Black students at Williams College favor self-segregated housing

The more I look at Williams College, the locale for Luana Maroja’s report on free speech yesterday, the more I’m convinced it’s a candidate as the Evergreen State College of the East Coast. My opinion comes from Maroja’s report (especially the behavior of students), a perusal of the student newspaper, The Williams Record, Williams’s “yellow light” rating by FIRE, (among other things, Williams has a “bias reporting system” and the college “retains the right of refusal for any outside speaker/performer and/or their campus sponsor for any reason”), and the administration’s rejection of a student-invited speaker in 2015 because the college President said the speaker’s views were contemptible.

Among the things you’ll find in the social-justicey Williams Record are two articles about African-American students demanding that they be allowed to have their own residential space, where they’d live only with other African-American students (this is not a requirement for black students, but an optional ancestry-restricted dormitory). One article reports the discussion and the other (the op-ed below) reprises that discussion from the viewpoint of an African-American senior at Williams (click on screenshot):

“Affinity housing” is, of course, housing in which people of a given ethnicity can have a “safe space” to live, i.e., one housing others of similar genetic background (or social-construct background, depending on your views). In other words, it’s segregated housing, albeit voluntarily segregated.

Richardson, described as a “biology major and Africana studies concentrator, as well as co-chair of Williams’ Black Student Union”, calls for segregated housing not just for blacks, but for Hispanics and Asian-Americans (would “Asian-Americans” include Chinese, Japanese, and Indian students?). Apparently Amherst and Wesleyan also have “affinity housing”.

Richard’s justification rests on her claim that such housing provides minority students with “support”, “solidarity”, and so on. Here’s part of what she says:

Affinity housing would grant students who share an aspect of their identity the opportunity to live together in an intentional community with shared values and goals, allowing these students to feel supported and have their identities affirmed by those who live around them. This type of housing serves to enrich the campus life by providing educational, cultural and social programming for not just the residents of the house, but also the wider campus community, thereby promoting a stronger sense of solidarity among students of marginalized identities. It would also allow the DC to have closer ties to students’ residential lives, allowing them to better support students of underrepresented identities.

. . . The common argument against affinity housing at the College is the idea that one can learn from living around people of all different races, interests and cultural backgrounds. This is true, but is already an experience that every student has during their first year here through the entry system. Forcing students to live around people of other backgrounds for the full duration of their time at the College, based on the idea that they are to learn from one another, inherently tokenizes international students, students of color and students of underrepresented identities. Nevertheless, even with the existence of the neighborhood system, many students rarely interact with their neighbors outside of their pick group.

. . . By giving athletes their own unofficial spaces, without providing an analogous option for other identities, the College seems to expect us students to adhere to a “mythical norm” (a term coined by Audre Lorde that describes the characteristics idealized by society that hold power and bring about oppression) of straightness, whiteness and able-bodiedness. When we deviate from this norm, we are meant to educate others around us about our experiences as “ambassadors” of our identities.

Now I confess ignorance about what the “entry system” is, nor do I think that students should have to live around those with whom they’re not comfortable for the entire four years of college. But neither do I think a college should provide segregated living facilities for its students. My view is that if there is college-mandated housing for a period (at William and Mary, where I went, it was for two years, after which you could rent an apartment off campus), it should not be segregated by ethnicity. In other words, I object to college-supported “affinity housing”.

I can appreciate the positive aspects of affinity housing limned by Richardson, one of which is a greater sense of solidarity with her fellow black students. She, and apparently others, would be uncomfortable having to interact with those who “tokenize” them and commit microaggressions (such microaggressions are mentioned in the other article, though no examples are given).

But whatever advantages accrue to segregating college living, to me they’re outweighed by a college’s mission to expose people to other kinds of people and to other ideas. It seems to me that if you want people of different backgrounds to understand each other—and who can deny that with understanding comes empathy and appreciation?—then there’s no better way than to have them live together. Sure, by all means have “cultural centers” where students of different backgrounds can meet up and mix with similar folks, but “affinity housing” on top of that simply keeps groups apart during their entire college experience.

When I was thinking about this, I called up an old friend from William and Mary, one of two white students in our class (there was only one African-American!) who took advantage of the opportunity to spend a year at the Hampton Institute (now Hampton University), a historically black college in Hampton, Virginia. That exchange involved living with a black student. When I asked my friend about his experience, and whether he favored “affinity housing”, he said the experience, while sometimes uncomfortable, was immensely valuable, and that he wasn’t in favor of voluntarily segregated housing sponsored by colleges.

When I asked him what the value of “mixing” was, he said that only by living with a black person, and constantly associating with them socially and in class, could he truly appreciate the damages of segregation and bigotry against blacks. (They even experienced a minority status themselves, with one W&M student being shunned in the cafeteria, and finally gaining acceptance by writing a blues poem that went, “It isn’t right to be alone when you eat. . . even if you’re white as a sheet.”)

And that lesson stayed with my friend; he spent the rest of his working life as a teacher and principal of largely black schools. When I asked him, “Well, did the black students get any benefit from your presence?”, he said yes, that for once they were able to teach white people about their culture and to have their teaching appreciated. All in all, he saw that semester as one of the most valuable experiences he had in his life.

So I would not only oppose affinity housing, but perhaps have colleges deliberately put different types of people together for a year or more. (In my freshman dorm, we were put with others of the same religion, so lived with the only other Jewish student in my program!) Imagine the kind of learning that would occur! Even if it would occasionally be uncomfortable, well, college should sometimes be uncomfortable. Besides, if the period of college-mandated housing was limited, you could thereafter choose to live with whomever you want.

As for the athletes, the article implies that athletes aren’t forced to live together off-campus, but do so voluntarily. If Williams itself supports athlete-restricted housing, I’d find that insupportable as well, unless—and I doubt this is true for Williams—the athletes dine together in a common area because they have a special diet.

At any rate, while I appreciate Richardson’s desire to feel safe, empowered, and not tokenized, it’s not the College’s job to coddle students and keep the different ethnicities together as groups and segregated from other groups—no matter what the students’ wishes and their justifications for self-segregation. There is plenty of time in the real world to live with people of your own ethnicity if you wish. I see the experiment of mixing different people for a year or two as a valuable way to promote mutual understanding.