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May-June 2007
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Culture(less) Club
During the year and a half I have spent as a student at Harvard, I’ve been befuddled by tRNA in a Life Sciences 1a lecture, experienced the nature of causation in Philosophy 8, and proclaimed the not-so-abbreviated history of the Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library to a group of international tourists as a Crimson Key Society tour guide. With more than two years left to go here, I already feel I’ve experienced everything I hoped to. However, I’ve also experienced something I never would have expected at Harvard: a feeling of deep cultural void. Growing up as a white kid in a white town, my childhood was blissfully ignorant of any cultural alienation. I fit in because everyone fit in—at least superficially. My preconception was that Harvard would be similar. After all, when one pictures the College, it is all too easy to let your mind’s eye visualize a bunch of white men in breeches and powdered wigs trotting around the Yard, reading leather-bound tomes by candlelight. Maybe I could chalk that up to my overactive imagination gone stir-crazy in northern Illinois, but you have to admit that, because of its long history of exclusivity and the United States’s record of institutionalized racism, the Ivy League has a bit of a reputation for homogeneity. Thus it was with great surprise and delight that I arrived on campus to find that my entryway in Grays Hall alone contained all types of people: from the Hindu who grew up in Tennessee to the gay black man from New Jersey to the vegan from New Zealand. My exposure to cultures other than my own exploded within one day, from the once-in-a-blue-moon bar mitzvah back home to the vast and popular array of cultural organizations at Harvard. The myriad ethnic or culture-centered student groups at Harvard offer a specific extracurricular niche to people of diverse identities on campus. For undergraduates, cultural organizations are the backbone of academic, extracurricular, and social life. Clubs range from the Harvard-Radcliffe Asian-American Christian Fellowship to the Harvard Society of Black Scientists and Engineers, to the Harvard Philippine Forum, and serve a variety of purposes, from educational to social and from commun-ity service to performance art. The services that these groups provide their members—and the multicultural community they help foster on campus—are invaluable. During the first week of school, I put my e-mail address on every mailing list I could get my eager little hands on. My new roommate’s Jewish? Hillel, here I come! A gay uncle? I could be the S in BGLTSA (Harvard Bisexual, Gay, Lesbian, Transgender, and Supporters Alliance)! One-eighth Swedish? Sign me up for the Scandinavian Club! But when the e-mails started coming, advertising Sabbath dinners and asking for Finnish translators, I realized that I didn’t really belong on the lists as I had imagined. In fact, I thought as I unsubscribed myself, I really didn’t have enough culture or identity of my own to be in any cultural groups at all. As someone straight, white, and nonreligious, I felt like an orphan in the system. While most (if not all) of these organizations are welcoming to students regardless of color, preference, or creed, being welcome in an organization and feeling as if you belong in it are completely distinct. 1 | 2 | continued >  
 
 
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