somewhere along the line, minority students had abandoned their trust in their statistical value, and when they did, they found themselves in a kind of descriptional twilight zone. Many rejected the pat definitions applied to them by admissions offices and sociologists, but few actually articulated the essence of their own identity. Slowly and often painfully they began to explore the meaning of their deep and soul-felt murmurings, and the first utterances took the form of some very difficult questions. "What am I doing in a white man's school, learning the very white man's rules that have victimized my people for almost two centuries?" "Am I copping out?" "Why must I divorce myself from my culture, which I am most certainly asked to do in order to fit in and succeed on the white man's terms?" When these students heard their home, their families, their people, their heritage thrown so heedlessly into the categories of "disadvantaged," "underprivileged," they began to feel that instead of being given an opportunity to learn and participate freely within the mainstream of society, as it was called, they were being asked to abandon, disassociate themselves from all that had formed and nourished them, to abandon all that for the dubious privilege of becoming an Afro-Saxon (a Black-white man.) And second class Black-white men at that. They began to distrust their "special admissions" and to feel that they were doing nothing but assuaging the white man's communal guilt. When, during the first two weeks of school, most of the conversation centered around the spectacular test scores of the white students, the minority students were compelled to slink away like shadows at noon, wondering why on earth they were there, how in the world they could compete, and much less succeed. But it was not only the novice and insecure student who fought these creeping realizations. In fact it seems that the most successful, scholarly ones were particularly sensitive to the conflicts. In feeling that they were being asked to give up their Blackness, or redness or brownness or yellowness in exchange for this torment, their Blackness or whatever, assumed in many cases a new, strange and deeper meaning. Whatever it meant, many decided then and there that whatever happened, they would not give it up or reject all that had gone into its formation.

All of these emotional boilings, however, eventually came up against these students' original desires and reasons for wanting to attend these "good schools." Thus the academic problems of these students, if they proved to be serious, were more often than not grounded in psychological confusion. For a time, it looked as if politics and psychology were inextricably mixed. It seems to some observers that as minority, particularly Black, students began to form organizations and clubs, that their insecurity and counterfidelity was reinforced by group, and indeed, very tight group, interaction. Much of the agony of conflict took the form of demands for more "relevance" in course work, an increase in minority student admissions to mitigate the loneliness and alienation, for law schools to take more public and publicized stands on civil rights and other social issues. As they began to voice their own confusion, it was almost as if the joy of that step--that one true step--was too enormous to keep to themselves. Their demands often sounded to the keen ear like urgent pleas to share their newly discovered needs--those needs which, if fulfilled, could open the path to real self-discovery. It is this edge of minority student demands that caused them, in almost every instance, to separate their protests from those of the white students, even though their positions were often very similar. When the demands were made in the context of dramatic and well-publicized sit-ins, demonstrations and building or office takeovers, many observers were shocked at this separation. Rumblings of "Black Power" conjured knives and race riots in the guilt-ridden and fear-filled minds of many whites. Elitist and reactionary commentators began to claim that their fears were justified, that students specially admitted were demeaning the standards of entire schools. And everyone was frightened when real violence did, in some cases, break out, or threaten.

Amidst all of this, in the late 60 s, whatever else was gained or lost, whatever one may feel about tactics, methods, and all that, something of real and revolutionary significance happened to many, many minority students. They gained pride, and they learned how to express it, to benefit from it. The other things that happened--the new courses in "relevant" topics and a renewed commitment from admissions offices to recruit more minority students, and a few other things--these things happened and have become permanent threads in the school fabric.

We and the nation are fortunate that school admissions officers have demonstrated a courage and a willingness to read, hear and disregard some of the materials which proclaim the infallibility of standardized tests. Unfortunately, much of such material fails to take into consideration the vast efforts and resources this country put into burning the scars of deprivation and inequality into millions of its citizens. The doors of opportunity were never open to any appreciable number of minority group people. To suggest that all things are equal and the same with various groups is nothing less than intellectual dishonesty.

We would have lost a great deal if many schools had not admitted minority students who have accomplished so much. These so called disadvantaged and deprived and deficient students have overcome immense barriers of subtle, statistical and insidious racism and exclusion, all because of their incredible strength, tenacity and sheer will.

Walter J. Leonard is special assistant to President Bok and the University's affirmative action officer. He will leave his post at Harvard at the end of this academic year to assume the presidency of Fisk University in Nashville, Tenn.