Today I was introduced to the I Too, Am Harvard campaign. Ostensibly a marketing project for her upcoming play of the same title, Harvard sophomore Kimiko Matsuda-Lawrence has launched a tumblr with the now familiar convention of serious sign-holding teens staring forlornly into the camera with deep messages and/or snarky comments on their aforementioned signs. This batch deals specifically with the microaggression that white Harvard students have said to black Harvard students over the course of their time in that venerable Ivy League institution.
I have to admit that my first reaction was kind of derisive. Oh, you went to the WHITEST place on the PLANET and are upset that they have no earthly clue how to interact with black people? How terrible it must be for you, with only your massively elitist golden ticket, oh I mean diploma, to soak up your tears at night.
This, of course, comes from my own experience as a person of color at a vastly white, expensive private institution. I was warned, multiple times, before I decided to go to Chapman.
“It’s in the middle of Orange county, they used to lynch Mexicans there.”
“The only Mexican those kids ever met was the maid.”
“You’re not going to have money like they do.”
All of it was true. During my time on campus, Chapman students started a Facebook club called The Anti-Ching-Chong Club (or something like that, I can’t find the original article), Chapman itself denied charter to a Jewish fraternity on shit grounds (since approved, I’ve been told), and student attempts to found a diversity center were responded to with various incidences of racist graffiti across campus.
I used to joke that you could always tell who was on scholarship because when you showed up for class there’d be five Mexicans with notebooks patiently waiting for the professor.
College wasn’t for me. It was clear that my brothers and sisters of color where there to serve the university, not the other way around. They gave us an insane deal on our tuition, they got the diversity numbers prospective students were looking for, and today we walk around with a good looking degree we paid basically nothing for. It sure beats going to Cal State Dominguez Hills, which is where we all would have gone otherwise. Not that we were bad academically, far from it, we were picked because our above average academic performance and our ethnic heritage combined to make Chapman look real good on paper. Dominguez Hills was the only place any of us could afford otherwise.
But should college have been for me? Owing to my own poverty, I don’t think my college experience would have been any better had I been white. In fact, I’m sure it would have been worse if I only fulfilled an academic need rather than both an academic and a racial need for Chapman. Being a Latina didn’t make it easier for me to get into school. But I believe it did afford me some financial aid I wouldn’t have gotten if my parents were white. It also gave me a lot of points with white professors in a predominately white liberal arts program. I got person of color points that lent a legitimacy to the things I said and the papers I wrote in that context that was completely undeserved. But I took advantage of it because I needed to keep my grades up.
Sometimes, tokenism is a privilege. Frequently it ends up costing you as much as it makes you, but at least it’s a wash and not a loss like minority status tends to be everywhere else.
But this isn’t about me, it’s about the children of Harvard, the graduating class of 2017. Coming of age a full 10 years after I did. Do they deserve to belong to their college? The answer, of course, is a resounding yes. But the guts of the matter are more complicated than that.
The layers of privilege that land a person in the ivy league, the layers of social, financial, and psychological fencing that exist to keep trash like us out is a fucking mess. I was just talking privilege on Reddit today, and how marginalized people are taught to internalize the idea that the world doesn’t belong to us. So people of color, or any other minority status, standing up and demanding ownership is not only novel, but totally feather ruffling. For all of us. My college experience was just to be grateful they let me in the gates. I think it was a good deal, and I’ve gotten way more out of the bargain than Chapman ever gained by getting an A grade bean on their roster for four years. But my memories of undergrad are of putting in time.
For me, those years were exhaustion and survival. Trying to get to the next paper, the next test, all the while working, living in my car, staying with friends, selling handmade goods, scraping and sleeping in study nooks, parking lots, couches, and sundry other hardship details. But weather my lack of belonging to the Chapman community is due to race or class, who can say. I know that among the other scholarship students, both white and non-white, my experience was typical. We all had jobs, responsibilities, and other places to be. What little we were involved in campus life only contributed more to our feelings of otherness and isolation. I was unable to put in the hours my unemployed friends could, nor was I able to be the activist I wanted to be, given the circumstances. I supported their attempts to subvert materialism by running on a barter economy, but you can’t pay the rent with biodegradable installation art.
The cynic in my says that these are the children of the wealthy, here to claim what is theirs. Not as people of color, but as people of wealth. It is true that rich people have a privilege regardless of race just like white people have another kind of privilege regardless of class. But what do I know? Maybe the last ten years have transformed the academic landscape to such an extent that even people like me have a place in education rather than being stats jackers, never really meant to fit in at the university of the upper middle class.
Looking back, I’m honestly not even sure I’d benefit from an atypical American college experience. Overall, I think that the reality gave me more preparation for life post-graduation than any amount of frat parties or week-long sit-ins ever could. At the end of the day, people don’t care where you come from, they are completely unimpressed by your experience. Only what you do, and more specifically, what you can do for them, matters. Which turns out to be great for us scholarship kids. This is already a mindset we’re totally familiar with. Children of privilege who make assumptions of ownership may run into problems where they don’t actually have ownership. Sadly, that’s probably not a lot of places.