University members divide themselves
Andrew Whitacre
Student Columnist

As far as I know, I’m one of only a few people from the university to have seen the World Trade Center wreckage in person. I say this, of course, not to brag – to do so would be nothing less than a mortal sin. I say it rather in the hope that someone else in our community has seen what I have seen and can perhaps corroborate or expound upon, in these pages, what I’ve recently experienced.

For a totally unrelated reason, this past weekend I went up to New York City. With my Saturday completely free, I walked downtown from Union Square, down through the East Village and Chinatown, past a view of the Brooklyn Bridge and City Hall, and deep into the financial district. Like many people have said before me, I didn’t see the Trade Center first – I smelled it. The smell seeped around Pearl Street, and closer, it dripped down Broad Street, and where I stood aghast at the debris, it flooded John Street. The smell wasn’t like burning plaster, it was burning plaster – and steel and glass, and shoes. Nearly three weeks after the fact, thousands still showed up to the six checkpoints to cry, to literally mourn. Three weeks after, and people were still coming downtown to staple up their missing-persons flyers. Three weeks and 150,000 tons of debris later, there is still six months of cleanup to do.

I lingered there for perhaps an hour. Not everybody was as lucky as I, in being able to come and go as I pleased: some broke down and couldn’t bring themselves to leave, national guardsmen stood watch all day uneasy in their gas masks, and, of course, there were the dead. But I’ve noticed something in myself over the years – that whenever I consider myself lucky or fortunate, I also feel an incredible guilt. Not a “survivor’s guilt” as such, but a guilt that says, “You’ve got a hell of lot to be thankful for, you damn well better do something good with it.”

And so, as I rode the Number 4 back up past Canal Street to Union Square Park, I started applying my “guilt” to our fortunate university community at large. In a moment of clarity on a Manhattan subway car, I was able to hold in a single thought what I knew of New York City and what I knew of the university. And I was ashamed.

In New York City, and particularly in New York City over the past three weeks, people live amongst each other with relatively few institutional barriers. For example, Chinatown is merely an approximation: it spills out amorphously outside what my map told me was “Chinatown,” and besides, Chinese people – in a strict sense – live everywhere throughout the city. Or take, as another example, the artists – again, in a strict sense: many may associate “art-for-art’s-sake” artists with Greenwich Village, but the fact is, they live not only in the Village, but also everywhere from downtown in TriBeCa to uptown in Harlem (of course I’m only talking about Manhattan here – the other boroughs have their own stories).

So when I saw all this in addition to New Yorkers’ remarkable response to the Trade Center attacks, I started wondering, “What the hell is wrong with the university?” Why is it that millions of wildly different people have been able to construct a common culture called “New York City” while we can’t evolve past Multicultural Appreciation Days in a school of 4,000 undergrads? Do you see the difference? New Yorkers live together because they share something, while we at the university institutionalize bad race relations within a white-black Greek system. Frats and sororities are necessary here; we need them, if for nothing more, the social life. But what does it say about our social life when collections of students can find no way or reason to socialize with one another? What does it say about our humanity to one another as human beings – as equals – when a body of students, those in Huffman for example, either dislike or are disliked by so many others that they have to physically separate themselves into a discreet unit from the rest? How did it come to be that as people who claim to be liberated from the prejudices of the past, we have found ourselves once again divided by institutions of our own creation?

I typically have a rule when I write: never critique a problem unless you are willing and able to offer a solution. I can’t do that this time. I am still so overwhelmed with my emotions at what I saw this preceding weekend that I can’t even begin to formulate even a suggestion.

Fortunately, there are people on this campus that are not only formulating them, but also putting them into action. One such person is senior Sabrina Parker. Over her years at the university, Sabrina has been developing a program that will bring race relations and tolerance issues to the foreground by creating an open dialogue among students in their dorms. I hope Sabrina will have an opportunity to publicize and teach our community about her program in the coming months.

I also hope you’ll take what I’m saying seriously. For my first three years here I would say to myself, “If you’re black/white, and you just plain feel more comfortable around blacks/whites, then that’s fine.” I argue now that not only is that not fine, it’s destructive. Allowing ourselves to live within our own comfortable cultures will simply continue to reinforce the boundaries that have always been there. It will take the active creation of a new campus culture and of new campus institutions before we can even entertain the idea of a single campus community.

The example of New York City is just one of many and is certainly a flawed example in many respects. It is also appropriate to point out that New York City is 400 years old, the university isn’t even half that. But how is it, really, that a city of hundreds of different peoples, just as many languages and two decimated symbols of its pride can put to shame a school of a few peoples, a common language and a billion dollar endowment? I just don’t know. And I hope someone out there will help me out.