The Comfort Zone

On the weekend of April 5-7, The Crimson took a poll of 408 students. Among other questions, the survey asked, “To what extent do you think ethnic/racial groups at Harvard self-segregate, on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being not at all and 5 being a great deal?” More than 50 percent said 4 or 5.

Self-segregation—if you want to call it what most people do—is a problem of perception. What do you see around you? What do you think you see around you? Who do people see around you? Who do people think they see around you? Race is a social construct. But that doesn’t mean we don’t have to deal with it.

In recent days, protesters have called on students, particularly those in ethnic or racial minority groups, to unite against what they see as an onslaught against diversity at Harvard. At the center of the storm: University President Lawrence H. Summers and a string of incidents relating to minority issues. Students assail Summers for his treatment of Fletcher University Professor Cornel R. West ’74, his perceived lack of support for ethnic and Latino studies, and the lack of women and minorities on the faculty.

But this is not a story questioning the University administration. That story is told every day. This is a story about questioning ourselves. We are quick to analyze the University’s leaders. It is more difficult to turn the discussion to students. How we live our daily lives. How we treat each other. The people we see around us. The people we don’t see, and the places in which we are comfortable and uncomfortable.

It is a sunny Cambridge Friday, the kind of day tailor-made for protesters. At the Science Center, the last-minute initiative of Diversity & Distinction editor Marques J. Redd ’03 and Asian-American Association (AAA) Co-President Sophia Lai ’04, among others, has prompted a number of students to rally. What’s the cause? Redd is handing out flyers that explain.

A line of about 30 students trail ahead of Redd as a student on the grass pounds a drum. They have donned masks made of white paper plates, white shirts and ties. Some of them hold a sign that reads, “Where is the diversity at our university?” Isaac J. Weiler ’02-’03, president of the Black Men’s Forum, stands on top of a bench and hollers his support, hands cupped around his mouth. The protesters stop in front of University Hall, in every tourist’s favorite spot, at the well-loved foot of John Harvard. Clipboards with petitions are passed from hand to hand.

Associate Dean of the College David P. Illingworth ’71 walks by, smiling as usual. What does he think about all this?

“The thing I like about this protest is that it’s quiet,” he offers. “I think quiet is a great witness.”

Does he think there is self-segregation in the College?

“I think there is less of it than there appears to be.”

Harvard can sometimes be a place where everybody talks and nobody listens. There have been forums and dialogues between students of different ethnicities and races for years. The ethnic studies movement, one example of a cause that interests students of many different backgrounds, has gone through many incarnations without much success. But in recent months, discussion of minority matters has risen to a fever pitch because of the departure of West, a leading light of the Harvard Afro-American studies department that until recently was considered an uncrackable diamond.

West’s widely publicized fallout with Summers, coupled with a series of other incidents, has lit a fire in the collective heart of students and started a real campus-wide conversation. Not since the birth of the Afro-American studies department—which followed the University Hall takeover of 1969—has the University occupied such a prominent place on the national stage because of minority issues. Everybody is talking about West. Everybody has an opinion.

But if the majority of the student body thinks racial and ethnic groups on campus self-segregate, why did it take Cornel West leaving to get most students talking about race? What about the lives we live every day? The actions of students as well as administrators merit being questioned in this discussion of diversity.

Justin G. “Juice” Fong ’03 thinks we can stop talking about it now.

“I don’t think we really need to talk about it. Just live in it. That’s the end goal, isn’t it? I’m ready to drop it. It’s all one big culture now, and that’s something to be appreciated,” he says.

A little over a year ago, Fong, a Crimson editor, wrote an endpaper for this magazine. His opus for Fifteen Minutes, “The Invasian,” was one of the most ruckus-raising pieces of writing ever published on this campus. Protesters said The Crimson had published a poor piece of unnecessarily inflammatory journalism. Fong himself was inundated with e-mail. His article was widely circulated around the nation, sometimes with choice—and he says unfair—comments prefacing it. The Crimson published an apology that earned both ire and praise from all over the country.

Fong’s central point was that groups on Harvard’s campus self-segregated. But the debate over the language he used obscured what he was writing about. We classify and identify ourselves in many ways, he explains now, a year older and wiser, and people should be more open to socializing outside the comfort zones created by such classifications.

“We start splitting each other by race...The problem is that we need to stop thinking about that and just live in it,” he says. “One of the frustrations I felt, that comes off in a pretty standoffish tone in the article—I don’t appreciate it when other people of Asian descent come to me and assume a lot of things about me. I think there’s an expected role for me, based on my skin.”

