By Alissa Dos SantosThe Daily Northwestern
The Daily: Do you think Northwestern is diverse, and how do you view diversity on campus?
Coley Harvey: The biggest thing is money. … Look at schools like Duke, Stanford, even Yale, Dartmouth, schools like that, that are kind of more comparable. And you’re right, you’ll still see that at schools like that, in terms of, say, for African Americans, the numbers are 15 percent, 11 percent, as opposed to (NU’s) five and six percent.
Cristina Ramos: Another thing that goes along with the money issue is recruitment. (Boston College) and Villanova are schools where a lot of Puerto Ricans go. … In my high school, you would have BC twice a month come talk to us, but I never heard anything about Northwestern. I found it by chance.
The Daily: Does race play a role in how people organize themselves socially at Northwestern?
Sonia Sanga: I’m a (Community Assistant) in Freshman Quad so I really get to observe objectively how students do kind of congregate. There is race, that definitely plays a huge part. … It’s a lot easier to talk about things, whether it’s dance teams or something, that’s how people meet.
David Xu: When you look at events thrown by minority student organizations, and you look at the attendance of these events, they generally are composed mostly of minorities. But when you go to larger productions and events like stuff run by A&O, and you look at the attendance, they’re more reflective of the general, overall racial distribution at Northwestern. … It’s very hard to penetrate the Caucasian community and to have them attend cultural events in general.
Nathan Zebrowski: I’ve noticed whatever cultural events there are; it’s just like any other event in that it’s sometimes hard to be aware. … Sometimes cultural groups can come off as something separate and the reason they do is because there’s a very big block in people’s minds to understanding people’s culture until they actually go there. …If people aren’t interested in another culture, you can’t make them be interested in another culture. Everybody is going to like their culture the best.
Becca Donaldson: We can be a bit overprogrammed in general at Northwestern, which definitely prevents people from just going out and exploring something new. … The time structure we have here at Northwestern doesn’t allow for the sustained exploration of another culture.
The Daily: Did diversity play a role for you in picking Northwestern?
Donaldson: I wanted to come here for a different perspective, but I think it’s not something that’s just handed to you. You really have to seek it out yourself.
Harvey: When I wanted to come to Northwestern it was primarily to get my degree, to be somewhere where there was a large body of water and also being near a major city … I expected there to be more of a mixing than what it is. At every college there is your black community, your Latino community, your large white community; you’re just still going to be able to navigate those pretty easily. But I guess I’ve kind of found that it’s a little harder than I assumed.
The Daily: Have any of you ever felt like people have discriminated against you at Northwestern?
Xu: (At the Feb. 16 “March for Unity”), there were a lot of cars filled with people shouting racial slurs and derogatory comments at us and telling us to shut up. I really wasn’t that aware of it, but that march really opened my eyes. I think there is an endemic problem, maybe not openly visible, but there certainly is something on this campus.
Harvey: I was wearing a hooded sweatshirt and a jacket that had a big Northwestern ‘N’ on it, and yet (a police officer) stopped me and said, “Can I see your ID?” It’s happened several times, but that time it really stuck out at me that it didn’t look like I belonged, and that’s kind of a problem because I definitely do belong.
Neal Sales-Griffin: There was a group of Caucasian people ahead of me, about six of them, and I was just walking, and, you know, I noticed them turning their heads looking behind. I could tell they were afraid that I was going to rob them or something. So when I got to the intersection I kind of caught up with them and I was like “Don’t worry, I’m not going to rob you, I’m going this way to my house.” And they all laughed and were like “I can’t believe he said that.” But I wasn’t too upset because I kind of understood.
The Daily: Do you think that there are stereotypes associated with your race and do they work against you or for you? Can they work both ways?
Sales-Griffin: Given that I’m president of Ayers College of Commerce and Industry – which is also known as College of Chinese and Indians because that’s who it primarily consists of – and because I’m black and I’m president of Ayers, I’m not just your average person coming out of Ayers. … If you are above the norm of what people consider – like blacks aren’t as smart as others, those different stereotypical things – when you go above and beyond that, you are looked at as the cream of the crop.
