Guest Article from the Chair of the Boston College Graduate Students of Color Association
Institutional Racism at BC
Why do only certain persons recognize it?
Craig A. Ford, Jr., Chair, Boston College Graduate Students of Color Association
About two weeks ago, Jack Dunn, university spokesperson and director of the Office of News and Public Affairs, told us that it was quite near impossible to recognize institutional racism at Boston College. “The supposition that BC is an institutionally racist place,” he tells the Heights, “is a difficult argument to make.” Here he speaks in opposition to the unregistered, though not perhaps very unknown in these pages, student organization Eradicate #BostonCollegeRacism, which claims the very opposite: that institutional racism is real, and that Boston College is one of the many theaters upon which such a force manifests itself.
A natural question to ask in this debate is, “Who’s right? Whom should I believe?” I’d like to contend here that one illuminating way to get at the answer to this question is to look at Dunn’s own words. He has more of them for us. Once again, about the idea of institutional racism—which for him may as well be placed into scare quotes—“I think that’s a false assumption, an unfair assumption, and [it] impugns the integrity of so many good people on this campus who’ve joined this community precisely because they’re people of good will who oppose all elements of bigotry.”
For Dunn in this response, the proper recognition of institutional racism depends, in part, on a certain relationship to ‘bigotry’, a character trait that is ostensibly not possessed by ‘people of good will.’ If we are to distill this into a hypothesis, then, it would be that the presence of people of good will, of people who refuse bigotry on racial grounds, is a factor, if not the determinative factor, in judging whether or not Boston College is institutionally racist.
But recognition depends on at least two things: a theory about what you’re recognizing, and evidence that a particular candidate fits the theory.
Dunn’s theory of recognition concerning institutional racism—at least from the words he’s given us—is wrong.
What theory of institutional racism?
A careful examination of institutional racism depends on what we would first understand as racism itself. Here’s where some folks start on the right track, but then stop, and where they stop is at identifying racism as bigotry or as overtly racist actions only. The problem here is not that these acts aren’t really racist—if, for example, you draw a swatstika made out of human feces in a residence hall, you better believe that’s a racist act—but it rather is that limiting racism to overt acts is too narrow of a criterion. People who maintain this view refuse to delve into deeper questions, like What conditions exist that allow someone to think that such an act is permissible? It’s answering questions like this one that get at what the reality of racism really is. To speak adequately about that reality, one must say that racism is an ecosystem that fosters a climate in which it is permissible to organize financial, social, and political opportunities; in which it is permissible to confer privileges; and in which it is normal to incite feelings of security and danger based on the color that one’s skin is believed to have. When seen within this frame, overtly racist acts are what happens when the ecosystem is functioning properly, not when the world is crumbling. And—if we are to speak within the American context for a moment, though not necessarily limiting ourselves to it—when these financial, political, and social opportunities, these privileges, and these feelings demanding mandatory security all seem to prioritize the bodies of those that can be identified as white, what you have is what scholars of race call white supremacy. It is, therefore, white supremacy—a racist ecosystem organized along a spectrum that privileges white bodies—that provides the conditions for and subsequently enables overtly racist actions to take place.
So what happens when one allows the word ‘institutional’ to modify the word ‘racism’? Rather than highlighting the attitudes and conscious biases of persons who might commit overtly racist acts, what the word tells us about is the resiliency of the racist ecosystem. To put our American context in a phrase, institutional racism normalizes white supremacy. This means that the daily contexts of our lives provides the stage upon which white bodies are privileged, are given opportunities, or are allowed to avoid certain penalties that non-white bodies do not share without extra effort—it is, in other words, the daily context in which the flourishing of white bodies and the priorities that those bodies name are “business as usual.” When it is normal, then, to have “good” neighborhoods and schools be synonymous with majority white neighborhoods and schools; when it is normal, then, for white bodies to accede more often to positions of power and authority within major companies even when non-white bodies work just as hard; when it is normal, then, for 75% of all those imprisoned for drug offenses to be black or Latino, even though the majority of illegal drug users and dealers nationwide are white, as Michelle Alexander tells us, then what we have is evidence of institutional racism.
What evidence of Institutional Racism at BC?
We do not have to look very far back in time to find institutional racism at BC--but we can. To begin, look at an article in the Heights from 1988, which also happens to be the year I was born, 27 years ago. This particular article is an interview with Don Brown, who was the AHANA director at the time. This is what he had to say when asked the question, “What do you see specifically as the biggest problem or problems facing the AHANA community on this campus?”