Fong is half Chinese, half Japanese, and his family has been in the U.S. for many generations. He terms his views “ultra-liberal” and adds that he knows they are somewhat idealistic and come from privilege. But he contends that Harvard, too, is a place of privilege. “If this were somewhere else where people of non-white skin colors had trouble being recognized and being respected—these are issues that are not so prevalent in our community.”

Fong’s article got the campus to talk about self-segregation, says Margaret C. Anadu ’03, a student leader at the Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations. But the conversation didn’t have the right tone. “It was defensive on both sides,” she says. “That wasn’t the conversation we needed.”

During the “Invasian” controversy, Seng-Dao Yeng ’01, one of the organizers of protests against the article, was flooded with messages from students on campus—including minority students—claiming that the problems of race and ethnicity at Harvard were exaggerated. Students were quick to be defensive about the topic. “People were really hostile to the issue of race being a problem,” she says.

A year later, Yeng works in Hong Kong, far removed from Cambridge happenings. She hasn’t heard of West’s departure. “Cornel West is leaving?” she exclaims. “That’s out of control!”

In the months since the Summers-West incident was leaked, House and other e-mail discussion lists have erupted with debate. Conversations have trickled into other matters pertaining to race and ethnicity, and students across Harvard have been more engaged than ever before with questions of identity.

“It probably does take someone as big as Cornel West to leave to capture people’s attention and make them think about issues of race on campus,” Yeng says.

Incidents like West’s resignation and the publication of Fong’s article produce an instant debate. Charges of minority self-segregation are usually met by the countercharge that white students and any number of other groups (athletes, musicians, actors, computer science concentrators) also self-segregate. But fairly or unfairly, minority racial and ethnic self-segregation is by far the most visible.

“I’m just sad that most self-segregation is invisible,” Anadu says. “If you see a table full of white students, no one thinks anything.” She is not the only one to opine that putting the onus of integration solely on minority groups is unfair.

Weiler has found himself most at home socially in the Black Men’s Forum. Over dinner, I ask him one of the survey questions: How often does he eat with other black students? His response is similar to Anadu’s. He chuckles. “When do I not eat at the black table?” he asks. “There’s only a black table because there are a sea of white tables.”

Weiler, who is half black and half Jewish, chose to become more active in the black community on campus after being what he calls “incognegro” during his first year. “I had no black friends,” he says. When he arrived at Harvard, he was more involved with the Jewish community. For Weiler, a self-described “mutt” who interacts socially with students of all ethnicities, shifting his primary social community was the result of many factors, including politics (he feels his views are more liberal than those shared by the majority of the Jewish community) and the way others perceive him (“I’m seen as black”).

Like most of the minority students interviewed, he doesn’t agree with Fong’s view that it’s time to ignore race. “Not to say that Harvard hasn’t made strides. But there’s a long way to go,” he says. Minority communities, Weiler adds, come together almost through necessity and offer minority students a chance for their voices to be heard.

The first minority community to have its voice heard—and the model for all such groups that followed—was the black community.

The black community was the trailblazer in everything,” says Michael E. Rosado ’03, the outgoing president of Fuerza Latina, a pan-Latino student group. “We feel a lot of solidarity with the black students on campus.”

The students active in Harvard’s black community form a tight-knit network and the Black Students Association is one of the most vocal and active groups on campus. Black first-years can come together as part of a thrice-monthly discussion group, Freshman Black Table, and students also meet in a variety of other groups, including the Black Men’s Forum and the Association of Black Harvard Women. Some groups started by the black community, including gospel choir Kuumba, have attracted significant contingents from other races.

BSA President Brandon A. Gayle ’03, who came to Harvard after attending a predominantly white high school, found himself in the midst of a strong black community for the first time at Harvard. Though he has white friends too, the majority of his Harvard friends are black.

“The notion of segregation versus friendship is a tricky one,” he says. “People just choose friends based on similar backgrounds, similar likes and dislikes.” Because shared interests and experiences based on race is very common, Gayle says, “self-segregation” is natural and not necessarily something which needs fixing. One common experience is enduring racism. “Ethnic groups will always be around at Harvard,” he says. “Such groups have to put up with some level of crap on a daily, yearly basis...I don’t think whites will ever have to worry about racism at Harvard.”

Redd, who is black and is helping to create the forthcoming Black Guide to Life at Harvard, agrees that black students, even at Harvard, can feel attacked on a daily basis. His blocking group is three black males and three black females. “I don’t think I saw myself as having any other options,” he says. In Redd’s opinion, black students hanging out together can be a matter of survival. Association of Black Harvard Women President Kimberly H. Levy ’03 says “self-segregation” might be better termed “self-empowerment.”

