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SF State has a race problem. It can be seen in the classrooms and on the grassy knolls of our great campus. It can be read on the SF State schedule, and it culminates with graduation.
What I speak about is how the atmopshere of the university tends to separate our student body through the encouragement of extreme ethnic pride. While there is absolutely nothing wrong with loving one’s self, our campus seems to see fit to encourage segregation.
Now segregation is a strong word, for it brings to mind images of the civil rights movement in the 1960s and the struggle of Brown v. Board of Education. But in order to understand what I mean, we must analyze the way our school system is built up.
Take a look on campus and what do you see? The majority of the time I see an ocean of different races but with members of each race hanging out together.
The reason for this can be seen in the way our school has so many exclusively ethnic and ideology clubs, and few clubs where people from all backgrounds can come together.
This is also seen in the offering of classes in the class schedule. Instead of multiethnic classes, a student is met with many classes with an emphasis on one race. Students have the possibility of going through their entire college career taking these classes. For example, a person that takes exclusively La Raza classes can obtain a Bachelor’s degree without having to take many classes outside of that major.
Once the person is eligible to graduate, they are offered the possibility of graduating at an ethnic graduation. A group of Latinos can graduate with Latinos, Asians with Asians, and Blacks with Blacks. So a student could go through their entire college career without having to associate with another race.
If our campus is dedicated to diversity and unity then these possibilities should not exist. There should not be ethnic graduations, and there should not be ethnic clubs, for rather than learning about others it seems like we are encouraged to learn exclusively about ourselves.
How can we claim to be a diverse campus when we provide a student the opportunity of not having to learn about others and what they have gone through? This university has achieved tremendous things through the encouragement of ethnic diversity, but we are on the wrong path by encouraging students to learn mainly about themselves and not of the struggles and movements we have all gone through as a race. We must recognize that there is no single race, but only the human race.
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Matias Cavallin @ matizi2000@yahoo.com
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COMMENTS
September 27, 2004 10:32 AM
Dear Editor,
I find this editorial to be a classic example of white liberal racism, and am deeply offended by its appearance in the Express.
Staff writer Matias Cavallin has done a huge disservice to our school by suggesting that 'exclusively ethnic and ideology clubs,' as well as classes offered in the College of Ethnic Studies, promote modern segregation on our campus. Cavallin fails to note the historical circumstances under which the Ethnic Studies program was forged, i.e. the Eurocentric nature of most higher education in the U.S., and the accompanying invalidation of counterhegemonic perspectives offered by people and communities of color.
The College of Ethnic Studies, and many of the student clubs Cavallin points to, were founded in order to create a space in which people of color could see their own cultures, ideals, and philosophies represented, instead of having to ingest and regurgitate notions of white supremacy, however subtle or coded they may have become in the academic setting. In this sense, all students at SF State should be proud of the fact that this university opened the first College of Ethnic Studies in the country, and has played an instrumental role in altering perceptions of the purpose higher education can and must play in the greater society.
Cavallin, and many of her/his ideological bent, simply don't get this. Rather, they run around making banal statements about all of us being human, that there's no race but the human race, etc. Implicit in such statements is the assumption that people of all backgrounds have identical access to resources, be they material or not, and have seen their heritage represented equally in society, be it in school, on television, or elsewhere. If Cavallin grew up in the U.S., I would ask how much s/he learned about people of color in her/his primary education? To what extent were people of color considered marginal in the founding of this country, and to what extent were light-skinned European men deemed the harbingers of 'Western civilization'? It is the historical erasures and inaccuracies of the education with which so many of us were and are raised that the College of Ethnic Studies, and student clubs founded and led by people of color, seeks to remedy.
Maybe SF State does have a race problem. If so, it's certainly not the fact that historically marginalized groups have found safety, camaraderie, and pride in numbers, but the fact that white students, who are largely disconnected from their own sense of ethnic and cultural history, feel threatened by this sense of reclamation. Cavallin's editorial is one such expression of that feeling.
From: "Raphael Cohen" cancerpen@hotmail.com
September 27, 2004 6:28 PM
Dear editors,
As most rational and observing people would agree, racism and whitesupremacy exist. Its history is well documented starting with thenation’s founding documents and its practice is continued today at alleconomic, social, political and cultural levels. Accordingly, it shouldcome as no surprise that white supremacy exists in SFSU’s curriculum,student body, administration, faculty, and student newspaper editorialstaff.
In a September 15th editorial, an Xpress editor essentiallyblamed racism on people of color and characterized the behavior of some people of color (e.g., hanging out, forming ethnic-based organizations,etc.) as part of a “race problem.”
Instead of examining conditions on campus that impel students of color toform ethnic based groups, this editorial serves to maintain white supremacy by labeling the behavior of people of color as problematic, racist, extreme, excessively proud, and self-segregating and whites as individuals who seek a humanist approach to life.
SFSU certainly suffers from the same “race problem” as the rest of theU.S. But blaming people of color and ethnic-based organizations for racialized division and disunity points to the confusion many students experience with racism and white supremacy. This country will be dividedby white supremacy until and unless white people examine their white privilege and become actively engaged in deconstructing race, whitenessand the myriad of social, political, economic, historical and culturalfactors contributing to the ordering of society.
White students interested in examining white liberal racism should read Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together In the Cafeteria? and check out www.untraining.org. Instead of blaming people of color for racism, we white people should support and challenge each other in examining how our white privilege expresses itself in our behavior.
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Dear Editor,
I find this editorial to be a classic example of white liberal racism, and am deeply offended by its appearance in the Express.
Staff writer Matias Cavallin has done a huge disservice to our school by suggesting that 'exclusively ethnic and ideology clubs,' as well as classes offered in the College of Ethnic Studies, promote modern segregation on our campus. Cavallin fails to note the historical circumstances under which the Ethnic Studies program was forged, i.e. the Eurocentric nature of most higher education in the U.S., and the accompanying invalidation of counterhegemonic perspectives offered by people and communities of color.
The College of Ethnic Studies, and many of the student clubs Cavallin points to, were founded in order to create a space in which people of color could see their own cultures, ideals, and philosophies represented, instead of having to ingest and regurgitate notions of white supremacy, however subtle or coded they may have become in the academic setting. In this sense, all students at SF State should be proud of the fact that this university opened the first College of Ethnic Studies in the country, and has played an instrumental role in altering perceptions of the purpose higher education can and must play in the greater society.
Cavallin, and many of her/his ideological bent, simply don't get this. Rather, they run around making banal statements about all of us being human, that there's no race but the human race, etc. Implicit in such statements is the assumption that people of all backgrounds have identical access to resources, be they material or not, and have seen their heritage represented equally in society, be it in school, on television, or elsewhere. If Cavallin grew up in the U.S., I would ask how much s/he learned about people of color in her/his primary education? To what extent were people of color considered marginal in the founding of this country, and to what extent were light-skinned European men deemed the harbingers of 'Western civilization'? It is the historical erasures and inaccuracies of the education with which so many of us were and are raised that the College of Ethnic Studies, and student clubs founded and led by people of color, seeks to remedy.
Maybe SF State does have a race problem. If so, it's certainly not the fact that historically marginalized groups have found safety, camaraderie, and pride in numbers, but the fact that white students, who are largely disconnected from their own sense of ethnic and cultural history, feel threatened by this sense of reclamation. Cavallin's editorial is one such expression of that feeling.
From: "Raphael Cohen" cancerpen@hotmail.com