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I go nuts, I do....it hurts so much, so much, it's indescribable the way it makes you feel...your whole body becomes hot, and your eyes automatically become glassy, because you just feel so inferior, because of something like that. I'll try to just walk away, but if I walk away then I cry, then I feel bad for feeling weak about it... I would feel like I needed to say something in defense of myself, because it does cause a great, overwhelming emotion within me. —Gladys, Latina, college senior, describing mistreatment because of race/ethnicity, sex, or both
Nearly eight years ago, NAACP Board Chair Julian Bond said he wished someone would do a study of race in colleges. I had written a book about women in academia,1 in which I had touched some on race as well as sex, and Bond's remark immediately struck a chord in me. What followed led me deeply into a world of silent suffering. It also introduced me to many people who are finding ways to reduce that suffering. This happened through a project called The Voices of Diversity.
I knew that, despite greater racial diversity among student bodies on many traditionally white campuses, the graduation rates for African-American, Latina/o, and Native American students on such campuses tend to lag far behind those of Asian-American and white students. I also knew that, according to one school of thought, the reason for this disparity is that members of the former groups are deficient and/or that their schools and/or families are ... as though nothing that happens while the students are in college could possibly play a role.
It seemed that the place to begin to find out whether anything happens on campus that is related to racism or to sexism, in keeping with my earlier interest and the knowledge that interactions of racism and sexism can have powerful effects of people's experiences, would be to ask the students themselves.
I no longer had a fulltime faculty position, so I could not apply for funding to do this research. After some years of efforts, with Principal Investigators Henry Louis Gates, Jr., of Harvard University and Michael Nettles of Educational Testing Service, and after the dynamic work of Dr. Nettles, a pioneer in research about race and higher education, in bringing together a wonderfully productive, supportive group of experts at a meeting at ETS, we applied for and received funding from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.2
The funding allowed us to do in-depth, one-on-one interviews with more than 200 students of color, and a small number of white students for comparison, on four very different public and private university campuses in the United States. We asked them, in essence, what things happen on their campuses that have made them feel welcomed, accepted, supported, and encouraged and which things have made them feel the opposite.
On April 7, we presented our findings publicly for the first time, telling the audience at an Invited Session sponsored by the American Educational Research Association's Social Justice Section that - not surprisingly but certainly disturbingly - we had found on every campus an enormous amount of racism, sexism, and combinations of the two.
The manifestations often took the form of what Chester Pierce has called microaggressions,3 which are kinds of mistreatment that are less blatant than physical violence and name-calling. For example, classmates rolling their eyes when a Black student speaks in class or looking surprised when a woman student answers a difficult question are microaggressions, as are white students turning away from Black students when the professor asks them to form study groups.
Mark Harris, who is African-American, did half of the interviews, while I did the other half, and Catherine Millett and her team at ETS used sophisticated techniques of analysis for identifying patterns in what we heard. But more compelling than anything we could say to describe or summarize what the students told us are the students' own words (e.g., see quotation that begins this essay). At the end of each interviewing day, despite the fact that in various ways, Mark and I have each been aware of our society's racism and sexism, we would meet and acknowledge how shattering it was to hear the many first-person stories, see the devastation on the faces of the students who were the targets of mistreatment, hear their voices as they described the way these incidents hampered their attempts to function academically, socially, and emotionally.
Due to the relative subtlety of microaggressions, students feel self-doubt and torment when someone does or says something that is not blatant hate speech but seems to be based on race or sex bias or both. Raymond, who is African-American, describes the painful and emotionally draining dilemma of having to wonder, when someone is unfriendly, if it is because they are racist or just having a bad day:
I have to stop and think sometimes, ‘Are they being racist? Or, is that just how they act? Or, are they just not being friendly because they're having a bad day?' So I try not to let it get into my head and make me angry and things like that. I just try to think it through, like maybe there are other reasons why they're not friendly. So I try not to think about all the negative and try to think about the positive. I do speak and try to get them to speak, but if they don't want to, I just try to go on with my day. It makes me feel like I am not wanted.
And when Demonde is inclined to act aggressively in response to mistreatment but suppresses that inclination for fear of causing yet more trouble for African-Americans -and especially for African-American men who are likely to be considered physically violent - and instead just walks away, he feels regret for having done nothing. Describing this devastating Catch-22 situation, he says:
I don't feel that there is anything I can do. If I do anything physical, I'm in trouble. I feel useless. I'm being hurt by this person. It's messing with me emotionally. I'm getting angry. ...I'm not stable, and the fact that I cannot do anything about it makes me feel even worse. ...sometimes you can walk away from situations, then it just eats at you for days, and you're like, "Man, I should have done this...." and in your head, you're going over and over what you would have done if you see this person again, what you would have said. And when you see this person again you're like, "You know what, I still can't do anything." Ever been in a situation when there's nothing you can do, and you felt so strong about something? I mean, it's crushing.
