A Response to Misconceptions

WHEN I wrote the editorial which appeared in the March 9 issue of The Crimson, entitled "Minority Group Self Segregation," I never expected the sort of reaction it prompted.

There have been several published responses to the editorial, both in The Crimson, and recently in the Asian-American Association's magazine East Wind. I would like to address the major arguments raised in many of these responses.

I would describe the authors of these responses as "one-eyed" because they are unable to view matters as varying in degree--they apparently lack depth perception. The co-presidents of the Asian American Association associated my editorial with an attitude that dictates, "you are Asian and so am I, so I shouldn't eat with you because that is self-segregating."

I am certain that most readers recognized this as a common rhetorical technique, to extend the opponent's argument to the point of ridiculousness. Obviously the above attitude was never mine.

In response to criticism that I extended examples of Asian-American organizations to represent all minority groups, I will grant that I wrote from personal experience and the experience of friends. But it is not that I am unfamiliar with other minority organizations; I simply did not feel comfortable including examples that I became aware of indirectly. I never intended to imply that segregation of other minority groups is identical to that of Asian students' organizations.

Other reactions to the editorial were childishly defensive: Most of the authors reacted by first outlining all the political and cultural achievements of their minority organization during the academic year. But they missed the point. I claimed that minority organization were becoming not less political, but more social.

Several people accused me of racial insensitivity, pointing out that I described minorities as clustering together in the dining halls, but never observed that whites sit together also. From this some felt at liberty to infer that, as one critic put it, I believe "all-white tables are 'normal' but, for some reason, the all-Black or all-Chicano tables are not." Others inferred that I am unaware of the racism embedded in some whites, which is another reason for segregation in the dining halls.

I realize that the blame for segregation should not fall on minorities alone. However, in my March editorial I chose to address the role of minority groups in this situation. That is all.

I will clarify my view. In principle, the aims of minority organizations are admirable: to provide a balance of political, cultural and social activities for minorities. But, in reality, I observe that in some minority organizations, the social functions are looming so large that they overshadow the political and cultural ones.

Organization members try to rationalize this trend by claiming that social activities such as dances or Pictionary nights are cultural simply because minorities are gathered together. Yet these are obviously purely social activities.

Not that there is anything wrong with purely social activities. It is just that that when minorities begin not only to eat together, but also to dance, play board games, put on productions, engage in sports, study and take study breaks together, then they have enclosed themselves in a self-sufficient community, absent of whites or other minorities. I do not think that this is what minorities, or whites, should strive for.

I want to shift the focus from minority organizations as a whole to individual minority students. I am sure that many minority students--both members and non-members of minority organizations--attend organization-sponsored activites and participate in political and cultural events, while at the same time interacting with other members of the Harvard community. Yet things can sour when students devote more and more of their time to minority activities. In extreme cases, minorities look to minority groups as comfortable pillows of escape.

It is people like Kwonjune Seung '91, the author of the East Wind article, whom I have in mind when I think about minority self-segregation. In his piece, Seung betrays his innermost thoughts: "Perhaps Hsia has never gone out on a dinner date with a white lady friend and felt the temperature drop several degrees. Then he cannot understand how liberating it can be to able to date members of the same minority group."

This is precisely the sort of thinking I oppose. Minorities should not feel that socializing with fellow minorities is a liberation, an escape from the whites. We ought to be colorblind in forming friendships.

Seung concludes his response with an implicit threat of violence towards me: "And yes, we play Pictionary," he writes. "We also learn Tae Kwon Do."

One of Seung's assumptions shows most how little he, and I am sure many others, understand my viewpoint. "Perhaps Hsia has never been called 'chink' and felt shame." No, I have been subjected to racial slurs; though I never felt ashamed by them. My emotions ran closer to anger or condescension. I am not ashamed of being a minority. Nor am I ashamed of my opinion of minority organizations. The two statements are not contradictory.