“It seems to me,” I asked hesitantly, “that a student could go through all four years of college here without really talking about race or connecting with a person of color. Am I misunderstanding something?”
Jasmine Waddell, Harvard’s dean of first-year students, nodded. “You’re right,” she said slowly. “I have not seen the leadership that is needed for people to have a different experience.”
In Waddell’s office hangs a portrait of Alain Locke, a Harvard graduate and the first African American and openly gay Rhodes scholar, as well as a student-made patchwork quilt. On a table lies a laminated sheet titled “Weaving Threads: Honoring the Legacy of Native Americans in Harvard Yard.”
“Other institutions have been doing intentional diversity work for a long time, and we haven’t. Like, we just got an office,” Waddell said, referencing the Office for Diversity Education and Support. “I feel like we have, in many ways, missed the 20th century. Harvard College has chosen not to participate in that movement, from what I’ve seen. That doesn’t mean we have to repeat it.”
Today, people across the university undeniably work hard toward racial progress. Yet our campus is still racially divided — while many of us also lack the tools to both explain and change it. Collectively, we lack a culture of racial literacy: a historical and sociological framework to understand how oppression and privilege shape every part of our daily lives. A required racial literacy curriculum may help fill this gap.
Diversity and Division
For many first-year students, the diversity of this community is unlike anything they have ever been exposed to before. That diversity is racial, but also intersectional: though race demands particular attention, we are systematically impacted further by gender, class, sexuality, ability, religion, and other parts of our identity. Some students already care deeply about equity work; others are asked for their gender pronouns for the first time. In Annenberg dining hall, paintings and sculptures honor figures like W.E.B. Du Bois and S. Allen Counter. In the classroom, topics of instruction range from Black poetry to American Sign Language to East Asian religious texts. Abundant resources, from Counseling and Mental Health Services to specialty proctors to the Harvard Foundation, are available to all students.
Alongside our diversity, however, comes division. “Coming into Harvard, diversity was framed as this thing that was prioritized and supported,” first-year Aaron Abai told the HPR. “But I feel like the true value of diversity is when people with different identities are interacting.” Our divided classes, clubs, and lunch tables cannot be explained without racial literacy; they reflect both a bordered world and a United States in which the number of segregated schools, defined by a White student population of under 40 percent, approximately doubled between 1996 and 2016. Other data shows that, in the United States, three out of four White people have no friends of color. “It was surprising that, coming to this diverse community, it almost feels like you’re on your own as far as taking advantage of that experience,” Abai added.
Students may know that race has impacted Harvard’s history, but often do not understand the extent of the role it has played. According to Waddell, racial literacy starts with the recognition that we live on the ancestral land of the Wampanoag people. “We have a responsibility to [them] … If I was in charge, which I’m not, I would make sure that every public meeting started with that,” she said.
“You couldn’t even articulate that you didn’t belong,” Ali Asani, a professor of Islamic studies and the chair of a working group on symbols and spaces of engagement, told the HPR about his time as a Harvard freshman in the 1970s. Working in Widener Library, he was shocked to learn that his supervisor, an African American woman, previously could not enter through Widener’s front door, sit in its main Reading Room, or work in an open, public space — instead, she worked in the stacks. “People are very focused on the present,” he said. “That presentism is like historical amnesia.” Asani’s experience has convinced him that, today, we should “create programs and structures where people have to engage with each other, and encounter people who are very different than themselves.”
Many of Harvard’s campus symbols and spaces — its colonial architecture, basement diversity-related offices, and buildings named for oppressive figures like Chester Noyes Greenough, Abbott Lawrence Lowell, John Winthrop, Louis Agassiz, and Increase Mather — not only bear witness to the school’s history, but also serve as painful reminders of ongoing racial divisions. The students of color interviewed for this article alone reported being told to “go back to your country,” fetishized as an “alluring” East Asian female, described as a “coconut: Black on the outside, White on the inside,” pressured to “give up parts of who I am so I can blend in,” targeted with a racially insensitive remark by a teacher, and asked if they would “name their kid Jamesha.” They have been called the n-word, overheard the n-word, and felt the burden of educating other non-Black students about use of the n-word. According to a 2016 report from the Presidential Task Force on Inclusion and Belonging, “one-third of Harvard College seniors reported not being satisfied with the sense of community on campus, and the lack of satisfaction was stronger among those who reported belonging to minority groups.”