Donaldson: At the (National Pan-Hellenic Council) panel last week, … I think I was one of the only white people in the room. And (someone) made a joke about how African-American students need a different kind of social outlet because ‘what are they going to do, go to hoedowns or something?’ I think I actually blushed, I’ve never really felt that way before. Because you know, I don’t go to hoedowns, I go to legitimate parties. There’s a certain stereotype, sometimes for Caucasian people, not being “cool” or “chill” in some certain ways.
The Daily: What can we do to encourage more racial integration and promote cultural understanding on campus?
Xu: One of the first things we can do is encourage the administration to wake up and to realize maybe there is a problem, that there is apathy, and it’s endemic within the Northwestern student body.
Sanga: They brought back the diversity requirement this year, but their way of doing it was … by (making) it more safe. … I think the administration needs to stop being so safe and go back to being a little more open and out there.
Harvey: It might be worth looking into some kind of all-university listserv. … When I was trying to advertise for the Black History Month Panel, the primary listserv I used was the black student listserv, the (For Members Only) listserv. It’s not that I didn’t want anyone else to come, it’s just that that’s the easiest access to a big listserv that I have.
Zebrowski: The only concern I have with that is if you submit everything for the university to send out, who actually makes the decision for what to send and what not to send?
Ramos: Maybe making a (diversity-focused) freshman seminar that everyone has to take. I don’t think I took out much from my freshman seminar. But if everyone has to take the diversity one, … I think that would be immensely beneficial.
Donaldson: I think it is a great idea to have some sort of academic component, although it makes me nervous to require anything of people. All of a sudden it takes away that element of choice, which is what opens up people to the experience.
Xu: It’s very hard for minority groups to get funding. In general, for minority student groups to get any sort of funding from (the Student Activities Fee), they have to be A-status – which means they have to be relatively large – which is very difficult if you’re talking about a minority group because it caters a lot to minorities by definition.
Zebrowski: If somebody is racist, they have personal feelings of racism. Some course they don’t like, I don’t know if that’s going to change it. … I went to diversiFYInu, and I liked that, I learned a lot for me, but if I was racist, it would never change my mind.
The Daily: Do we have what it takes as a student body to combat racism?
Donaldson: Those students walking on the sidewalk who were looking back at Neal might not have ever thought they
were the type of students who would look back at Neal. And until it was pointed out to them by Neal, they might have never thought about that or been conscious about it. Those are the kinds of experiences that hopefully begin to open people’s eyes.
Zebrowski: After diversiFYInu was the first time in years that I actually recognized somebody’s race consciously. I was probably more racist after that in one way because suddenly it was like “this is race, this is race.” I think you need to be careful (because diversity-centered programs) can have the effect of playing the issue into something that it’s not.
Donaldson: I understand what you’re saying and where you’re coming from, but I also think that identity crises is the reason we come to college, to put ourselves through situations where we might not feel the most comfortable … will eventually make us wiser human beings.
Xu: The people who have inhumane racism are a tiny minority of the general student body. It’s much more constructive for things like diversiFYInu to target people who are straddling the fence, who might be apathetic, who never even go out to events like that in the first place. … If we do make some requirement for programming – and this has to be good programming – it … will open some (people’s) eyes, and we will have more people going out to more events.
The Daily: Any final comments?
Harvey: Dialogues like this need to occur, where people can sit around a table and kind of talk about things. … Ideally, I guess (campus diversity) would be like a 25, 25, 25, and 25 percent kind of thing, but that’s never going to happen … I’d like to see the administration be held accountable, kind of stepping up to the plate and saying “all right, we understand this is a problem, students see it as a problem, now it’s our turn to kind of jump in and see how we can solve it.”
Ramos: I wish the Hispanic community here were much bigger. The administration needs to be accountable and take charge and I guess more discussions are good.
Donaldson: I think there’s a way that Northwestern could deal with enrollment so that the population here could better reflect the proportions of different minorities. … I think minority enrollment is very important, also because there is something to be said for strength in numbers, and I think the stronger you feel your home base to be, the more likely you are to go out, and to challenge yourself and your beliefs in the community if you have a strong home base.
