|
May-June 2007
|
< previous | 1 | 2 A few weeks into my freshman year, I joined the Kuumba Singers of Harvard College, a choir that celebrates black spirituality and creativity through song and other forms of performance art while working to develop the black community on campus. While my friends at home and at school teased me (whom they called “the whitest person they know,” whatever that means) for being in a black student group, I grew to feel like a part of the Kuumba community. I even wrote a piece for the Crimson, referring to myself as someone “culturally blanched” but still able to join a vibrant cultural student organization. The key to feeling at home, I decided, was to approach the experience not as just another fun club, but as an opportunity to learn and grow from exposure to “unfamiliar” territory. But even with that attitude, it is difficult to feel truly at home in an organization that—frankly—is intended for someone else. My semester in Kuumba was one of my best experiences at Harvard. Yet within the group, my status as a white member unintentionally pigeonholed me: I was there because of what I did, not because of who I was. And at the end of the day, when I joined another group that conflicted with the rehearsals, I slowly faded out of Kuumba, not in protest, and not because I didn’t like being in the choir, but because without the inherent cultural tie, I felt as if a key part of the overall Kuumba experience simply was not there for me. Being welcome in an organization is very different from being recruited to a club. And even though Harvard-recognized student groups are prohibited from actively discriminating in their membership, there is a difference between deciding to join a group because your interest in the culture is strong enough to overcome the feeling of being out of place, and being actively recruited and encouraged to join a “home away from home” in the form of an ethnic or religious organization. My last-ditch effort to connect was a trip to the Wisconsin Club’s function during reading period in the spring. “Are you from Wisconsin?” I was asked as I reached for a brat and some cheddar. Well, no, I replied, but my town is right across the Illinois border, so it’s very similar, I would think. The other partygoers seemed unimpressed with my connection (despite the fact that my best friend from home is a University of Wisconsin “badger”), and I left feeling that my state’s lack of frozen-custard production rendered us somehow even more boring than other, more dairy-inclined states. I was crushed. I found that, like many of my peers at Harvard, I missed the “culture” of my home when I came to school. Unfortunately, the “culture” of my home happens to be Leave It to Beaver-style whitewashed, station-wagon-driving, unassumingly agnostic, Midwest suburbia, and to those who don’t have the personal connections to such a place, well, it’s a harder sell than something as visibly warm and interesting as a big Irish family party or a performance of Mariachi Veritas. And the fact that I had no conforming religious beliefs no longer made me stand out—as it had in my Catholic high school. Instead, it made me uninteresting. It was hard to cultivate the feeling that my “culturally blanched” heritage was worth celebrating, and I started to believe that without any external validation, it was nothing worth missing. But thinking along those lines defeats the purpose of having cultural organizations in the first place. What I failed to see—and what many fail to recognize—is that the absence of a cultural organization for the “majority” (as opposed to the minority) does not imply that the majority lacks a valid culture. What it does suggest—and rightly so—is that, judging on the basis of history, there is no need to draw attention and appreciation to that culture in this context. When Kuumba was founded in 1970 by five black undergraduates, the Harvard class of 1972 contained only 51 black students. The tenure of former Harvard president Abbot Lawrence Lowell, class of 1877 (and for whom Lowell House is named), is rife with moments of active discrimination. In June 1920, seven students were expelled from the College (and from Cambridge) under the suspicion of homosexual activity. In 1922—only decades before Kuumba was founded—Lowell expelled all African-American students from the Yard dormitories; he also promoted admissions changes that reduced the proportion of Jews in the freshman class from 27.6 percent in 1925 to less than 15 percent in 1933, at the end of his career. Historically, minority groups have been marginalized on Harvard’s campus, so the need for a strong, positive, minority presence has been great. A female friend expressed that sentiment at a staging of The Vagina Monologues last year. When a male friend asked why there was no production dedicated solely to male genitalia, she replied, “There is: it’s called history.” That focus on the white male contribution to society is true at Harvard, where even the introductory courses required of all concentrators in popular disciplines such as history, English, and social studies barely touch on material from outside Europe and the United States. In this respect, it seems petty to bemoan the sense of cultural vacancy that I feel as I watch my roommate play her veena (a south Indian stringed instrument) in the cultural show Ghungroo or listen to RecKlez (a Klezmer band composed of Harvard students) during Cultural Rhythms. I may not feel completely at home in any cultural organization on campus, but neither am I someone President Lowell might have prevented from attending Harvard (if I were male, that is) in the first place. Cultural organizations are an integral part of Harvard not only because they bring diversity to the College, but also because they give majority students the experience of what it feels like to be in the minority. And truthfully, being in the audience for the cultural events I attend has taught me just as much as I would have learned on stage. With open eyes, and an open mind, even the “culturally blanched” among us can feel like a part of something rich.
Berta Greenwald Ledecky Undergraduate Fellow Emma Lind is a history and literature concentrator who lives in Winthrop House with three other women and one veena.  
 
 
|