Many students on all four campuses told us that they did not know to whom they could speak on campus about these matters. They feared that their friends - especially the white ones - would consider them overly sensitive or weak for not being able to let mistreatment roll off their backs, and indeed some described painful instances in which white students had in fact reacted in those ways. Few felt that there was anyone in their university's administration to whom they could turn. A common remark was that they coped by trying to ignore such incidents and to assume that "What you get out of college just depends on what you put into it." Although it is admirable that they would try to continue to do their best, for them to have to struggle in isolation, while neither the administration, the faculty, nor their peers seem to want to acknowledge or grapple with these issues means that the students experience the mistreatment as their own problem, with which they must find ways to deal.
To present these findings publicly was what I had hoped to do from the moment I heard Julian Bond's speech. The more such experiences remain hidden, the more devastating they are, and the less likely they are ever to be acknowledged as social problems that call for social solutions. Ideally, solutions should be initiated at least in part by those with power and influence rather than the targets who are already having to spend time, energy, and emotion trying to get through being mistreated.
One of the most wonderful experiences in directing the Voices of Diversity study was getting to work with the people focusing on diversity at Missouri State University. As you can imagine, in order to obtain permission to interview their students, from the outset we had to guarantee to conceal the names of the four institutions. This was not surprising to us and was totally understandable. But listen to what happened with Missouri State, whose President, Michael Nietzel, made the decision to go public about the problems identified in our report and his intention to try to rectify the problems on their campus.
In May, 2009, we presented to Missouri State a summary of what their students had told us. Their campus was the first of the four to which we took our project. A wonderful group of people there, including but not limited to (in alphabetical order) Leslie Anderson, Charlotte Hardin, Juan Meraz, Wes Pratt, and others had for years been trying to increase the racial/ethnic diversity of the student body and find ways to make that diversity work for everyone on campus. I cannot claim to know about the internal workings at MSU, but I had heard that the MSU President at the time, Michael Nietzel, was deeply committed to diversity matters.
Very soon after our report was delivered, as I understand it, President Nietzel went to the MSU Board of Governors, who quickly declared that inclusiveness was now one of the university's top priorities. From then, there came a cascade of actions (continuing currently to gather steam under current President James E. Cofer, Sr.) - notice that: not just more committees or more data-gathering but actions - in every realm and at every level of the university. I recently received a list of more than twenty discrete actions they have taken, ranging from the President and his top-level cabinet taking two four-hour training sessions about diversity and inclusion to the holding of a series of cross-campus discussions about white privilege to the creation by Carol Maples of a theatre troupe called Giving Voice, which enacts vignettes related to racism, sexism, and other forms of bias as part of workshops for faculty and others and in classrooms when invited (and has been used as well with juvenile justice workers).
MSU is in many ways a model of how actions can be taken and genuine commitment to these issues can be modeled. They have even made connection with the City Council of Springfield, MO, where MSU is located, and the Chamber of Commerce, both bodies of which have implemented diversity initiatives, and they have catalyzed the creation of cooperative work on diversity among the five institutions of higher education in their area.
In the next essay here, I will write about the sexism the students reported and some interactions of racism with sexism.
In the meantime, the next time you hear anyone claim that we live in a postracial or postfeminist society, please remember what the students told us.
Copyright ©2011 by Paula J. Caplan. All rights reserved.
References
[1] Caplan, P. J. (1993) Lifting a ton of feathers: A woman’s guide to surviving in the academic world. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
[2] This project was funded by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, which was established in 1930.The organization supports children, families and communities as they strengthen and create conditions that propel vulnerable children to achieve success as individuals and as contributors to the larger community and society. Grants are concentrated in the United States, Latin America and the Caribbean, and the
Southern African countries of Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, South Africa, Swaziland and Zimbabwe.
[3]Pierce, Chester. (1970). Offensive mechanisms. In F. Barbour (Ed.), The Black seventies. Boston: Porter Sargent, pp. 265-82.
Pierce, Chester. (1974). Psychiatric problems of the Black minority. In S. Arieti (Ed.), American handbook of psychiatry. New York: Basic Books, pp. 512-23.
