tabari, posting in
debunkingwhite @ 7:18am: NYT Lets Us Down Again
I'm having a hard time articulating exactly why
this New York Times article bothers me as much as it does. A lot of it's the title - "Interracial Roommates Can Reduce Prejudice, Campus Studies Find" - which focuses entirely on the effects that interracial housing has on white students. Although the article does talk about the increased stress that PoC feel when housed as freshmen with white students, the focus of the article remains on all of the positive effects that such housing arrangements can have for the white kids.
There's
this quotation from an Ohio State hall director that bothered me, too --
“I had one student who chose to move out, who said they just didn’t like the roommate’s friends, who were too loud,” Mr. Badaszewski said. “I thought there was a racial piece to it, but I didn’t bring it up and name it. It’s one of those topics — race, religion and politics — your parents tell you not to talk about at dinner because it can be explosive. And in this case, I knew it wouldn’t make things better.” For me, my reaction is -- no, probably it's good that a roommate with racist opinions is moving away from his PoC roommate, I doubt anything Mr. Badaszewski could say could immediately solve that problem. But not to mention at all - not to call out in any way - a student's racist assumptions and actions, because it's explosive? Don't admissions directors go on and on about how diversity on campus is supposed to broaden (never explicitly specified) white minds? How do they think that's going to happen, if challenging racism never occurs?
And then there's this bothersome sequence of passages. Mr. Boakye, a Ghanan student at Ohio State, is cited for his opinion about the effect that interracial housing has had on him and on other black students: "'If you’re surrounded by whites, you have something to prove,” said Mr. Boakye, now a rising senior who was born in Ghana. 'You’re pushed to do better, to challenge the stereotype that black people are not that smart.'"
Several paragraphs later, the Times posts this bit of brilliant analysis: "Russell H. Fazio, an Ohio State psychology professor who has studied interracial roommates there and at Indiana University, discovered an intriguing academic effect. In a study analyzing data on thousands of Ohio State freshmen who lived in dorms, he found that black freshmen who came to college with high standardized test scores earned better grades if they had a white roommate — even if the roommate’s test scores were low. The roommate’s race had no effect on the grades of white students or low-scoring black students. Perhaps, the study speculated, having a white roommate helps academically prepared black students adjust to a predominantly white university."
Yes. Having to face constant prejudice about one's abilities simply because one is black is such a good and helpful thing! Black students really should seek out the whitest possible campuses - that'll really encourage them to improve. No danger of burnout or excessive stress or, heck, insult or assault by white students - nope!
What do y'all think?
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Currently studying Marx with a local leftist group. While his exploration of the workings of capital is useful and dynamic, his conception of pre-capitalist history is very 19th century, replete with references to savages and progress. Unfortunately not all of my comrades seem to fully get what's wrong with treating European-style development as inherently progressive.![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif){kind=small}