Achieving real campus diversity

By Brooke Boniface

As a fair skinned, blonde haired, blue eyed girl, I have rarely walked into a room and thought, "Wow, I am in the minority right now." So for the first few weeks of attending IGWE meetings each Thursday at 6:30 p.m. in the Shappell Lounge, I experienced a tiny piece of what some of my friends at Santa Clara may feel all the time.

The feeling was not exactly awkwardness or one of discomfort, it was almost an unconscious acknowledgement of the fact that I was not in the majority, that I did not have as much of a claim to this culture or environment as everyone else there did. When I was trying to describe the meetings to a couple of my friends, both of whom are Caucasian, I found myself at a bit of a loss for words.

"I don't know," I said, "You should just go. It's a really good experience."

I got looks of incredulity and short laughs. "What?" I said in disbelief. Neither of my friends are even remotely racist and I couldn't understand their blatant lack of interest. "Well, Brooke," one of them replied, "it's the black student union. It's not exactly for you is it?" Their view of IGWE as only for the African-American members of the student body -- which also extends to a view of MEChA as only for Latinos and Barkada as only for Pacific Islanders -- seems to be extremely prevalent in the Santa Clara Community. Santa Clara's Diversity page online reads, "Santa Clara is a community enriched by women and men of diverse backgrounds, respectful of difference and enlivened by open dialogue." By percentage, in the class of 2012 there are 38.49 Caucasian, 18.10 Asian/Pacific Islander, 16.79 Hispanic/Latino, 3.52 African American and .19 Native American.

At first glance this seems like quite a diverse campus; if diversity were defined in purely numerical terms then sure, Santa Clara is diverse. Granted, the percentages of African American students is rather low. By the numbers Santa Clara seems to have an extremely varied student population, but on campus, the diversity seems to be on the outskirts.

Alexandria Black-Davis, another sophomore at Santa Clara, thinks that the root of the problem has to do with the fact that "minorities are here more just to say, 'we have a certain percentage of diversity rate on campus' versus for the purpose of 'these are people, lets learn about their culture.'"

The beauty of having so many different races, ethnicities and nationalities on this campus is that it grants everyone an opportunity to learn. Cultural clubs like IGWE, MEChA and Barkada all host events throughout the year such as Love Jones, Spicy Bronco and MLK night. However, often times the only people who attend these events are the ones in the clubs. This tends to be a problem because as one student pointed out, "If we have a group of people who are all the same sitting around talking, what do we learn from that? Not much." Amechi Okechukwu, a junior at Santa Clara and the co-chair of IGWE, believes that, "We can do a better job as a school of making sure that the students are ambassadors of Santa Clara and its values of acceptance and inclusion and leadership."

The school must hold its students accountable, and students must live up to our standards both in the classroom and the community. That is the true way to measure whether Santa Clara is really diverse; not with numbers or percentages, but with the level of acceptance that permeates throughout the school. Only when there is an open dialogue between people of every race, ethnicity and nationality can we learn how to live together and thrive.

Brooke Boniface is a history and political science double major.