Damn Wes, It’s Like That?

I have never had a class with Professor Price. I don’t know much about her work or whether or not she was deserving of tenure. I don’t even really have much insight into the tenure process itself. What I do know? As a member of the Wesleyan community I felt that it was necessary to support my peers in questioning Wesleyan’s tenure process and hiring practices as an issue of diversity. While I believe that other factors are of equal importance, race distinctly matters when it comes to this particular issue. I believe that Wesleyan is doing a disservice to all of its students by failing to provide us opportunities to study, engage and share knowledge with professors from varying racial backgrounds, as their scholarship can offer insight and perspectives that are valuable and necessary.  We should all be upset by the idea that Wesleyan is perhaps actively privileging certain perspectives in the classroom when they fail to attract, hire and retain high quality professors of color. We should all be outraged by this…but instead, I have found claims of “racial paranoia,” accusations of “pulling the race card” and “blowing things out of proportion.” These comments serve to highlight a trend that I have noticed during my two years at Wes. It seems that the dialogues that happen in the classroom or face-to-face and those which take place on sites like Wesleying and the College ACB are vastly different. Each time issues of race arise on campus, they are soon followed by a barrage of anonymous online “here we go agains,” as if to imply, often quite violently, that discussions of race are synonymous with accusations of racism fueled by white liberal guilt or SOC oversensitivity.

This implication is a dangerous one that stops us from having meaningful conversations about real problems. It saddens me to think that such a seemingly large number of Wesleyan students would use anonymity as an opportunity to say careless and truly racist things.  By accusing students of pulling the race card when they attempt to address tangible issues of institutional racism, I feel that my peers are attempting to use intimidation and aggression to silence our [all Wesleyan students’] ability to call it like we see it or as we experience it. I personally welcome any open discussion or debate about Wesleyan’s lack of tenured and non-tenured professors of color, which is a real problem, but for those of you who wish to continue using internet anonymity as a tool of silencing; I’m going to have to ask you to kindly FALL BACK.