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Jul

2009

Living Together

Posted on 13:45, July 7th, 2009 by EKSwitaj

Read my latest story, "The All-Nighter", at 52|250.

A recent New York Times article surveys campus studies that have discovered a number of different effects of having interracial roommates. The effect that makes the headline, however, is to my mind the most obvious: that living with someone of another race can reduce prejudice. According to the article:

Several studies have shown that living with a roommate of a different race changes students’ attitudes. One, from the University of California at Los Angeles, generally found decreased prejudice among students with different-race roommates — but those who roomed with Asian-Americans, the group that scored the highest on measures of prejudice, became more prejudiced themselves.

That last part did strike me as unexpected, in part because during my second year at Evergreen, I roomed with a young woman of mixed Japanese and Irish heritage (Hi, Christine!) who certainly wasn’t any more prejudiced than anyone else I knew at the time (yes, I know anecdote =/= data).

While it is difficult to evaluate one’s own level of prejudice, I do know that living with her, and seeing how different incidents and statements affected her, woke me up to a lot of my white privilege. I won’t go into specifics here because it is more her story than mine, but I learned not from demanding that she explain things to me (though I probably was guilty of this on occasion) but by living through things with her.

It is living separately that allows prejudice to continue. Because of this, educational institutions that want to develop whole citizens and not just cog-in-the-machine workers do have a real interest in making sure that their student populations are diverse. At the same time, it must be remembered that it is not the responsibility of people of color to open up their lives to white people just because we want to understand.

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2 Responses to “Living Together”

Nora on July 20th, 2009 at 12:33 am

I stumbled onto your blog through feministing. I, too, lived with someone of a different race and found it profoundly changed the way I looked at the world (even though I’m a WOC myself). I also love that you acknowledge it’s not a POC’s responsibility to educate a white person, nor is it their reason for going to a school. It seems that a lot of white people think diversity is for whites, which to some extent it is (just as it’s for any race, in the sense that diversity should benefit all groups coming together). But I think the primary reason diversity is so important is so that people of color have a part in the system, and that there are people of color in higher jobs and that they have helpful connections and so on and so forth. I think that affirmative action kind of got spun so that whites would think it was for them…maybe I’ve made this all up in my head, though

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EKSwitaj on July 20th, 2009 at 1:13 am

Thank for commenting. You’re absolutely right that the primary reason for diversity is so that people of color (and, in other contexts, other groups that have been excluded) can have a place in the system, and if I had been as aware of these issues as I want to be, I would have included that before discussing diversity-as-education.

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