What’s Missing: Required Racial Literacy
Our lack of racial and intersectional literacy is not surprising. Many students come from education systems that never taught them to understand how our social identities impact who we are. And when they arrive on campus, students may want to do better, but not know exactly why or where or how. Others simply do not know what they do not know.
“I think a lot of students do want to improve upon or attain [their racial literacy], but they often don’t know where they would go to ask something like that,” junior Sruthi Palaniappan, president of the Harvard Undergraduate Council, said in an interview with the HPR. “Creating a training that can take a few steps back and provide a more common language and understanding … is what we need.”
Currently, students of color too often carry the burden for this training. “Another manifestation of racism on this campus is that students of color are forced to take time that they would otherwise dedicate to their work, or other passions, to do the work that a robust racial literacy program by the College would do,” junior Hakeem Angulu told the HPR. “And I think this would be more than the offices staffed by students, like the Foundation and QuOffice. I’m talking about student groups focused on identity that provide unpaid labor to educate people outside of those communities. This labor is also found in less organized spaces, like in dining halls and classrooms, where that education is nice for white people … but is distracting and taxing [for their peers].”
This education continues to be necessary because undergraduates are not at any point in their four years at Harvard required to develop this racial literacy toolkit. Though valuable and necessary, the College’s existing resources are all opt-in experiences. Students who do not believe they need them can easily never engage. Even required General Education curricula such as “Histories, Societies, and the World,” for example, can be fulfilled by courses like “Pyramid Schemes: The Archeological History of Ancient Egypt.” Other schools, such as the University of Pennsylvania, have a “Cultural Diversity in the U.S.” requirement, where each course option explicitly and heavily grapples with race and social inequality. Harvard College does not. Perhaps if it did, more non-Black students would, at the very least, learn that their use of the n-word is a problem.
Many students, though perhaps well-intentioned, will never critically examine how the social construction of race still impacts all of their lives. Harvard College continues to graduate students unequipped with the racial and intersectional literacy lens they need to navigate our world.
Privilege and Oppression Implicate Us All
Current diversity work often frames “the issues of people of color” — rather than White supremacy — as the central problem, failing to recognize the systematic and intergenerational domination of Whiteness from which many people still benefit today. “People say inclusion and belonging are just for minorities,” said Asani, “but that implies that the majority, if there is a White majority, is not included, that they are just exclusive terms for people that are different.” While some conveniently avoid the conversation, these framings too often place the burden on people of color to exclusively and repeatedly teach others about their experiences of oppression. “It’s actually then acknowledging the hegemonic discourse, which I think is wrong,” he added.
But if some students do not have those experiences, what do they have to share? Cori Price, a dorm proctor and the director of first-year faculty initiatives, told the HPR that multiple students have approached her with this question after Community Conversations, a required first-year program discussing identity during Opening Days, explaining that “this does not apply to me.” Price observed that assigned readings for the program in previous years often spotlighted low-income, queer, or otherwise marginalized students; for the Class of 2022, the only mention of privilege was a sentence regarding access to predominantly queer spaces on campus from a genderqueer Asian-Latinx student. “There’s never a reflection from students from wealthy prep schools about their identity transformation,” said Price. “So even the framing of the conversation, by leaving out particular identities, suggests that this group of people are having an issue, and we need to bend and flex to understand that, not realizing that this is a systemic problem.”
Racial literacy goes beyond celebrating diversity and recognizing division; it requires further examining those structures of racial dominance. “I think admitting students who come from a particular background and then working with them from a deficit model is not the way to talk about racial education, or to inform other people about this conversation,” continued Price. “Because if you don’t understand your race in a very real way, you will feel like you’re being left out of the conversation about it, when you are actually one of the central parts of the conversation.” Price specifically clarified that she was referring mostly to “students from White, wealthy backgrounds.”
