Division at Trinity: Racism Embedded in Class Matters

The recent tumults at The College, manifestations of a subtle (but persistent) racist discourse within the Trinity community, are saddening for two reasons: First, such actions are inflammatory and, as President Jones remarked recently, "when a member of our College is harmed by discrimination in any of its forms, we are all harmed.  And we are all corporately lessened by the actions of a few." Second, and perhaps more horrifically, is that such actions highlight ingrained divisions in our community. There is a certain futility in confronting this divisiveness, and what is most troubling is that racism, no matter how passionately the community strives to eliminate it, will always persist on the small college campus.

 To those within the Trinity student body, faculty, and administration who truly believe that the racist discourse can be subverted and eliminated, this writer admires your fortitude and your zealotry. However, the aim of this piece is to elaborate not only on why such events occurred, but also to explain why they are so painful to confront within the community. Furthermore, at a much deeper level, this piece was written with the intention of drawing attention to an underlying institutional structure that gives recourse to racist actions and ineffectual anti-racist responses.

Within the private liberal arts institution, "race" loses much of its sociocultural footing. Small communities such as Trinity cannot comprehend divisions based on race as divisions between one group and its purely foreign "other."  The academic ideal of the small community of scholars and colleagues prevents race from functioning as a socially divisive mechanism in its own right. On the small college campus, racism is simply not the same cultural phenomenon as, say, gentrification and "white flight." However, the question of why race serves as a source of social friction on the small college campus then arises. To answer this, race in the Trinity College context must be thought of as merely a social moniker, belying greater socioeconomic and cultural implications. Anyone with any connections to individuals of other races on the small college campus would surely not dispute the fact that wealth and class divide defines associations more than race. Class divisions, more subtle and more poisonous to feelings of communal unity, are thus subsumed into the illusory racist discourse.

Class divisions find their most despicable outlet in the familiar (yet falsely ascribed) racist discourse, yet they are most painful for the reason that they draw attention to the very frame individuals apply to their college experience. Within the capitalistic context that defines most contemporary societal endeavors, small private colleges present themselves as providing services or goods—they are selling the student (customer) something. By their very nature, small private colleges are ill-equipped to conduct the sort of massive research endeavors that define a successful institution by 20th century standards of the "research ideal," and instead must brand their product differently—the small college is selling a "collegiate" experience. This means, however, that small colleges are prey to the worst vagaries of customer satisfaction, abandoning any claim to following a humanistic pedagogy, and instead selling people only what they like – a positive experience, because the customer is always right. This leads students to conceive of their collegiate experience along purely utilitarian lines, as they are no longer acquiring truth, but purchasing a product. What individuals believe they are buying from a college, however, is defined by their socio-economic standing.

Within the context of class and racism, this is not to say that all individuals of color are of a lower class background, and that all white students are of a wealthy background, but the cultural stereotyping remains. At first glance, this stereotyping is engaged so that by an individual's race, one may make assumptions regarding their class.

 At the risk of some necessary oversimplification, the cultural pretensions regarding college of the "lower" and "upper" classes are fundamentally different. To be a college educated individual with the context of the declining middle class or the upper class means to receive a measure of self-legitimization—one only attains full recognition as a member of one the aforementioned groups if one goes to college. In this way, for the upper- and middle-class individual, the act of going to college is an essential part of affirming one's social standing to oneself and others. The collegiate experience for the lower class individual is far more ambitious, as it is seen as a means of social mobility. Inherently linked to the notion of class are the ideas of economic standing and earning potential, and social mobility is defined by these ideas. The college experience promises social mobility along these lines—that if one attends college, one will earn more. Additionally, in an ipso facto sort of way, by adopting the cultural pretension of going to a small, private, liberal arts college (rather than, say, a professional school), one is no longer a member of the lower classes. Thus, while the capitalistic-utilitarian mentality of consuming the product sold by a college for one's own end persists for both upper and lower-class individuals, what they believe they are purchasing is vastly different. If the reason for attending a college is inherently different between two individuals of different classes, then so too must be how one frames the entire experience of college—what one does, where one goes, who one knows.

With these class identifications in place, defining the summation of the entire collegiate experience, division is likely to occur. Class, as mentioned in recent Tripod article, is a more loaded and less understood topic than race. Racism gives immediate recourse to divisiveness. It provides a rough template on which to project social anxieties in a small community, and it serves as most familiar tool by which individuals may wound each other. Yet, as mentioned above, the topic of racism unto itself is an illusory beast, and one cannot address racism without addressing class, which is something that the small college cannot do. By addressing class in any real or meaningful way, institutions such as Trinity would be drawing attention to the manner in which they've failed as academic organizations, and they would betray themselves as part of a system that they supposedly stand against. Rather than being a liberal, free-thinking community of scholars all gathered together for the benefit of all humanity, whereby with enough education the whole world will become better and more enlightened, by addressing class, the small college would reveal itself as but another arm of a grand capitalistic mentality—selling the consumer "the best four years of your life" rather than dispensing any meaning of truth.