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Are White Students "Armed for the World?"

By Candyce Phoenix
Black College Wire

Candyce Phoenix

I wonder if white people know that they are white. Do they wake up in the morning and think, "Wow -- I'm white"? When they sit in class, do they pay extra attention when they're reading a white author's works? Seriously, I'm just wondering.

I'm black. True, I don't wake up thinking, "Wow -- I'm black." But I do pay extra attention when somebody who looks like me winds up in the syllabus for freshman English. I do get a little miffed when a white person touches my hair, exclaiming, "I just had to feel it! It's so different!" I try to make sure that if I'm not early, I'm at least on time -- not C.P. time, either. I'm not trying to "play the race card." I'm just saying that I'm black and I know it -- every day, maybe every minute.

This semester, I decided to exchange Columbia University, my regular school, for Howard University in D.C. Though the campus abounds with black faces, most if not all of the black students and faculty are still aware of their blackness, probably because they need only go to Capitol Hill to find scores of people who have either forgotten, don't care about or actively work against them.

There is a constant sense of camaraderie, an agreement that we are all here to solve the problems facing our race and the country at large, to get an education and make things better. As at every school, there are those who are primarily out to make money, but in most cases, even they want to use their positions to help others. There is an understanding that those at the Mecca, as Howard is known, have not only a desire but an obligation to better society.

Columbia is a great school. It has opened doors and given me opportunities that I might not have had otherwise. The value and reputation of an Ivy League education cannot be underestimated. But I fear that many who leave predominantly white schools, institutions that train leaders of tomorrow, may be woefully unaware of issues facing communities and people of color.

Sitting in class, you can sometimes hear a comment made that isn't outwardly racist, but still maintains a tinge of discrimination. In those instances, I have often thought to myself, "OK, will you speak up today or are you just going to let this one go?" More often than not, being in the minority fills me and others with an obligation to stand up for my __________ (fill in the blank: race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, etc).

White institutions do not have a responsibility to train us all to go out and scream "Black Power" in the faces of everyone we meet. We shouldn't somehow find a way to retroactively turn them into HBCUs. Neither Howard nor Columbia is intrinsically better than the other, but the focus on different cultures that HBCUs offer presents a critical counterbalance to the dominant approaches to education prevalent in the Ivy League.

Diversifying the curriculum is not merely an issue of people of color wanting to learn about their cultures. If that were true, one would only have to maintain the isolation that studies of people of color receive by being quarantined under race-specific majors.

We need to find ways to ensure that these leaders enter the world with a working knowledge of the realities facing various ethnicities. My Black Philosophy professor explained the goal of college as being "knowledge for action . . . academic excellence with social responsibility." He described it as "arming" students for the world.

Curricula at many white institutions place disproportionate importance on white scholars, and effectively deny the importance of scholars of color. They arm students with a rifle with which to fight, but do not encourage them to pull back from the scope to see more than just the Eurocentric world on which our society tends to focus. Only two things can result: they will try to help and shoot blanks, or they will simply shoot to kill when addressing race issues in the future.

More and more universities are beginning to embrace cross-cultural curricula. Some do so willingly, others as grudging responses to widespread student protest and criticism. Still others settle for simply creating the illusion of action and change by throwing money at serious concerns and forming new, but impotent offices charged with addressing diversity concerns.

Whatever changes these institutions decide to make, they cannot deny the increased globalization that affects almost every profession -- from medicine to business to law. In a country that will soon consist mostly of people of color, Eurocentric institutions must expand their scope if they hope to remain relevant in the long run.

Candyce Phoenix is a student at Columbia University who is attending Howard University this semester under an exchange program. A version of this article originally appeared in the Columbia Daily Spectator.

Posted Oct. 17, 2005