The middle bit of Andrew Sullivan’s latest “Intelligencer” column at New York Magazine calls out Williams College and similar colleges that practice or propose to practice segregated housing—now given the convenient euphemism of “affinity housing”.  I’m pleased that Andrew got the idea for this section from reading this website (see below), but even more pleased that Sullivan puts the weight of his pulpit and his intellect against segregated housing. (Let’s call it what it is.) A screenshot from Sullivan:

He adds this, all of which I’ve written about before, but not with Sullivan’s panache, which is on display here:

Segregation as the pathway to integration seems to be the argument, a point with some uncomfortable precedents dating back to before Brown v. Board of Education. The student group demanding this recently announced on its Instagram page that “the administration expressed general support for affinity housing and together we came up with a pilot program for affinity housing that was feasible given the avenues of change at the college.” If you want to see how this kind of transformation happens, check out this video of a student council meeting on April 9 discussing whether there should be funding for racially segregated events at “Previews,” when prospective students visit the campus to check it out. At around the 45-minute mark, two students enter the room, ranting and swearing as they insist that their demands for the programs be met. They were, of course.

As I’ve reported before, there are ample sociological data suggesting that people get along better when they get to know each other. Segregated housing erodes that ability. Sullivan adduces additional data, and though the results aren’t 100% uniform, the upshot is that priming students with “color blind” rather than “multicultural” (i.e., identity-politic) approaches tends to make students more aware of ethnic differences and imbue them with stronger stereotypes about different groups. Sullivan concludes this from these studies:

. . . the more focus you put on race, the more conscious people are of it as a valid and meaningful distinction between people, and the more likely they are to reify it. At today’s diversity-driven campus or corporation, often your first instinct when seeing someone is to quickly assess their identity — black, white, gay, Latino, male, trans, etc. You are required to do this all the time because you constantly need to check your privilege. And so college students — and those who hire and fire in business — are trained to judge a person instantly by where they fit into a racial and gender hierarchy, before they even engage them. Of course they’re going to end up judging people instantly by the color of their skin. Social justice has a strict hierarchy of identity, with white straight males at the bottom. It is, in fact, a mirror image of the far right’s racial hierarchy, which puts white straight men at the top.

. . .In other words, teaching people to see other races as completely different from one’s own may encourage us to define others by stereotypes.

When the deep tribal forces in the human psyche are constantly on alert for racial difference, we run the risk of exacerbating racism. So we face the prospect that anti-racism could facilitate what it is attempting to destroy. It wouldn’t be the first time that a well-intentioned experiment has backfired.

Back to Williams College. Recent demands for segregated housing at that ritzy institution came from an Authoritarian Leftist group at Williams called CARENow, which sent a list of demands to the president and trustees, one of which was for segregated housing:

3. Improve community spaces and establish affinity housing for Black, queer, and all other minoritized students.

Note that the housing is to be segregated not just by race, but by sexuality and god knows what other criteria define “minoritized” status. (Note too the use of the neologism “minoritized”, which, contrary to the word “minority”, implies that somebody is doing oppressive “othering”. But, as biology professor Luana Maroja argues, this doesn’t seem to be the case, at least at Williams.)

Now after the first year, Williams students have the right to share dorm space with other students of their choice, which leads to a form of self-segregation. I have no strong objections to that policy, though I think it may have inimical effects on “inclusion.” What I object to is a university designating living space for any group that others cannot inhabit. That is a form of segregation that, as Sullivan says, is touted as a pathway to integration. Does anybody really believe that?

On the designated date—President Maud Mandel is nothing if not compliant to the demands of protestors—the President issued a response to the demands on her official website (click on screenshot below). I’ll note in passing that Mandel, buying into the protestors’ rhetoric, uses the word “minoritized” five times.

I won’t go into her responses to the protestors’ many demands, as it’s a long document, but I do want to give her response to the demand for segregated housing. First of all, she seems to be open to it. Second, she vociferously claims that it’s not really segregated (my emphasis).

Another area of the residential life discussion that has attracted widespread attention is the idea of affinity housing. College leaders have been in constructive conversations with students leading this cause. In discussion with them, we have stressed the importance of embedding our conversations in the wider discussion around residential life that will be a central feature of the Strategic Planning process. Doing so will also enable us to collect relevant data from other schools to inform our thinking. In this spirit, the working group will consider the idea of a pilot along with other possibilities. We do want to pause and recognize that, at the time of writing, some students involved in the affinity housing and other efforts are being subjected to unduly harsh media and social media attention that misrepresents affinity housing as “segregation.”

In reality, people on campuses across America already opt to live together based on various shared interests and identities: French language students, film studies, Christian fellowship students, vegetarians, hockey players, etc. The question is not whether such an idea is valid in principle, but how to reconcile in practice the impulse toward free association with Williams’ commitment to a diverse living community. Any pilot that is considered should take these questions into account, as well as looking at the successes and struggles of comparable efforts elsewhere. But we believe such questions should not be a bar to exploring the idea in the course of strategic planning.

Note that Mandel implies that “the impulse towards free association” is at odds with “Williams’ commitment to a diverse living community,” but that’s not true. Williams is in fact committed to a community that has racial, ethnic, and sexual diversity, but not to a community in which individuals from different groups are encouraged to mingle. If ever a college is deliberately balkanized, it’s Williams.

Mandel needs to read Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language,” which points out how unpalatable policies can be softened simply by giving them different names.  Exactly how, President Mandel, is “affinity housing”, which separates groups of people based on their ethnicity or sexuality, different from segregated housing?

And yes, of course people on campuses across America already live with others of like minds/interests/pigmentation. That is okay. What is not okay is to mandate segregated spaces where others aren’t allowed. That idea is NOT “valid in principle.” Can you imagine a Southern segregationist making similar arguments in favor of racial segregation, either at colleges or in communities? After all, that is “white affinity housing.” (Note Mandel’s clever omission of “ethnicity”, “sexuality” and “race” from the list of “shared interests and identities.”)

Once again we see a double standard: it’s okay to segregate students by race so long as the students of color are the ones who can exclude others. It doesn’t work the other way around (and shouldn’t!). All such forms of mandated segregation are odious and, rather than being inclusive, are divisive.

For years Williams has resisted the notion of such segregated housing, and good for that. Now, however, the school is on the verge of capitulating to the demands of neo-segregationists like CARENow. Williams depends heavily on the donations of rich alumni to finance it: it has one of the largest per (student) capita endowments in America. I hope that those alumni are paying attention to how their money is being used.

h/t: cesar, Simon