Unrandomized Life?

As a sophomore, I haven't ever known a non-randomized housing system and I never really thought about what life would be like without one. Last week's open letter to the Harvard community concerning randomization (News, May 8), authored and signed by 27 present and past tutors of color, however, has set me wondering.

The open letter protests randomization on the grounds that it has resulted in a break down of House community. "It was communities of shared backgrounds and interests that enabled the Houses to transform themselves from ordinary dormitories to house--and that made the students who lived in them truly feel like a family," the letter said. The authors were especially concerned with how randomization has affected the quality of life for minority students. These students, they argue, now more than ever, lack a nurturing support system in what is for many a particularly alienating Harvard experience.

In all honesty, I have never felt much of a sense of community in Leverett House. Sure, I'll hype up the dining hall to play along with some silly rivalry every once in a while, but when you get down to it, I really couldn't care less about which dorm I was assigned to. In fact, I haven't really found "community" anywhere at Harvard. For me, a significant part of this "alienation" was a result of the fact that it was possible for me to wander about the Yard one balmy fall evening in the beginning of my first year and not see another brown face.

Until I read the open letter published in Friday's Crimson I hadn't really thought that there might be an alternative. I just sort of figured that this was the way things worked when you decide to come from a public school located in a black, working class neighborhood to "Fair Harvard," and you were just supposed to learn how to deal.

But what if? What if there had been a place within Harvard where I wouldn't just be part of another 9 percent. A House, maybe, that had a disproportionate number of African-American students. Would I have elected to put in a preference for that House and, horror of horrors, attempt to self-segregate?

You betcha.

But, you gasp, isn't segregation bad? Isn't that what that whole ruckus in the 1960s was about--ending segregation? What about that Brown vs. Board of Education thingy? If we go back to the segregation of unrandomized housing, aren't we taking a step backward?

Without randomization we would see a more segregated House system, but there is one crucial difference between this type of segregation and pre-Civil Rights segregation. That difference is one of power. The segregation that revolutionaries of the 1960s sought to put an end to was based on exclusion from resources, motivated by the desire to maintain power over another group. To this end, a significant number of white Americans used their power to deny black people the freedom to choose where they went to school, what jobs they held and where they lived.

In response, Civil Rights activists looked not to integrate America, but rather to counterbalance power differentials and thereby give all people the right to choose the course of their own lives. Legislation like the Fair Housing Act of 1965 didn't mandate that black people must move into all white areas and integrate them. Rather, it was an attempt to end unfair and discriminatory practices so that if black people chose to move into a white neighborhood, they could do so in peace.

Harvard randomized housing to integrate students in the hope that if students were made to live together, they could learn more from one another than they do in classes and in extracurricular clubs. I hate to sound cynical, but it seems to me that, in randomizing the housing, Harvard hoped they could spread out the few minority students on campus to serve as educational representatives for the greater minority population.

While I like to think that my background helps me to bring a new, valuable and different perspective to campus dialogue, I don't like to feel as if I am being forced to do so.

For me, the saddest consequence of randomization is that in forcing me to integrate, I have lost my freedom of choice. The logic of a Civil Rights movement that attempted to make more options accessible to minorities has been warped to justify Harvard's attempt to deny options to everyone.

And indeed, it is in this distortion, to the extent that Harvard has taken our choice away from us, that we have stepped backward.

Carine M. Williams '00 is an Afro-American studies and social anthropology concentrator in Leverett House. This is her final column of the semester.