Let’s Talk About Race

Growing up, my friends were never divided along color lines.

I attended an international school in Guatemala all of my life, where identity was more about where you were from than what color your skin was. Cesar and Ron were not black; they were Dominican and Bajan-Israeli. Peter, Anabel, and Miho were not Asian; they were Korean, Taiwanese, and Japanese. I was Guatemalan, born and raised, and the fact that I was white was secondary.

I learned so much from my diverse group of friends in high school, so I wanted to find the same in college. I would have no trouble doing that, I thought, especially given Harvard’s extraordinarily diverse undergraduate population.

So I did the typical first-year thing: I did a reasonably good job of making friends, I joined crew, I hung out with the people in my dorm, and I worked as hard as I could at academics. But I felt that, to a certain degree, I didn’t belong anywhere. It was a feeling I got from a lot of my friends, too, the ones who didn’t identify strongly with a certain culture, religion, or activity. I wanted to get to know everyone, not just the people in certain pre-set categories.

Still, that didn’t prevent people from trying to categorize me. More at Harvard than anywhere else, people would explicitly ask me about my racial background. I would say that I was from Guatemala, and the person would tag me as Hispanic, even going so far to imagine a fictitious accent I don’t have. I took it as a compliment—better than being called a “gringo,” as I am in Guatemala.

A few times, people even decided that I had some Asian blood. You have Asian eyes, they said, after I told them my father was born in Taiwan. To this day, I’d have trouble convincing a lot of them otherwise.

It didn’t really bother me. I just felt like race was an important distinction for some people to make, and even if I didn’t fit within their categories very well, that was okay.

It didn’t really bother me—until one moment midway through fall semester. I loved taking the back stairs up to the ledge above Annenberg, where I could just take it all in. I would stand there and admire the paintings and sculptures, the high hammerbeam trusses, and the stained glass windows with their beautiful blue, yellow, red, and orange panes, each separated by thick black lines to depict a variety of Western, almost religious, images. I would watch as my classmates arrived from their myriad activities, filed through the meal lines, then sat down with their respective cliques.

Before, when I was down there with them, I only saw these cliques as different entryways, different activities, and different classes. Up there on that ledge, though, I didn’t have my glasses and faces were a blur, so I couldn’t help but see that the tables were almost all divided by race.

It was then that I realized that almost all of the meaningful relationships I had forged—in crew, in classes, in my entryway—were with white people. Furthermore, all of the activities I was interested in pursuing further involved interaction primarily with white males. It was frustrating to realize that even for someone who had a diverse group of friends in high school, there were barriers to meaningful interaction with people of different races.

I witnessed a lot of my white peers reacting to that same frustration in many different ways. Some questioned the legitimacy of ethnic and cultural student groups; others formed identities as distant from racial issues as possible.

No one did much to change the sources of our frustration. Rather than cross barriers themselves, they invited people of other races to make that leap—to punch their clubs, comp their publications, join their teams. Of course, none of this did anything to remedy the imbalance.

After that moment in Annenberg, there was no question in my mind that race dominates social interactions at Harvard. Many of my black, Asian, or Latino acquaintances could have told me that, but as a white male, I was not being defined by the color of my skin. It doesn’t matter how may times I attend the Monday meetings of the Black Men’s Forum. People are not going to see that on the street, in class, or when I go out at night. Even when I wear a tie for BMF’s tie day, people think it’s for something else. I have to wear my tie with informal clothes just so people will realize that I am identifying myself with the BMF, and not just dressing up.

There are a lot of lessons to be learned from my experience with race. First of all, I am not alone. A lot of white people care about racial barriers, and would willingly do something if they saw avenues for change.

Most importantly, however, is that everyone—not just those in the minority—needs to come to terms with the racial lines that define social interaction at Harvard. I think the place to start is to make open and honest discourse a part of our identities from the beginning. It’s not always easy to think and talk about race, and I don’t blame the people who choose to avoid the topic. But talking about race is our responsibility in an age of diversity; it cannot be avoided.

The most beautiful stained glass window I’ve ever seen was one in which the different colors of glass were melted together, free from the defining black lines, to depict a sunset over the ocean. The horizon was sharp at the edges, but the pane blurred as the blue water and the yellow and red sky reflected the orange sun in the center, the colors spilling over each other in a fantastic display. Our eyes take in the world as a blur. It is only in our minds that lines are created in order for us to perceive the world.

Kyle A. De Beausset ’08, an editorial editor, is an environmental sciences and public policy concentrator in Leverett House. He joined the Black Men’s Forum during his freshman spring.