OK, this puts me in mind of a story from my years at college which I think illustrates part of the problem.
This happened at one of the workshops on the day of the town's Take Back the Night Rally. I can't remember how I wound up at this particular workshop, but it was about class, and it was more or less a consciousness-raising session, run by a grownup (i.e., not one of the students). What I remember was that there was one young woman among the students at this workshop who was a student at my college, and who was POOR. Really, really poor. And she started talking and couldn't stop because it was like, FINALLY she was somewhere that someone was going to understand her.
She said, "It's so isolating. My friends will ask me to meet them at the snack bar and I say no, I can't, I have no money. They say, oh, just get a cup of coffee or something! and they DON'T GET IT because when they say 'I'm so broke!' they mean they only have a hundred dollars left in their checking account and when I say I have no money I mean I have NOTHING. Not even 50 goddamn cents for a cup of coffee."
I remember this very clearly because I was absolutely one of the clueless people she was talking about. I couldn't spend money like water but I could certainly order pizza if I was hungry at 10 p.m. And absolutely I had friends who could not, but my privilege, and their lack of privilege, had been COMPLETELY invisible to me prior to this point.
In part, I was clueless because the college I went to makes some effort to minimize the class distinctions (in a good way) -- all on-campus activities are free. You can see plays, concerts, movies, athletic events, etc., without the need for spending money. They have a no-car policy that is not super well enforced but discourages the more show-offy sort of rich people from coming. But, also, acknowledging these class distinctions was (and still is) stigmatized.
So. Although my college did strive for diversity, the pressure to conform combined with the uniformity in experience created by a small-college environment meant that a lot of the time, there was this illusion that everyone (no matter how different their background) was basically just like you, for values of "you" that were white, middle class, etc.
There were opportunities to experience the full diversity of the campus but they were easy to avoid, if that's what you preferred to do. We did have a diversity requirement for our classwork, but I'm pretty sure you could fulfill it with classes that let you learn about diverse people who'd been dead for centuries. Also, in a classroom, discussion tended to be focused on the material. Occasionally it would tread into personal territory, but that wasn't something professors could orchestrate or demand.
no subject
This happened at one of the workshops on the day of the town's Take Back the Night Rally. I can't remember how I wound up at this particular workshop, but it was about class, and it was more or less a consciousness-raising session, run by a grownup (i.e., not one of the students). What I remember was that there was one young woman among the students at this workshop who was a student at my college, and who was POOR. Really, really poor. And she started talking and couldn't stop because it was like, FINALLY she was somewhere that someone was going to understand her.
She said, "It's so isolating. My friends will ask me to meet them at the snack bar and I say no, I can't, I have no money. They say, oh, just get a cup of coffee or something! and they DON'T GET IT because when they say 'I'm so broke!' they mean they only have a hundred dollars left in their checking account and when I say I have no money I mean I have NOTHING. Not even 50 goddamn cents for a cup of coffee."
I remember this very clearly because I was absolutely one of the clueless people she was talking about. I couldn't spend money like water but I could certainly order pizza if I was hungry at 10 p.m. And absolutely I had friends who could not, but my privilege, and their lack of privilege, had been COMPLETELY invisible to me prior to this point.
In part, I was clueless because the college I went to makes some effort to minimize the class distinctions (in a good way) -- all on-campus activities are free. You can see plays, concerts, movies, athletic events, etc., without the need for spending money. They have a no-car policy that is not super well enforced but discourages the more show-offy sort of rich people from coming. But, also, acknowledging these class distinctions was (and still is) stigmatized.
So. Although my college did strive for diversity, the pressure to conform combined with the uniformity in experience created by a small-college environment meant that a lot of the time, there was this illusion that everyone (no matter how different their background) was basically just like you, for values of "you" that were white, middle class, etc.
There were opportunities to experience the full diversity of the campus but they were easy to avoid, if that's what you preferred to do. We did have a diversity requirement for our classwork, but I'm pretty sure you could fulfill it with classes that let you learn about diverse people who'd been dead for centuries. Also, in a classroom, discussion tended to be focused on the material. Occasionally it would tread into personal territory, but that wasn't something professors could orchestrate or demand.