Leafing through any large university brochure across the country, one of the top selling points (aside from the famed dining experience) is the cultural diversity the school has to offer. The glossy front page almost always has a minority member in the picture, laughing in a circle on the quad or throwing a frisbee with a group of young, vibrant students. Given all the trouble colleges go through to sell the idea that their institution is minority-friendly, it is surprising to hear about all the racial profiling that actually goes on once students step on campus.
Racial profiling on college campuses occurs in several different scenarios, including the classroom. An example of this comes from a story a friend of mine had told me about a student that attended a large school in Boston. The student’s parents were from Bangladesh, but she had grown up entirely in the United States. The girl was having some trouble in a college writing class she had signed up for.
The professor didn’t seem to agree with her writing style, giving her less than satisfactory grades that she didn’t necessarily believe she deserved. One day after class, the girl went to speak with her professor to figure out how to improve her writing and meet his standards of grading. She described the teacher to be friendly and even sympathetic, but not because he thought she simply needed a few stylistic improvements. He told her: “I know it must be hard to write English papers, especially since English probably isn’t your first language. Perhaps after some courses in grammar and vocabulary, your writing will improve.”
The girl was shocked to say the least. Not only had the professor insulted her writing capabilities, he had wrongfully assumed that just because she wasn’t a white student that English wasn’t her first language. Had she been a white student, the professor would have never questioned that English was her first language, even though many of the white students at the school are international and learned to speak their native tongue first.
He probably hadn’t realized his remarks would have such an offensive impact on the girl, but nonetheless, the comment was ignorant and entirely unprofessional. He had put an unfair assumption on the girl’s writing simply because she looked foreign, affirming the tendency of Americans to racially profile those who are most unlike themselves. She hadn’t corrected her professor at the time, but the confrontation made her start to feel ashamed of her skin color, even afraid that this sort of prejudice would follow her to every class she would ever enroll in.
This kind of racial discrimination has occurred on many other campuses across the country, causing kids without the standard “white” American look to wonder just how safe they really are in their pursuit of higher education. In response to an incident that transpired between a Yale University policeman and an African American student, the boy’s father took to twitter to express his outrage.
@CharlesMBlow (a New York Times columnist) wrote, “So, my son, a 3rd-year chem major at Yale was just accosted - at GUNPOINT - by a Yale policeman bc he ‘fit the description’ of a suspect…” Just as the girl from Boston, this boy was assumed to be someone he wasn’t just because he “fit the description” of a non-white student.
Instead of putting prejudices aside and treating each student equally, regardless of their racial backgrounds, schools are letting assumptions and stereotypes get in the way of a fair education for all students.
Charles M. Blow, the father of the black Yale student, said in an interview that “Recent events reinforce what many have been saying for years: have a conversation with your children about what to do when interacting with authorities.”This suggests that the problem of racial profiling forces parents to teach their children how to comply with the system, not how to challenge it. Many students who fall under the “minority” category live in fear that a school that should promote acceptance and open-mindedness will instead judge them for looks that are beyond their control. Instead of continuing to allow this behavior to happen and encouraging minority members to adjust to the circumstances, why shouldn’t we teach white students and faculty to judge all members of the community equally? College is supposed to be a time to branch out and coexist with a myriad of different people, not to make assumptions out of fear and misunderstanding. Until colleges can learn to stop racial profiling, the higher education system will remain a flawed institution that cannot live up to the glossy pages they promote.
