Word: racial
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Jason C.B. Lee ’08, president of the Black Students Association (BSA), objects to the way that some students characterize social groups based along racial and ethnic lines. “Segregation has a negative connotation, like ‘black students are imposing this extreme negative on themselves. Segregation is terrible and now they’re doing it to themselves.’ We kind of balk at the term ‘self-segregation’ because we feel good about what we do here, how we interact with each other...
Because of the racial connotations of the term, self-segregation is often overlooked in situations where race is not the uniting factor. “There are also situations where people associate with others who have a shared experience, not necessarily a cultural background, but it doesn’t have the same kind of stigma attached. It might not be as obvious when things like that happen,” says Deborah Y. Ho ’07. In other words, what we call self-segregation might just be a more visible manifestation of the relationships that exist...
...most visible manifestations of “self-segregation,” many blocking groups are predominantly or entirely composed of one race. The Harvard administration does not release racial statistics in blocking, so it is difficult to evaluate the diversity of blocking groups. The phenomenon was easier to notice in the era before the randomization of the housing system, when students had a great degree of choice over the House in which they would be placed. According to a 1994 Crimson op-ed, 80 percent of Black students opted to live in the Quad...
...Harvard switched to the current, randomized process where blocking groups have no control over the house in which they would spend the next three years. The endeavor aimed to foster racial mixing and end the concentration of minority students and athletes in certain houses. Reaction to this plan was fairly mixed at first, with some student minority leaders expressing doubts about the consequences of the move. For instance, Derrick N. Ashong ’97, a former president of the BSA, worried that the plan would cause splintering in the Black community...
...Hamilton believes Harvard students can straddle the border between being involved in a racial community and taking part in other activities. “People feel they have to make a choice: You can either be a part of the black community, or you can do something else, but you can’t do them both. I don’t think that was anyone’s deliberate impression to give people. Now that that is being realized, I think greater efforts are being put forth, within the greater Harvard community, to really show people the opportunities...