There are about 100 active members of the BSA, according to Gayle. At the same time, he notes, “there are 400 other black people here. They’re doing something completely different. It’s a really small community, in the sense that those 100 people are what’s used to judge the entire community, when you have people who are doing their own thing.”

Teddy L. Wright ’04 is an example of a black student “doing his own thing.”

From across DeWolfe Street, intense-eyed Wright salutes with mock gravity. It is warm, and he is barefoot, wearing shorts and a blue camouflage bandanna knotted around his head for a walk down by the River.

“I feel like my blackness does mean a lot to me,” he says. “But it doesn’t mean I need to seek out all the other black kids on campus.” He is the only black student in his blocking group. He is not active in any black student organizations. He is a member of a final club, the Fly. He is involved in public service—after-school tutoring of elementary school children. These are kids who need role models, he says—black role models. “This is how I belong to my community,” he says. Rather than having an identity imposed on him, “this is a set of criteria I’ve actively chosen.” Often, he adds, he is the only black person on the van headed to the school.

At the other end of the spectrum is Harrel E. Conner ’02, the former brotherhood chair of the Black Men’s Forum. Conner went to a Memphis high school that was mostly black, with a white minority that socialized separately. When he refers to the Harvard community, he says, he means black students. “The community ends at the black community,” he says.

He points out that there is a wide spectrum of ethnic diversity within the black community itself. “They’re diverse and I’ve learned a lot from them. People ignore black ethnicity. We’re not all the same,” he says.

He sees diversity as something of a one-way street: All his life, he’s been exposed to the mainstream, while the reverse isn’t true. “I knew how [white people] danced, what kind of music they liked, their jokes, how they talked, and when I came here, it was like, ‘OK, I’m seeing what I’ve been taught my entire life.’ I wasn’t shocked by any white person here,” he says. “For them, the education is being around a black person.”

Leaders of black student organizations acknowledge that minority “self-segregation” exists, but they are not apologizing for it. They say that it is natural, in many ways beneficial and will probably continue into the foreseeable future.

“It’s a false pretense that we live in an integrated society,” Conner says. “We don’t.”

Of the 6,650 undergraduates who enrolled at Harvard College at the beginning of the fall 2001 term, 2,970 are white. That’s 45 percent, nearly half the student body. There is obviously no formalized voice for white students—no White Men’s Forum, no White Students Association and no White Women’s Collective. Such an organization would make a lot of people uncomfortable, but there’s not much danger of that happening. If, as some leaders of other ethnic student organizations say, white students self-segregate as much as anyone else, they are not conscious of doing so. The Crimson survey found that while Harvard’s campus has some white communities that identify strongly with an ethnicity (the Jewish community, for example), 26.3 percent of the 274 white students surveyed said their race/ethnicity was not at all a part of their identity (versus 11.9 percent of all other students). As such, when they talk about their experiences with self-segregation it is usually in reference to their experiences with or opinions about other groups.

Thomas M. Bechtold ’04 is a white Minnesotan whose blocking group is predominantly black. He says blockmate Gerard McGeary ’04 seems to know every other black man on campus, and that through their mostly black blocking group, he’s met many more black students than he would have otherwise. What does he get out of that? “More friends,” he says simply. McGeary once invited Bechtold to Freshman Black Table. Despite having friends in the group, Bechtold felt like an outsider. “They weren’t hostile…nothing like that. But I felt like they wanted to talk through their issues with each other—other black students. I don’t even know why I felt that,” he says. After that one meeting, Bechtold never went back.

Brian T. Mitchell ’03, a white student, feels he has little in common with students to whom ethnicity is very important. For example, he says he feels like an outsider at dining hall tables dominated by minorities. Mitchell expresses an opinion found commonly on campus when he says that he thinks students who focus on ethnic differences ignore a more divisive factor: class.

“I think I think people at Harvard tend to misunderstand what diversity really means,” he says. “I would value class diversity a lot more.” Mitchell, who comes from a working-class background and lived in a diverse part of central Texas, says he hasn’t found many similar people here. Many students at Harvard come from privileged backgrounds, he says.

“It’s frightening how rich the people here are,” he says. “And they just haven’t been exposed to people who aren’t rich.” Mitchell, who blocks in Lowell with three white males and one Asian male, ranks self-segregation at Harvard as a 4 on the 5-point scale. He concedes the point that self-segregation of white students isn’t as obvious as that of minorities.

“There are so many white people at Harvard, it’s hard not to have a group of people that’s mostly white,” he says, adding that he feels he shares a lack of common ground with minority students. The issues that matter to him are different.

The word “self-segregation” implies intent. But many of those who have ended up in social groups dominated by one ethnicity say they didn’t notice their situations until after the fact.

