he students traced their protest to the black students’ takeover of Lorimer Chapel in 1969 and to a 1994 student action that took the name Students of Color United for Change and demanded separate multicultural housing on campus. This year’s protesters, as did the authors of the report of the Task Force on Institutional Racism, referred to and restated demands and complaints lodged by a 1998 graduate who charged that she had been racially harassed by another student and claimed she had not received a fair hearing or adequate apologies from the College.
Protesters and authors of the task force report focused on “institutional racism,” which they differentiated from individual racism. Invoking the term introduced in the late 1960s by Stokely Carmichael, Laura Eichelberger ’99 read the following definition to a Campus Community Meeting: “While racism in one sense may describe the beliefs or ideas of individuals, in its institutional sense it refers to the anonymous operation of discrimination in organizations, professions, or even whole societies.” Textbook examples in Eichelberger’s definition included excuses for lack of diversity in hiring, discrimination in lending based on neighborhood restrictions and seniority rules that create “first in, last out” and “last hired, first let go” policies.
At Colby, students said, institutional racism takes various forms. It is evident in the assumption that students of color will put in the time and effort required, above and beyond their normal workload as college students, to bring about social justice and equality, they said. Responsibility for campus programs, for minority recruiting strategies and for diversity training too often fall on the shoulders of students of color, they said. “I’m tired of being a member and a co-convener to create something that other students take for granted,” Sanders told Cotter at a Campus Community Committee meeting. “It’s not my job. Something should be done by senior administrators.” Later she pointed out that the protest capped a week when she had attended a racism task force meeting on Monday, a Society Organized Against Racism (SOAR) meeting Tuesday, the Campus Community Committee meeting on institutional racism on Wednesday and a Presidents’ Council meeting Thursday to appeal for a minority affairs representative.
Students said it is institutional racism whenever a class or a professor turns to an African-American student to explain some subtlety of life in the inner city or something about Shakespeare’s character Othello. Said Coy Dailey ’01: “In utopian history, say, let’s talk about slavery or let’s talk about civil rights—the class tends to look at the person of color—this happens everywhere; I went to a predominantly white high school and this was the pattern—and he feels like he has to speak up for the whole race.” It’s uncomfortable, Dailey says. “I’m a student too. I’m trying to learn just like everyone else. A lot of people don’t even have to think about this stuff. Everyone else can say, ‘I don’t see that’ and walk away. We can’t do that.”
Institutional racism is evident in the lack of an assured role in student government, students said. “At the Presidents’ Council, everybody sitting around the room was predominantly white and the dorm representatives, even if they weren’t white, the dorms they were representing were predominantly white,” said Christina Tinglof ’00. “So it seems obvious to me that racial minorities don’t have a very big say on the Presidents’ Council.”
When the Presidents’ Council approved a non-voting representative, it, in essence, gave students of color “permanent guest status” in Colby’s power structure, said Associate Professor of Philosophy Jill Gordon.
Gordon said another manifestation of institutional racism is the way Colby’s harassment policies deal with sexual harassment but lack the specific language to effectively prosecute instances of racial harassment. She described institutional racism as “the ways in which institutions further disadvantage people who are already disadvantaged.” It can be traced to the policies, procedures and practices that institutions have and use that consciously or unconsciously reproduce racial inequities that exist in the larger society. “No one individually has to be racist” for institutional racism to function, she said.
Cotter took issue with the term “institutional racism” as soon as faculty and students used that term in the title of the task force last fall. He said Colby’s tradition of affirmative action, with resultant numerical increases in minority representation in the student body, faculty and staff, is the opposite of the practices that perpetuate discrimination and exclusion and that define institutional racism. When Potter conceded at a Campus Community Committee that all institutions are infected with institutional racism, Cotter’s reaction was that “it’s a meaningless description. So let’s concentrate instead on concrete objectives,” he said—“things we can do to fulfill the commitments we’ve already made to affirmative action. Let’s ask, ‘Where are we? How are we doing? What more can we do?’”
