The White Man’s Burden

French, Russian, Midwestern, and Nebraskan ancestry make me among the whitest of white men. Despite a whole life of effort I still can’t dance, and I still can’t jump. I carry the guilt of a privileged position wherever I go. It’s a hard life, that of a white male. Yet wallowing in my own pity, dwelling on the collective tragedies of the white race, and retreating into the ranks of my white brethren fails to provide me with adequate comfort. As a result, I’ve come up with the revolutionary idea of white integration. Up until now, it has been racial and ethnic minorities enjoying the delightful process of integration, it’s about time that I get in on the excitement.

Everywhere I look I see others integrating. It was right where my dorm stands today that the early “savages” of this great land were taught the virtues of our civilization. In fact, without integration into our superior Western tradition how would they have even found the word “genocide” to describe what was happening to their people? And black people have pretty much made a whole month’s worth of history out of integration—from buses, to water fountains, to elementary schools! And let’s not forget Arabs, Hispanics, or Asians—some of them have integrated so much they should put it on their résumés. At Harvard, minorities integrate everyday as the few, or sometimes the only one, in organizations like The Crimson, the Lampoon, the Institute of Politics, or some class. Since everyone else has gone through the fun times of integrating, why not turn the tables?

I didn’t always think this way. I thought I would find myself at home in the halls of white supremacy. It was just another on a long list of injustices against the white race when I found that for everyone except me, there were ethnic organizations like the Asian-American Association, the Black Men’s Forum, and Fuerza Latina. Why did everyone else have to self-segregate themselves and leave me out in cold? Why couldn’t colors and cultures just be erased to force conformity with the dominant race? The more I thought about it, the more I realized that Harvard itself was just one big white organization, where my own self-separation was a part of every day.

I say self-separation, as opposed to self-segregation, because segregation is imposed, whereas separation is a choice. Self-separation is a choice about power, a choice that ethnic and racial organizations make when they choose to organize “self-segregated” groups and empower themselves through cultural expression, political action, and social networking. Such revelations led me to attend meetings, participate in their constant discourse, and even work for some of their causes. Whites fight to give their children wealth, while minorities fight to give their children rights. Is not their choice to separate of the noblest quality? That same line of thinking brought me to realize that whites themselves, consciously or not, make the same choice as these organizations all the time. Except in the case of the dominant the choice of separation is one to keep power, or even to take it from others, entirely for themselves.

A new study at UCLA, says that we white people self-separate more than anyone else on college campuses. Douglass Massey’s “American Apartheid” cites that one in four whites prefer to live in a neighborhood entirely absent of black people. White people have run miles and miles away from minorities, leaving vast suburban wastelands all over the country, wastelands where everything looks the same and white people do variations of all the same things. It’s left adults rotting on the couch in front of the TV and adolescents with nothing better to do in the middle of the night than go to Denny’s. Even with everything anyone could ever need, this homogeneity perpetuates a culture of made-up unneeded problems. I wouldn’t be surprised if we start impaling each other with the white pickets off of our fences. This has to stop, and we have to stop it by integrating.

The principles of diversity tell us that interacting with people of different backgrounds is enlightening, but it takes more than passively interacting to truly integrate. Only by devoting time or dedicating oneself to the worthwhile cause of others that can one truly understand their plight. Our self-separation makes many pressing causes of the day seem to not be our own, and only getting involved in these organizations and communities can make us understand how we fit into the solution. All we have to do is start simple. There are no racial restrictions to any of the ethnic organizations on campus. Attend a meeting. I have myself have attended many a meeting to emerge unscathed. We have to attempt the process of integration ourselves before we can ask even more of it from others. The quest for the perfection of the self is endless, but the pursuit for the betterment of others is easily achieved.

Kyle A. de Beausset ’08, a Crimson editorial comper, lives in Matthews Hall. He is a member of the Black Men’s Forum.