Race Roles Exchanged At Simmons for a Day

In an attempt to drive home the hardships apartheid has forced on South African Blacks, students at Simmons College imitated, for a day, the racial policy on their own campus--but with a twist.

On Tuesday, white students at the small women's college in Boston were asked by classmates to display identification cards at campus entrances and were prohibited from using designated restrooms, elevators and water fountains Minority students, who make up 8 percent of the student body, went to and from classes unrestricted.

Betsy E. Quint, president of the Student Government Association (SGA), which planned the event, said the experiment, along with yesterday's South African Awareness Day on the Simmons campus, was designed to raise student awareness of a variety of issues.

"One was the issue of race on this campus and others nationwide. Another goal was to educate students on apartheid in South Africa," said Quint, who is a senior. "[We wanted] to give them, in a small sense, what it feels like to be in the majority, but yet to be discriminated against," she said.

Simmons Professor of History Floyd B. Barbour said the activity, which first took place at the school three years ago, was intended to shock people into greater awareness of apartheid.

"You need something to kick you on the path and make you understand what people are feeling," said Barbour, who offers courses in Afro-American studies. "The whole idea is to walk around in others' shoes," he said.

Quint said the experiment was also designed to help form a consensus of student opinion about the college's investments in companies that do business with South Africa.

According to Quint, the Simmons College Corporation has about $2 million invested in South Africa.

But not everyone in the college community agreed that the project was well run.

"I don't think it worked well," said Shamikhah A. Rashid, vice-president of the campus' Black and Hispanic Students Organization. "We were disappointed in [the SGA] for not enforcing what they were doing," added Rashid, who is a junior.

Rashid said the policy was not enforced broadly enough to accurately represent the conditions imposed by the policy of apartheid.

Others said participation should not have been mandatory.

"They gave us no option," said freshman Caroline R. Maibor, who added the program should not have divided students according to race. "I think they went overboard," she said. "They created unnecessary problems."

But Quint said SGA chose to divide the students as they did in order to raise awareness of race relations at Simmons. "Racism goes on right here on campus," she said.