Surviving white supremacy: Take a seat
I hear it time and time again. “I don’t have rights here,” the well-meaning student says to me as I allow my eyes to unfocus from his and begin to gaze at his milky white skin, adorned with hipster-esque clothing that most likely came from American Apparel. “The new drinking policy, the termite infestation, we have to do something.”
Whether I find myself observing a meeting of students who want to change the school’s rights to their society’s logo, or listening to the buzz of students wanting to publish an independent, radical ‘zine, it has become apparent that these students are preoccupied with the concerns of white, middle-class, masculinist America.
Whether the loathing is about Whittier College’s revised drinking policy or about student conduct procedures, I am always left wondering why the same group of students tend to feel that their rights are being violated, when in fact their experiences at Whittier, and in higher education in general, reflect the extraordinary opportunity that our culture has created for them.
In fact, just the other day I was approached by a fellow student and told that he would like to tell high school visitors to not come here because “we don’t have rights.”
My first reaction to this statement was to ask the question that has probed my mind ever since. Who is “we” in this statement? Surely, you must understand that there are differences in our experiences.
While being held responsible for hosting a party in which an intoxicated student requires a medical transport might seem a little oppressive to you, the Social Host Responsibility Policy is not the first thing I think of when I hear the word “oppression.”
And while we are on the topic, neither is the “new drinking policy.” As a woman, I am disturbed that more of these students aren’t on board with the revised drinking policy, considering the connection between alcohol and rape on college campuses.
You see, I am not a middle-class, straight, white male. I am a queer, Xicana woman of trans* experience who comes from a working class background.
While I am privileged in so many ways—education, ability, language and citizenship to name a few—my marginalized identities have made my experiences, and therefore my concerns, quite different from the dominant group on this campus.
My priorities are much more basic and essential to my survival than are the priorities of the normative culture on campus.
I am interested in issues of access and justice, such as ensuring access to safe bathrooms, and not on getting away with smoking weed in my dorm room.
Unlike students who subscribe to the dominant male, white, heteronormative ideologies on this campus, subjugated students are forced to confront systemic oppression.
Students of color have to confront reality that, for example, the majority of African-Americans who earn their doctorates do so in education administration, resulting in a low number of African-American faculty according to Payne Hiraldo in The Role of Critical Race Theory in Higher Education.
As the faculty owns and directs the curriculum, African-American’s and black epistemologies are thus excluded from the process of producing knowledge.
We see this reality every day at Whittier College, where the number of black faculty is alarmingly low, and most likely results in the low retention of black, male students.
When white male students continue to dominate conversations about justice on this campus, which is what I feel happened in a recent course I took, the narratives of marginalized groups are subjugated to the white, male, heteronormative voice.
This results in the reinforcement of structural white supremacist patriarchy which remains compliant with our current state of ostensible diversity, an ideology that thinks coloring our campus like a box of crayons is social justice.
You see, our concerns are not the same. I want to ask my doctor about my canker sores without getting asked intrusive questions about my sexuality and being told that I might have HIV, when really it was the stress of being a college student that caused them.
I want to change the silence that pervades rape survivors on our campus, creating a culture in which survivors feel safe to come forward and report their assailants.
I want to talk about basic access to healthcare for queer and trans* students on-campus, healthcare that doesn’t tell you be more careful next time when you were too afraid to tell the health center that your reason for getting an STI test was because you were raped.
There is no “we.” Our experiences and our lives are different. The dominant culture, the male, white, heterosexual culture, does not represent me or my concerns and our use/disuse of “rights” are definitely different.
Students from marginalized groups and disenfranchised communities must create our own space, our own voice, on this campus and have our voices move from the margins to the center.
Students who do not face institutional racism, sexism, etc. must recognize their own positionality and understand that sometimes, they need to take a seat.
Originally published on www.thequakercampus.com.
