Maybe I have been a little too naive. No one ever snickered or laughed when I entered the Annex for dinner nearly every day last year (or at least, I didn't notice it). For me, the seating arrangements in Valentine are not necessarily the issue, though I did lend my support to the efforts made last week. But there are problems at this college which few can deny and which to some extent manifest themselves in Valentine. Regardless of my views on the politics of the dining commons, the fact that the so-called sit-in that occurred last week could have sparked such heated debate on campus seems almost laughable to me-especially because it was such an innocuous action.
Come on. No one was burning Amherst paraphernalia in effigy or shouting "fight the power" slogans. They were, for various personal reasons, attempting to unseat an arrangement of division that seems to alienate many people on campus. I firmly believe that the intent was certainly not to attack individuals or targeted groups of students but rather to alter the disheartening segregation of the dining commons, if only for a couple of days.
Even so, The Daily Jolt quickly filled with unabashedly ignorant drivel that certainly isn't in keeping with the supposedly "PC" and intellectual environment of this college. Seeing athletes described as "dumb jocks" who didn't deserve their admittance to Amherst and minorities (especially African-Americans) described as infantile whiners waiting with outstretched hands for benevolent charity from whites sickened me. Contrary to the beliefs of some misguided, 99.9 percent of athletes are indeed not dumb, rowdy white supremacists; they have their own difficulties and feel attacked and made out to be the culprits of some sort of racist, elitist, sexist, homophobic conspiracy. And what about the minorities who are active in athletics or those who choose to sit in Annex because their friends sit there? I wonder if these individuals feel alienated or caught in some sort of conflict as tensions flare on campus over these issues.
Playing upon vicious stereotypes about other students and trying to fit the roundness of people's experience into square categories such as the rich, white athlete or the disenchanted and ungrateful minority is no way to address the apprehension about these issues that we all share. I find myself hard pressed to separate obviously misguided sentiments from what I viewed as the prevailing attitudes on campus. People are open-minded, aren't they? Maybe people were just trying to provoke others or get their 15 seconds of fame on the forum. In examining the reaction to the "sit-in," I can somewhat sympathize with those who may have seen it as an attack on the stereotypical Amherst student who is seen as sporty, wealthy, and white. I can also empathize with some minorities who feel isolated and unwanted in this environment.
Despite the divisiveness of this discourse, I still have an almost unshakable belief that most people here aren't hatemongers, but many are woefully ignorant of the concerns of those outside of their small circles. Many speak in terms of amorphous and mysterious issues of ignorance and invisible boundaries, which are understandably off-putting to those who don't see themselves as bigots or their desire to socialize with people of similar interests as alienating. Furthermore, hearing the problems presented so vaguely, many suspect a "conspiracy theory" of some sort, or oversensitivity on the part of "marginalized" groups. Encasing the problems in ambiguous terms only fosters misunderstanding on the part of those who find it hard to believe that anyone being afforded the opportunity to attend Amherst is in any way marginalized. On the other hand, it is often hard to articulate one's feelings clearly about intolerance that has taken on the most covert form.
One thing that I've learned in life is that you can't judge the validity of others' feelings based upon your own experience-something that must be remembered in this dialogue. The issue is not that people feel owed something because of past wrongs or that people enjoy the camaraderie of their fellow teammates. I think that even the most ardent critics, except for those made oblivious to these issues by a preoccupation with their own experiences, realize that something is wrong, though they might not know how to conceptualize it, express it, or hope to change it. I made the effort to integrate and indeed became a regular participant in the "mainstream" Amherst social scene, as well as an annex regular. This effort was a result of my life experience; I was accustomed to such social venues. Few people were ever directly mean to me, but I have been called "faggot" while trying to enjoy myself in a social setting and have overheard conversations in which people pointed to my own "recently discovered" black identity.
I have chosen to recount these experiences in the public domain only to say that these issues are very real and influence people's lives and experiences in very personal ways. It's really not a matter of paranoia. Though most people may not be bigots, that doesn't mean that there aren't uncongenial and mean-spirited idiots out there. It's clear to me that however liberal this community may claim to be, many people are not comfortable associating with different people or seeing different people together because of their own insecurities-a fact that I have had to grudgingly deal with here. I have begun to question whether such an environment breeds acceptance of differences or merely tolerance rooted in the unfashionableness of prejudice.
I would hope that the "sit-in" and the subsequent dialogue that it spurs will make people see how ignorance and intolerance lurk just below a veneer of acceptance and that there are issues, subtle and not so subtle, that need to be addressed on this campus. While the extremists on both sides point fingers, those of us somewhere in the middle are often torn by a divisive debate that seems to promote segregation rather than integration and anger and misunderstanding rather than dialogue and consideration.
David Holland '02 is a regular columnist for The Amherst Student.