Wash U’s Model Minority

The print version of this article mistakenly used an earlier draft of the piece. Below is the author’s intended contribution. 

BY MICHELE HALL

If you scroll through the names of students involved in the Mosaic Project, there are not likely to be any surprises. The names listed are more than likely names of students who you know are active in administrative projects for diversity and inclusion, and in fact have been involved in these projects from an early stage of their time at Washington University. You have seen them sitting on various boards, you have seen them in admissions propaganda, and now you are seeing them again on the Mosaic Project website. And that is the exact problem.

The Mosaic Project, an initiative to “engage students in dialogue about diversity and inclusion,” arrived as a retroactive (and in some ways political) response to incidents of bias and exclusion on our campus. In this attempt to manufacture actual inclusion, the university has enhanced the role of WU’s Model Minorities. The phrase “model minority” is typically used to discuss a minority population that has seemingly succeeded in assimilating to the standards of the dominant culture. For example, in America the model minority is seen to be Eastern and South Eastern Asians, who have largely achieved success by the majority’s standards, yet are still marked as minorities due to their phenotypical markers of foreignness. In coining the phrase “WU Model Minority,” I am speaking of minority students or allies of minority students who have become the university-approved spokespeople for minorities on campus. As a result, these are the only minority voices that are credible in discussions of improving diversity and inclusion.

This is not to criticize these students; in fact, I greatly respect the work of those who I would consider to be WU’s Model Minorities, and some of you reading this may even consider me to be a WU Model Minority. I believe the role these WU Model Minorities serve is important, because without them there would be no one to advocate for marginalized student interests at all. However, I do fault the administration for establishing these students as the authorities on minorities and minority marginalization within this institution on the basis that they are palatable to the majority. These students are often palatable in their dress, in their speech, and in their approach towards the administration. In some ways, they have successfully assimilated to the standards of the dominant culture. These experiences are all too familiar to me: dressing less expressively, constantly monitoring my speech for African-American phrases, and biting my impassioned tongue when I am face-to-face with the administration, in order to be taken seriously. A passionate (read: aggressive, angry) black woman is oftentimes perceived as too radical, and relegated to the margins.

What is missing from the conversation on inclusion at WU are the unassimilated voices, those that tell the story of marginalization the way it is, without any niceties; those that preach more radical approaches to change at this institution that are quite frankly not easy to listen to. These are the voices that are excluded from our dialogues about diversity and inclusion on campus.

So how can we as a community engage all voices, from all facets of our cultural spectrum? It begins with less anonymous and culturally nice surveys that students are tired of filling out with very little tangible change. Administrators should focus their time on conversations with minorities who are not easily palatable to the cultural norm: students who are typically left out of the conversation, either because they have become disenfranchised by the lack of change or those who are strategically ignored. Administrators should attend general body meetings of groups such as the Association of Black Students, Association of Latin American Students, Pride, or Muslim Student Association; not to introduce themselves and swiftly leave or to apologize for a recent bias incident on campus, but to understand the issues and concerns that these groups have on a regular basis. Informal and formal focus groups should be put into place, so that there can be candid conversations about the areas in which our community fails to be inclusive and the ways in which the university can explicitly aid and facilitate inclusivity before an incident of marginalization. We should be sure to include not just student and faculty voices, but also the voices of the staff, without whom this university would not be able to function. By including these voices that are not typically heard, we as a community can more swiftly move towards the inclusion that we tout as a fundamental principle of this university.