The Conservative Minority

IN THE PAST FEW WEEKS, the old misunderstanding between conservatives and minority groups has raised its head once again. Nationality and at Harvard, conservatives have been blamed for a rise in racist rhetoric and racist actions committed by policy makers, politicians and police.

But if conservative and minority students at Harvard would only recognize their common minority status, perhaps they could get beyond recriminations and begin to work towards common goals.

Conservative aren't usually thought of as a group whose situation resembles that of minority groups. But the history of conservatism in America shows a lot of connections.

THE AMERICAN conservative movement began gaining strength in the late 1950s after the creation of the magazine, National Review. Ever since then, conservatism has vacillated between a movement bet on integrating into society at large, and a community isolating itself from the rest of society and protecting what conservatives consider America's cultural heritage.

Some of this isolation from the public has proceeded from pundits misinterpreting the significance of Barry Goldwater's run for president in 1964. Conservatives, knowing the strength of their movement, came gradually; to distrust the mainstream press which dismissed conservatism as irrelevant.

The conservative mistrust of dominant cultural institutions extends from popular culture to academia. William F. Buckley Jr.'s first book was God and Man at Yale. In it Buckley posited the gradual takeover of the academy by mealy-mouthed liberals indifferent, and even hostile, to religion and the cultural importance of religion in Western culture, particularly in shaping conceptions of individual rights.

Buckley's conclusions about modern universities were borne out by subsequent events. The modern university has become almost entirely secularized, and the role of religion as a culturally important, the vital and useful force rarely finds a place in academic discussions today.

But although conservative mistrust of the news media and misgivings about the nature of the modern academy are warranted, the way in which conservatives have reacted to media bias and universities' religious indifferences are not.

Conservatives, instead of attempting to change the news media and American universities from within, have increasingly taken potshots at these institutions from the outside. In this way, although conservatives have raised the level of discourse about the roles of these institutions, they have also succeeded in excluding themselves from position in which they could change the status quo.

HERE AT HARVARD, conservatives, like other member of statistical minorities, feel that their point of view is excluded from the mainstream press. Thus there is some resemblance between the situation of the conservative writers who choose not to comp The Crimson because of its liberalism and those minority students who choose not to comp The Crimson because they view our coverage of minority issue to be biased.

The outsider status which minority students and conservatives feel they have does not always extend into realms other than Crimson coverage. But more common ground exists.

Take, for example, poverty and legacy admissions, two interrelated phenomena. Many conservatives are poorer than the average Harvard student and more likely to come from working-class backgrounds. It would be condescending to assume out-of-hand that the same holds true of minority students. But given that more minorities in this country are poorer than the populations at large, and given that fewer minority students than non-minority students had parents who went to Harvard, I think that the assumption is reasonable.

Some people at Harvard naturally assume that, say, writers on Peninsula, are rich and privileged. Or that it has a high number of legacies on its staff. These assumptions are entirely false. A large percentage of Peninsula's writers come from blue-collar back-grounds. Two of the five Peninsula Council members (that I know of) have blue-collar fathers. One Council member, who was recently called an "upper-class white kid" by a professor, really isn't.

Really. His father is an unemployed machinist.

So when minority students talk about oppression and privation, many conservatives know exactly what they're talking about. Better, in fact, than any Harvard professor, regardless of race. Harvard professor, after all, make an average of $92,000 a year.

THE WAY IN WHICH the parents of conservative and minority students consider our attendance at Harvard also begs comparison. Several Harvard conservatives I've known have said their parents felt proud, but betrayed, when they decided to go to Harvard rather than a "conservative" university or college.

similarly, many minority students I've known have mentioned that, although their parents felt pride at their getting accepted to Harvard, other members of their community felt they were betraying their race by going to Harvard.

Of course, there is one compelling factor which sets conservatives and minority students apart. Except when the particular conservative is also a minority, (which happens more often than stereotypes about racial minorities would lead us to believe) conservatives do not differ physically from their white, upper-middle-class liberal peers. Thus no matter how much we get called "fascists" we may much more easily overcome the biases with which others judge us.

But those minority students who views conservatives with suspicion simply because we disagree about the means to destroying racism should think again. Our differences of opinion about solving racial conflicts and the results of racism proceed not from malice, but from conflicting approaches to their solution.

We should recognize that, and rather than talking past one another, begin to talk with each other. Maybe then we can begin to see that, regardless of race or even of approach to solutions, we all want to change society for the better.