A Dearth of Interaction

"All my friends at this school are Black," Zaheer R. Ali '94 says.

"It's not anything that I think happened by choice," says Ali, who attributes the phenomenon to "laziness, for the most part."

Ali's friends, he says, are people he "can speak freely with, without explanation."

Ali is originally from the Caribbean--Trinidad, to be exact. But his family moved to America, and he went to high school in suburban Maryland.

Ali says the Black community on campus was "definitely a factor" for him when he was considering where he would apply for college.

When Ali came to visit Harvard after he was admitted, he was impressed upon seeing a protest in support of more minority faculty hiring. And he says that, during the weekend he came to visit, all the activities he attended were either planned or recommended by the Black Students Association (BSA).

Once at Harvard, Ali quickly became involved in the Black community. Ali served as vice president of the Freshman Black Table. And his sole roommate during his first year was a Black Hispanic.

To find an adequate social life, though, Ali felt he needed to go outside the Harvard Black community.

"Harvard is just not a party school," he says. So Ali, in search of parties, headed down-river to MIT. In the beginning of his first year, he went to MIT for parties "every weekend."

This year, Ali has headed away from the river--to North House. "Most of the Black students in the Class of 1994 are in the Quad," he says.

Ali decries what he sees as a lack of discourse on the topic of diversity on campus.

"Last year I never saw any inter-cultural, multi-cultural events or anything geared toward the exchange of ideas," he says.

Even those events designed to promote cultural exchange failed, he says, remembering a Harvard Foundation brunch where he saw members of different ethnic and racial groups clumped together instead of interacting with each other.

"Not debating" is "the most hurtful thing I've found at this school," Ali says. "I don't see any interaction between the various communities.

"The woman that put up the Confederate flag...I didn't see a debate with her, I just saw a big protest People were marching here and there and never had a discussion. I think that was stupid," Ali says.

"I could just hear people saying, 'Oh, there go those Black people again, protesting something'."

Ali sees two possible directions for dealing with the lack of debate. The first is institutional action along the lines of a debate on affirmative action. "I think there is a need for dialogue...for informational forums," he says.

The second alternative, which Ali thinks is seriously flawed, is downplaying the racial, cultural and ethnic differences that do exist. "I don't think the way of solving or dealing with diversity is saying we are all the same," he says.