Missing the Point

Like many of us here at Harvard, I’ve been keeping up with what’s going on in New Haven in anticipation of Harvard-Yale weekend. I’ve engaged with many of my peers on this subject in casual conversation, and I have to say that it’s made me unsettled. Too often, “Hey, have you heard about what’s going on at Yale?” has been followed by responses like “Yeah, sucks to be them, huh?” or “score one for Harvard!” or, even worse, “That’ll never happen here.”

My fellow students, we are missing the point. This isn’t about a school rivalry, or ratings and rankings. This is about institutions like ours continuing to fail significant portions of the populations they govern. It’s about the larger issue of our institutions trying to quell the voices that desire desperately to be heard, instead of critically and genuinely engaging with the problems that exist within our campus. To say that what is going on at Yale—and even Missouri-Columbia—would “never happen at Harvard” is to demonstrate ignorance as to the kind of institution we attend and to ignore the history of similar abuses that have occurred on our campus in the past and continue to this day.

I remember speaking with a friend about the apparent “white girls only” party held at Yale’s SAE, at which many of my friends at Yale were discriminated against on the basis of their skin color. I was met with a reply of “That’s terrible; it’s a good thing we go to Harvard.” But Harvard isn’t exempt.

In 1952, 11 black students woke up to the flames of a burning cross, a symbol of the KKK, outside their windows. Just a few years ago, students organized the “I, too, am Harvard” movement in direct response to constant rebukes of their legitimacy as Harvard students. Last year, a group of non-violent student protesters, who convened at the starting blocks of primal scream in order to demonstrate solidarity with the black lives that are discarded in our country every day, were met with hostile chants of “USA!” and, according to some bystanders, "stop ruining our fun." According to reports from fellow students, on the same night as Yale’s SAE’s party, people paraded, with impunity, throughout Harvard’s campus wearing black face.

Given the striking evidence, I find it disheartening and unnerving that students believe Harvard is somehow immune to the issues that plague other college campuses. And as a black student on this campus, I find it disappointing that my fellow peers fail to acknowledge the past and current wrongs of this institution against people like me, and ride off our suffering as ruining their fun.

I’m not here to complain, I’m not here to play “woe is me.” I simply want us to keep in mind that we must always be critical of our environments, especially in times where similar environments are experiencing unrest. We should see what’s happening at Yale as a reminder, as well as foreshadowing, of what can occur here if we do not engage in this kind of reflection; be it on issues of race, mental health, sexual assault, or anything of the like.

After all, to ignore the history and potential of continuation of bigotry and racism on our campus would be to further the inevitability of the level of unrest at our peer institutions coming into fruition here at Harvard.

Robert Rush '18 is a social studies concentrator living in Pforzheimer House.