Intolerance at Trinity Not Limited to Racism

In a recent Letter to the Editor, Gary A. Smith '72 assured us that, don't worry, no one cares if you're gay once you get to the real world (the real world in this case being the aerospace engineering industry).Last week, Joe Tarzi asked us all to get a little perspective - after all, in the real world, people take racial jokes as the jokes that they are meant to be (with the real world mentioned here being Tarzi's high school).

I don't think of the real world as a place full of rocket scientists and high schoolers; I guess I'm just not that worldly wise. Thinking of Trinity as a four-year vacation from real life is not an accurate or productive way of looking at college or at life. Students may like to think of Trinity as a little bubble separated from Hartford and their time here as a little bubble separated from the rest of their lives, but our actions here at Trinity do not exist in a vacuum and do not just disappear into a void.

Our actions here reflect attitudes of society in general and have an impact on other students at Trinity. Most students can agree that an action like writing "nigger" on a student's white board affects the student who was harassed via white board; disagreement comes when we start to talk about the motivations and implications and proper reaction.

An action like this should affect all of us. Even if scrawled by a drunk student, this epithet is not just an individual action; it indicates that this student thought racism was deserved or funny or at the least permissible. Harassing actions, however small, reflect an environment at Trinity that says it's alright to mistreat other people, and we as a school should react quickly and decisively against these actions and this environment.

I am so glad that President Jones e-mailed right away, that there was a well-attended march and a rally and coverage in the Tripod and a planned forum. Individual, overt acts of racism provide a rallying point, and Trinity students took advantage of this to rally in a powerful and noticeable way. We should be careful, though, not to manufacture rallying points for school-sanctioned, short-lived spurts of activism.

The cultural and institutional classism, racism, sexism, and homophobia at Trinity are much harder to recognize - especially when you are not among the persecuted group - and are consequently much harder to react against. Reactions against an identity are confused with political statements that deserve equal hearing when alterations to EROS chalkings are vehemently defended as the exercise of free speech. The hurling of an epithet like nigger is immediately condemned (and should be), but bitch, whore, pussy, and gay are routinely tossed around as insults. Attempts to point this out are informal, seldom school-sanctioned, and almost always laughingly dismissed.

I think structural change is necessary at Trinity, and I am right behind you with the damning the man and raving on. But we need to examine and acknowledge subtle and widespread harassment and inequality, the cultural atmosphere that permits the individual acts of intolerance that leap out at us and demand an immediate reaction.