If you took roll call in the Cabot blocking group of Christopher Shim ’02-’03, it would go like this: Choi, Chung, Hur, Kim, Kim, Kim, Kwak, Kwok, Lee, Lim, Myung, Shim, Zymaris. A string of mostly Korean names. Being Korean is a part of the members’ identities, Shim says, but far from the only part. “People don’t believe me when I say we really didn’t plan it to be like this,” Shim says. “At the first blocking meeting we had, we looked at each other and said, ‘Oh, yeah, we’re all Korean.”

Shim spent his first year at Harvard rooming with Lionel L. Lynch ’02 and Emilio J. Travieso ’02. The three remain friends, but “we call ourselves the great social experiment,” Shim says. “We all got along but I guess we didn’t make as much of an effort to block together. We didn’t really hang out socially,” he says, sounding a little wistful.

Lynch, who is black, ended up blocking with a Dunster House group that includes a large number of black students. At his high school, he was one of very few black students. At Harvard, he says, it was natural for him to try to know the other black men. His blocking group, he notes, is the only Harvard group he’s active in that has six black men. “I definitely don’t consider myself having picked these people because they were black,” Lynch says. “It wasn’t a self-conscious ‘I want to live with a group of black guys.’” At the same time, Lynch admits, race formed a basis of shared experience between them and was a factor, though not the final determinant, in their decision to live together.

Race also factored into the blocking decision of roommates Kate G. Ward ’05 and Crystal I Chien Farh ’05, who found themselves sometimes at odds over their views on self-segregation. Ward, from upstate New York, is of a mixed European-Catholic background. Farh is of Chinese descent, and was born in the U.S. and raised in Hong Kong. “Probably the biggest thing that bothered me is that she said she feels more comfortable with Asians than whites,” Ward says.

The roommates’ differences started with a common interest: the opposite sex. “I gravitated towards Asian males and talked about how I’ve only dated Asians in the past. It came down to me preferring Asians here,” Farh says. “It was an issue because Kate thought I was being racist.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” Ward interjects. “It was just hard for me to understand. Growing up in America, we’re trained to be colorblind. It was a hard thing for me to accept.”

“I attributed a lot of that [attraction to Asians] to my upbringing and told her I was kind of intimidated by white people and people of other races,” Farh says. “I feel like I have a better chance with Asians. Asians hit on Asians…You see it in Annenberg too. I feel it’s more intimidating to sit at a table with non-Asians.”

The Crimson survey confirms that almost 60 percent of students haven’t dated a person of another race. “Kate actually challenged me on going after other guys,” Farh says. Their friendship has forced her to think hard about her views, she says—she has had to justify them.

Farh had difficulty becoming as comfortable among non-Asian friends as she was with Asian students. White students’ comfort levels are rarely tested to such an extent. As Kimberly J. Ravener ’03 says, while minority students are consistently forced into situations where they are outnumbered, white students generally have to consciously choose to end up in that scenario. Ravener is a self-described standard white girl in a very diverse blocking group. Through her blockmates, she’s become the rare white student who participates primarily in a minority-dominated social scene.

Kate E. Jackson ’04, who is biracial—black and white—is blonde and blue-eyed. She says she thinks she doesn’t feel the barriers some students do to hanging out with different ethnic groups. “As much as I can understand the need for minorities to feel like they have a support system...I really wish a lot more people at this school could be a part of the minority community,” she says. “I think the white kids think that they would not be welcomed...And the minority community doesn’t reach out and let the white kids know they would be welcome.”

Those who would like to see a more integrated Harvard often talk like Jackson and Fong. They say that students should reach out, become more open-minded and not be intimidated. What they have on their side is little more than rhetoric, though: They wish everyone would make a conscious effort to diversify. But there’s little evidence that that will happen in the near future: Those who defend self-segregation, though they may object to the term itself, offer a number of concrete reasons why students come together in ethnically separate groups. Such social behavior is understandable, they say; it’s beneficial and it’s so natural that even those who attack it are often guilty of self-segregating without realizing it. It is easy to believe them when they argue that some level of self-segregation should—and will—continue.

Says Gayle: “It’s up to the students to interact as they choose.”

Blythe M. Adler and Kate E. Szostak contributed to the reporting of this story.

Vasugi V. Ganeshananthan ’02, the former managing editor of The Crimson, is an English concentrator in Lowell House. She covered ethnic student organizations and campus race relations for The Crimson, and directed the team of reporters who broke the story of Summers’ appointment as University president. She is the daughter of Sri Lankan Tamil immigrants, and grew up in Bethesda, Md. To what extent does she think ethnic/racial groups at Harvard self-segregate, on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being not at all and 5 being a great deal? Before writing this scrutiny, she would have said what most people said, which was a 3 or 4.