Black Mischief

In more genteel days, Harvard’s curriculum was nearly all required; the readings and teaching proposed to the youth a broad view of all that was thought beautiful and good for the gentleman. Modern fancies, however, have overwhelmingly favored the eviternal proliferation of options, whittling down the common texts for every entering class to the contents of one slim pamphlet, “Community Conversations.”

In 1993, Archie C. Epps III, then the dean of students, responded to a special charge that he received to address race relations with a program called “Harvard Discovery.” At the core of the one-day exercises was a booklet of readings ranging from Emerson to Henry Louis Gates Jr., now the Fletcher University Professor. Its purpose, Epps said, was “to take us from diversity to unity as a class and as a College.”

Epps’s day has disappeared but “Community Conversations” remains, albeit in a slightly altered form. Over the past few years the pieces shifted toward equally pressing issues for freshmen, like perfectionism. However, following 2007’s “Quad Incident,” in which a group of black students were questioned by the Harvard police, the Freshman Dean’s Office seems to have decided that the readings needed to be refocused radically. In the process, it produced a program that consciously rejected not only Epps’s legacy but the virtues of balance and free exchange in favor of an echo chamber resonating with shrieks of inevitable conflict and indelible privilege.

The whole plan got afoot last fall when Thomas A. Dingman ’67, the dean of freshmen, took several upperclassmen to a theatrical essay toward racial understanding, “Nigger Wetback Chink.” While the group found the show useful as a point of departure, they were naturally concerned by its obvious drawbacks, such as the three-man troupe’s inattention to gender issues.

Dingman chose to hash out the details with a committee, though some selected were unfit in act and temperament for so delicate a task. Among them was J. Lorand Matory ’83, professor of anthropology, who, during the time on the committee, complained that he and other partisans of Palestine were, in his words, being persecuted by “a moneyed and media-connected American Israeli Defense Force…agile with the pen and the campaign donation.”

Also on the committee was Dr. S. Allen Counter, professor of neuroscience and director of the Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations. Counter has had a curiously strong record for ethnic vituperation. In 1980, writing to The Crimson to protest a film screening, he played on anti-German stereotypes extensively, though no one involved was German. Counter used the same venue to vent his spleen on the Jews in 1992, in response to bad press about the Harvard Foundation from The Crimson. In the letter he blames “Crimson writers active in Hillel” for fomenting these complaints. He apologized for the latter remarks.

But in 2002 Counter went back to the old smearing in the pages of the Black Collegian, promoting not understanding, but resentment. Therein he praises the descendents of American slaves, a “special race,” he says, for almost single-handedly advancing American social justice in the 20th century while other minority groups, who had been complicit in white supremacy, were merely mooching off their affirmative action benefits. Overlooking historical discrimination against them, he contends that Asians were “designated as ‘honorary Whites’ in order that they might also own Black-skinned people as slaves,” and that they, along with Hispanics, were frequently admitted to “anti-Black” schools as equals of whites in the system of racial discrimination.

Such were those entrusted to introduce the class of 2012 to Harvard’s take on racial understanding. As you would expect, the readings discuss the thoughts of those with a wide range of opinions and backgrounds, from proponents of race-based affirmative action to partisans of the class-based variety, from a “self described ‘forty-nine-year-old Black lesbian feminist socialist mother of two’” to a member of a “Black Nationalist church with a Pan Africanist philosophy.” While a couple of the readings dwell upon the figure of the wrong-headed, young, white man, unable to acknowledge his racial privilege, the pieces encourage not only hackneyed white guilt but male, middle-class, Christian, heterosexual, and able-bodied guilt as well. Likewise, the freshmen were exposed to a poetic call for revolution and thereby were informed of the existence of a “war between races.”

The committee hoped that the assortment presented a “coherent set of writings,” but the pieces often fail to proceed logically. One author, for example, attempts to demonstrate the power of white privilege by citing a study of poor white women at a selective college and the importance of lucky breaks in their success. Aside from the fact that the sample was highly skewed—of course those who were fortunate are more likely to get into a good college—the author provides no evidence that these unmerited indulgences were based on race or that the experience of non-whites was any different—just a bald assertion. Responding to the concern that affirmative action is reverse racism, the same writer lightly dismisses the concern by likening the situation to a see-saw. Another author, incidentally a member of the selection committee, states matter-of-factly that, in America, “black males [are] seen as criminals.”

If the committee members think such selections contribute to mutual understanding, they are fools. If they do not, they are, I’m afraid, fiends.



Roger G. Waite ’10 is a classics concentrator in Winthrop House. He is publisher of The Harvard Salient.