If we reckon with both oppression and privilege, race always applies. To craft more open and honest relationships with others, students must recognize how they systematically benefit from the various forms of privilege they are given — not only White, wealthy students, but also those with, for example, light skin, straight hair, able bodies, loving families, access to social networks, or educational opportunities. Privilege should not be a source of guilt, but of responsibility to learn, grow, and act in solidarity with others; it should tell us that each of us is implicated in this racial reality.
Rethinking the First Year
If race impacts a student’s experience as soon as they arrive on campus, racial literacy curriculum should begin then, too. “It’s your first time in this space, and there’s a strong community element with everyone experiencing that together which goes away slightly when you become a sophomore or junior; students are incredibly eager to meet other students, and they’re thinking a lot about what the next four years of their lives are going to look like,” Palaniappan said. “Having this training then could be really pivotal.”
First-year required experiences already occur in and out of the classroom, and both spaces could be remodeled to require racial literacy training. Academically, a General Education requirement could more narrowly focus on racial systems, like at UPenn. Palaniappan added that a consistent focus of the UC has been to provide trainings for all hired faculty and teaching fellows. “Though we can’t mandate anything, I do think there are creative ways to convey this information, such as creating videos or supplementary resources to give people to review this information on their own time,” she said.
What the administration can mandate is training for undergraduates, enforcing completion of an online racial and intersectional literacy course before students arrive on campus — as they currently do with modules about alcohol education and sexual assault prevention. In-person trainings should also take place at the beginning of and throughout the year.
Creating this sort of training could start with a simple reframing of a program like Community Conversations. “We even drew a backpack about the [identity-related] things that we carry,” Abai recalled about the programming this past year. “But I don’t think we had explicit conversations about race.”
The language and substance of these sessions should explicitly unpack privilege, oppression, and other concepts like implicit bias, affirmative action, and cultural appropriation. They should focus on racial division, and connect race to other systems of oppression. “The way it’s designated now is to start conversations,” said Palaniappan, “but I think it doesn’t completely achieve its goal of doing so, because it’s limited in the way it’s framed and therefore how students approach the conversation.” All conversations should be led by trained proctors or other paid facilitators.
Since the start of the school year is particularly packed with activities, Waddell suggested a second training halfway through the year, or, as she observed at Brown University, mandatory monthly workshops on diversity-related topics. A relevant faculty lecture could be added during Opening Days. Analyses of survey data and other institutional models could reveal other steps — trainings and beyond — that would benefit all students. Waddell stressed that administrators bear the responsibility for this work. “The last thing I want is for a student to be doing the work of an administrator,” she said.
New measures should address not just the absence of curriculum or policy, but also a culture of care for its urgency. “I think partly people have to opt in to wanting to know more, do more, and be better, [in addition to] the mandatory piece that everyone needs to go through,” Price argued. “To think that this conversation is only something that we need to have because it is part of a liberal education agenda does a disservice to students and ends up cheapening the conversation because people think, ‘Well, if I can just perform tolerance, then everything will be fine.’ That’s why many students and a lot of people at the university in different factions feel as if some things are not genuine efforts: it ends up being a requirement that has to be fulfilled.”
Despite this response, university requirements do reflect the education that Harvard College values for all its students. All students will need to write and do math at some point in their lives; accordingly, the College has requirements in Expository Writing and Empirical and Mathematical Reasoning. Because all of us will also need to interact with a diverse range of people, and because race and intersectionality are foundational to our daily lives, we should all develop the racial and intersectional tools to effectively navigate this world, too. We should all want to develop those tools.
If, as Waddell warned, we do not want to “miss out on the 21st century,” we can start by prioritizing racial literacy just as much as any other form of literacy at Harvard.
Image Credit: Unsplash/Markus Spiske