Frankly, I am fairly tired of the constant stereotyping of Clark as a white, beer guzzling frat-boy dorm. I am fairly tired of feeling ashamed and muttering my residence hall under my breath when someone asks me where I live. I am fairly tired of an entire building being accused of being racist. The truth is—and hold your collective breath on this one—it’s not. Yea, sure, there must be some people who are racist somewhere in the building; I can’t speak for all 136 of us. But there are enough who aren’t. There are enough people who feel pained when the college as a whole decides to denigrate us because we decided we liked air-conditioning when we were rating our options on a Res-life form. If the form said: ‘You will have a clean room but everyone on campus will hate you and call you names; but at least you’ll have clean rooms’, maybe some of us would have chosen differently.
Firstly, Clark isn’t all that white. There are 13 students on my hall alone who are students of color, there used to be 14. And no, he wasn’t driven out because we didn’t like the color of his skin.
Secondly, so what if the white frat-boy image holds true for the majority of Clark residents? What is the objection to them? They aren’t imposing themselves on you. They aren’t forcing you to be like them. They aren’t storming your bastions of popularity, stealing your friends and ensuring you continue your existence as a friendless, socially awkward high-schooler. They’re actually adding another dimension to the school, one everyone here seems to object to under the broad guise of ‘diversity.’ It’s a sad day when ‘diversity’ and ‘open-mindedness’ have come to mean that you ridicule those who are different from you when you are finally in a majority and the people who ridiculed you are now a minority.
We’ve also been accused of being cliquish. Yes, we do eat at the same table at Mocon. But so do people in other dorms. Just because your halls are smaller and there weren’t 30 of you crowding around a table at the beginning of semester doesn’t mean you didn’t have your cliques, or dare I say it, your own group of friends. The first few days at college, you don’t really want to be friends with everyone; you’re a little more intent on settling down than appearing to be non-partisan in your friend selection. And as far as I can see, there are as many Clarkies attempting to break out of their ‘dorm-imposed’ mold as there are non-Clarkies, and as many kids who have friends from other dorms as there are in yours.
When we first came to college a big deal was made about Wesleyan promoting ‘diversity;’ students, faculty and administrators spoke about ‘Diversity University.’ I’m a little confused though. Maybe it’s because I come from another country, but I always thought that the word diversity encompassed a little more than the color of someone’s skin. Maybe—and again, I might be wrong—but I figured that diversity was about how your brain worked, how you accepted people who were different from you, and not just in their skin color. Diversity, maybe, just maybe refers to the different ideas there are, the different ways people look at the world, the different ways they approach the same situation, the different laughs, the different walks, the different tastes in music and literature. That’s where Wesleyan should be going and that’s where Wesleyan students should direct their aims. Don’t waste it carping about whether a dorm’s culture is white or black or brown or gray or any other color that exists. It’s not about whether you have enough people of the same skin color living on your hall. Let us focus more on whether you’re meeting people who are different from you, who challenge the modes of thinking you’ve gotten used to, who have different value systems, who treasure different things, who change you as a person and as an individual. And if that’s how one measures diversity, thank you to whoever’s in charge up there for putting me on the same floor as these 33 other people and the same dorm as these 100 more, cause you know you did a goddamn good job. Thank you.
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