To the Editor:
Your recent editors’ note ends, “We do not and will not tolerate racism,” but this begs the question: What are you actively doing to dismantle it? I mean, if you ain’t for us, you’ve got to be against us.
It seems many organizations at Brown and beyond think recruiting a few token people of color is enough. In 2008, for instance, The Brown Noser was still a predominately white male organization, for which I was writing political satire as a black woman. I was having some difficulty getting published, so I asked the editor, who’d written the entire staff about the general lack of quality in the work, for some feedback on mine specifically. The response I received called my writing “very good and funny” but said “it made the reader feel kind of bad about race relations on campus.” White tears.
Quiet as it’s being kept, diversity in organizations, in many ways, benefits the majority more than the minority. The majority can pat themselves on the back for making a quota and learning about other cultures without even applying for a study abroad. Meanwhile, students of color have been set up for failure inside of systems that were built to exclude them and their authentic expression of their needs. We’re given brief platforms, tone policed and finally mocked for creating under-resourced but safe spaces for ourselves.
Privilege is spending more time proving you aren’t a racist than becoming an ally. Privilege is racism only crossing your mind when someone calls you a racist. Privilege is defending your right to bear arms and free speech or press when unarmed black bodies can’t even breathe and brown people are being denied an education. Privilege is reading this letter and not publishing it just because it makes you feel bad. So while I don’t know what cows have to do with white privilege, if Mr. Brown can moo, you need to be making sure everyone else can too.
All the best but do better,
Elizabeth Morgan ’10 MFA’13
