Word: ethnic
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Students who are drawn to a field of study by their ethnic background may also find themselves limited by their lack of objectivity. Erika L. Solomon ’08 comes from a Jewish family—an ethnic tie to the Middle East that drew her to the study of Arabic culture. “A lot of Jewish people study the Middle East and Arabic as a kind of counterbalance to their ethnic identity,” she says. “They want to understand this culture they see themselves in conflict with...
...fact, the variety of viewpoints that non-heritage students inject into ethnic disciplines may be the stepping stone to their recognition as legitimate fields of study. “If you’re trying to get a better understanding of any issue, the more voices you have, the better,” says Blount. “What’s the worst that could happen—that two people disagree? But I guess that would get you closer to the truth...
Minority students may even be less well-versed in the culture of their ethnic group than they are in the study of the Western canon. “During high school, I wasn’t exposed to African-American history to the extent that I would have liked,” says Welton E. Blount ’09, an African-American Linguistics concentrator with a focus on African-American studies. Coles notes that, while he was taught Charles Dickens and Emily Bronte in his high school English class, classic works by African-American writers such as Ralph Ellison...
Coles disputes the notion that ethnic departments are more racially charged than other fields in the humanities. “The majority of students here are white, the majority of professors here are white, so what we have here is a very white-normative experience,” he says. He notes that minority students at Harvard are often accused of being preoccupied with their race for acting in a way that, in Caucasian students, would not incite the same response...
...Caucasian students are arguably more likely to encounter questions of academic purpose when they choose to focus on ethnic disciplines. Solomon, who identifies herself as Latin American and German, often encounters the accusation, “Oh, you want to date Arab guys—is that why you’re studying the Middle East...