Confessions of a Self-Segregationist

I was a self-segregationist.

I can’t pinpoint when it happened, but somewhere between sixth and eighth grade I started hanging out with the 10 other white kids in my 200-person middle school class. My school, two blocks from my house, was over 50 percent Hispanic.

Attending sleepovers in sixth grade meant going through the torture of having my hair teased, curled, spritzed and finally, in despair, drawn in an tear-jerkingly tight ponytail, the stray wisps shellacked with hairspray or curled on my forehead in a pathetic attempt at bangs.

Maybe it was self-defense, maybe it was common values, maybe it was the fact that my clothes didn’t hang right and my hair didn’t rat, but by the beginning of eighth grade I hung out almost exclusively with kids who had the same hair as I did, the same fair skin (my sixth grade friends called me Rudolph because of my perpetually sunburned nose) and the same-sounding last names.

My middle school experience is fairly unique in America, which is still 72 percent white. But last week California announced that whites no longer comprised the majority of the state’s population, joining eight other states in which minorities comprise over 50 percent of the population. It’s an indication of a larger trend towards plurality in American society.

Fifty years from now there will be no majority in America. The terms majority and minority will become meaningless in reference to race in our lifetimes.

But that’s the future, and while the future has come to California, it hasn’t yet made it to Harvard. The recent defense of self-segregation at Harvard has centered on minority-ness. The argument is either 1) I didn’t have any (fill in the blank) friends back home, so I want to get to know other people like me now, or 2) As a minority on this campus I feel more comfortable around others of similar backgrounds.

A third, and I believe more valid, defense of self-segregation among minority groups actually has nothing to do with being a minority.

There are many reasons for people of the same race or ethnicity to form (sometimes exclusive) social groups. They may have similar values, speak the same second language, go to the same church, eat the same food or simply do their hair the same way. There is nothing wrong with this, per se—after all, in America we have something called the freedom of association.

Whites do it all the time, at Harvard and beyond. They just don’t get called on it as often. I was never asked in middle school why I was self-segregating. No one accused me of not getting along well with others.

People cross cultural lines, or don’t, for all sorts of reasons. Some are personal, some are societal. It is the societal reasons that we can change, which we must change and which we all bear responsibility for changing.

Without cultural exchange, without some breaking down of cultural barriers, there can be no evolution of the broader American culture. This is a difficult process. It threatens the dissolution of core cultural values; it threatens the replacement of traditionally held values for non-traditional ones. Most of all, it means change for both cultures involved in the exchange.

We all bear part of the responsibility for forging a new American culture that better reflects our shared values, just as we all bear some responsibility for the perpetuation of cultural isolationism. Cultural isolationism is untenable. But cultural evolution can only happen through the dangerous, difficult task of integration.

Ending self-segregation is not as simple as putting people of different backgrounds into the same classroom. Even if we were broken down into randomized blocking groups of one, self-segregation would still happen at Harvard. You can’t legislate away the comfort of being with like-minded individuals. That is, after all, the reason we are all at Harvard to begin with. I am pessimistic that self-segregation will end in America even after 50 years have passed and there is no longer a white majority. The increase of the minority presence in America is not enough to guarantee cultural interchange. We must be at once more courageous in our individual acts, and more understanding of our individual choices.

No one person or group bears the responsibility for self-segregation. Rather the imperative to challenge our segregationist tendencies rests on us as individuals, uneasily but equally.

Meredith B. Osborn ’02 is a social studies concentrator in Leverett House. Her column appears on alternate Fridays.