Sitting in my race, class and ethnic groups course, twiddling my thumbs and trying to follow my professor, I couldn’t help but feel disconnected. There he went, speaking of tolerance, what it means to be prejudiced and how it’s easy to stereotype other races — but this is probably the 300th time I’ve heard this lecture from a cultural class, and it seems to be the only message they have to offer.
At times, I feel more like a subject of discussion than a student acquiring knowledge — everything seems to be directed toward accepting people like myself and becoming “tolerant,” but nothing goes toward the problems facing people of color and how they can fix them, because our structure only identifies with a Caucasian, Western perspective.
At the University and many colleges, the overemphasis of this perspective is a disservice to students of color. There are a lot of things in the majority perspective in which an ethnic minority cannot identify with, thus creating a totally different and unfair expectation of them: They are to identify with Caucasians and learn to walk in their shoes, while Caucasian students enjoy the safety and comfort of their own perspective while battling through their social problems.
It’s very rare for a professor to challenge students to look at things from the eyes of another culture. Students learn about other groups through the Western perspective, and they are never put in the place of a person of color — it’s always a detached, third-person perspective.
Caucasians will receive a multitude of lectures telling them how to avoid being racist and how to cope with guilt, but the African-Americans, harbored by feelings of anger and oppression, the Latinos, tired of political alienation, or the Native Americans, demoralized by the near-depletion of their people, most likely will never receive any first-person acknowledgement or advice.
It’s quite hypocritical how universities will boast all day about their scholarships, multicultural requirements and community programs dedicated to racial awareness, but then formulate their academic curriculum as though all their students are Caucasian. The social issues for a Caucasian are different than those for a person of color; why boast about how many different kinds of people your school has if you cannot adequately educate them all?
It’s inevitable to feel disconnected at times as a person of color. Nothing you learn resonates with your struggles, and even when it does, the target audience is still Caucasian Americans, so there’s only so much one can obtain from it. While we are in a nation that is mostly Caucasian, it is vital for colleges and professors around the nation to vastly broaden the perspective in which they teach from. This will not only create more involved minorities and a more welcoming environment for them, but allow students of all colors to witness cultural experiences in a whole new and eye-opening fashion.
College should be a place where students learn to identify with and understand many different people; only looking at the world from the Caucasian point of view doesn’t challenge them enough to achieve this. But I don’t think this change is too high on our society’s to-do list.
While it’s imperative for minorities to understand Caucasian thought if they are to be successful in Western society, Caucasians can go their whole lives being ignorant of minority struggles and live happily ever after.
Granting us many cultural perspectives and giving us the opportunity to connect to them in our education is treated as a luxury we don’t need to receive — instead of a right we all deserve.
On campuses across the nation, diversity in numbers is important — not diversity in thought.
So maybe we will never be in a learning environment fully open to all America’s people, maybe we will always be taught that the majority perspective is the only perspective we can learn from, and maybe this cultural disconnect will continue — through colleges, workplaces, households and society as a whole.
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White Pacifica Forum Members
Adolf Hitler
Bono
White anarchists
Johannes Brahms
Charles Manson
Thomas Jefferson
Glenn Beck
Pope John Paul IINeed I go on? Explain it. Spell it out. What are the assumptions shared by all those people, and by me?
and then can return to teach the caucasions in your life the truth
see you