Return of Division

Self-segregation can't be limited just one group.

Thirty years after the U.S. government forcibly integrated American schools, segregation is returning. But rather than leading the fight against it, many minority students are now on the forefront of the effort to restore it.

The phenomenon of minorities, especially Blacks, deciding to live primarily with members of their own ethnic or racial group is visible today on may college campuses, in various forms and degrees of seriousness. In one of the more extreme examples, Cornell University has dorms exclusively for individual minority groups. Harvard has its own, much milder version of self-segregation: eighty percent of Black students here live in the three Quad houses.

It seems that in most cases, self-segregation has less to do with hate or distrust and more to do with comfort level; people generally feel more to do with comfort level; people generally feel more at home among those they relate to. For many minorities, that group naturally entails others of the same race. No one anywhere is innocent of this desire to associate with compatible people. Moreover, the phenomena of self-segregation among minorities is more visible precisely because the students are minorities. As many have pointed out, people rarely notice, or condemn, a dining table or rooming group that is all white.

Yet self-segregation has in several places gone beyond issues of comfort. When the practice reaches levels like that Cornell, where whole, dorms are set aside for people of a certain color, it merits concern, and condemnation. At this level, self-segregation stops being about individual comfort and begins being about racism and division. The assumption behind an all-Black dorm is that there is some benefit in having people of a certain race, and only that race, living together.

Unfortunately, condemnation of such practices of is not always forthcoming. Aside from the administrators who allow such arrangements of take place, others are hesitant to criticize something they surely would have were the races reversed. This hesitancy is a product of a widely-felt but rarely-spoken belief: it's different when minority students self-segregate.

The rationale behind this double-standard is that minorities, Black in particular, have and continue to suffer in this country. And there can be no disputing that; one only needs to look at the percent-ages of Blacks in poverty to know that discrimination continues to leave its mark. This history of oppression leads many to be tolerant of self-segregation among minorities.

This acceptance of serious minority self-segregation indicates that people are missing an important point: exclusivity is contagious. Under the current housing arrangements at Cornell, a white student will be more likely to see Blacks as "those people in that dorm," rather than as "the guy down the hall." That distinction between seeing people as individuals versus seeing them as members of a certain race makes all the difference. The former fosters understanding and dialogue, the latter distrust and prejudice. The resultant distrust ensures that the self-segregation of one group will soon be followed by that of others.

Seeing people for the "content of their character, rather than the color of their skin," is an ideal in this country, one that arrived late in our history. Like many of our ideals it is a work in progress rather than a fact of life. The incompleteness of the ideal is not an excuse though, for taking steps backward. Self-segregation is such a step.