Subtle forms of racism, that's a problem that's being verbalized more and more. Feelings related to that, feelings of not feeling a part of the environment. A good number of AHANA do not feel a part of the BC community. That's been a perennial problem, and that's not a problem unique to Boston College. The challenge of the university is to really begin developing strategies aimed at making AHANA students feel welcome. It's not enough to place a focus on recruiting AHANA students. I think the real challenge is to ensure that once those students begin matriculating that they feel welcomed.
He would also note the financial struggles that many AHANA students endure (“What happens oftentimes is that students are forced to work twenty or thirty hours a week in order to contribute to the payment of that tuition and what happens is that it has implications for how the student does academically”); the need to find and retain more faculty of color (“More and more AHANA students are beginning to verbalize concern about the absence of persons of color on the faculty and on the staff and in the administration.”); and the challenges of a curriculum that seems too Euro-centric (“Students are verbalizing concern as well about curriculum, about the Euro-centric(sic) focus. The curriculum at Boston College does not do enough by way of taking persons of color into consideration.”).
When I could consume my first (legal) alcoholic beverage at the age of twenty-one in 2009, BC would task its Diversity Working group with “developing an approach to diversity-related issues.” In 2011, they found—among other things—that black students report higher levels of dissatisfaction with their overall campus experience, that black students consistently mention how segregated the BC campus is, and that, devastatingly, “Black students report experiencing discrimination at rates higher than the rest of the student population, and experience being singled out in class for their race and ethnicity.”
These findings prompted the same committee to assemble focus groups in 2013, where Black students began to name what they believed were the causes of their dissatisfaction. Their diagnoses included “BC likes its whiteness;” “They seem to not like being diverse;” “There is no diversity of thought;” and “White students are not interested or open to others.” In other words, they named white supremacy. Even a focus group of Senior students at the time—a cross-section across races—remarked that “diversity is polarized on campus,” that “there is no diversity in the curriculum,” and that there was a lack of diversity among the faculty. Perhaps most surprisingly, when white students were asked about reasons for black student dissatisfaction, one-third of them said, “Because of the hostility that exists in America towards blacks.”
At the conclusion of these focus groups, Student Affairs issued a final report, called the Black Student Experience report, in which they summarized student experiences in the following way: “Boston College does not acknowledge racial tensions on campus and the most common approach is reactive to major volatile incidents on campus.” In the very next paragraph, Student Affairs would write, “[S]ubtle instances of racial tension dominate the Black experience at Boston College.” What did they call for? Among other things, increasing the number of black persons at Boston College.
When campus activists talk about institutional racism at Boston College, they are talking about the resiliency of the same problems that have lasted at least over the last twenty-seven years—this author’s entire lifetime. Consonant with the worries described by Don Brown, Eradicate #BostonCollegeRacism has pointed to the lack of faculty, staff, and administrators of color on campus, and, recently, the AHANA Leadership Council has initiated an entire campaign around awareness and administrative action about the same issue. Moreover, Eradicate #BostonCollegeRacism has asked the administration to require diversity and anti-oppression training for the entire BC community, which is consistent with one of Student Affairs’ recommendations in 2013 to “identify ways to broaden diversity in Orientation programs.”
And it is something that is desperately needed, because even the overt signs of racism—the signs that the ecosystem of white supremacy is working well—are out in full bloom. Just look at what students are saying on Yik-Yak about recent student activism on behalf of persons of color: “I liked black people better when they were in chains.” Or the sentiment of another person who said that time could be better spent protesting high prices in Mac, than on protesting incidents of institutional racism.
Who’s Right? Whom Should I Believe?
Like I said in the beginning, the power to recognize something depends for a large part on what theory you use to recognize it. Once we recognize racism as an ecosystem that in the American context supports white supremacy, we see that overt acts of racism are tips of an iceberg that goes much deeper into America’s racial consciousness. BC is no different—and that is what these studies, conducted by BC’s own office of Student Affairs, shows. To malign Eradicate #BostonCollege Racism, as Dunn does, as “unproductive,” especially when Eradicate #BostonCollegeRacism has shown that Dunn’s assessment is altogether inaccurate, and to deny the existence of institutional racism at BC, is to erase the decades of work that administrators of good will have used to combat it—black and white and every shade of color besides.
This is how far Dunn’s words get us, to the brink of uttering different words that construe evidence differently in a more adequate theory of racism; to the brink of words that organize coalitions around racial justice; to the brink of words that say that we’ve had enough dialogue—that whatever “strategy” the Provost and the current Vice President for Student Affairs have in mind is too slow—and that the time for accountability is upon us; to the brink of admitting that institutional racism exists in order to begin the process of eradicating it.
