Universities and activists continue to seek segregated activities, after the previous generation battled for the exact opposite.
Looking out over a sea of people in Harvard Yard last week, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive and one of Harvard’s most famous dropouts, told this year’s graduating class that it was living in an unstable time, when the defining struggle was “against the forces of authoritarianism, isolationism and nationalism.”
Two days earlier, another end-of-year ceremony had taken place, just a short walk away on a field outside the law school library. It was Harvard’s first commencement for black graduate students, and many of the speakers talked about a different, more personal kind of struggle, the struggle to be black at Harvard.
“We have endured the constant questioning of our legitimacy and our capacity, and yet here we are,” Duwain Pinder, a master’s degree candidate in business and public policy, told the cheering crowd of several hundred people in a keynote speech.
From events once cobbled together on shoestring budgets and hidden in back rooms, alternative commencements like the one held at Harvard have become more mainstream, more openly embraced by universities and more common than ever before.
This spring, tiny Emory and Henry College in Virginia held its first “Inclusion and Diversity Year-End Ceremonies.” The University of Delaware joined a growing list of colleges with “Lavender” graduations for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender students. At Columbia, students who were the first in their families to graduate from college attended the inaugural “First-Generation Graduation,” with inspirational speeches, a procession and the awarding of torch pins.
Some of the ceremonies have also taken on a sharper edge, with speakers adding an activist overlay to the more traditional sentiments about proud families and bright futures.
After Columbia’s ceremony, Lizzette Delgadillo said she spoke about the pain of “impostor syndrome — feeling alone when it feels like everybody else on campus just knows what to do and you don’t,” and of how important it was to have the support of other first-generation students.
Ms. Delgadillo, who graduated with a bachelor’s degree in biomedical engineering, had lobbied for the event for three years, as a member of a group called the First-Generation Low-Income Partnership.
“The current political climate definitely pushed this initiative to come to fruition,” said Ms. Delgadillo, the daughter of Mexican immigrants living in Los Angeles.
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Harvard Students Plan Graduation Ceremony for Blacks Only
“In true Ivy League fashion, even the segregated graduation ceremony is only for those with a graduate degree.”
Black graduate students at Harvard spent the past year raising money for a graduation ceremony for blacks only, a first for the Ivy League school. The students who plan to attend the blacks only ceremony will also participate in the all-inclusive main ceremony. According to one student, the separate ceremony is important for the black community because of historical racism.
Harvard joins at least four other universities in the United States that currently hold black only graduation ceremonies. The practice is controversial and draws fire from critics for segregating the ceremonies. Rather than looking at the ceremony as segregation, students say it’s about community and fellowship.
Students claim that having a separate ceremony is about celebrating success and letting others know black students can graduate like everyone else. This idea is not really trailblazing in 2017, considering the amount of successful black professionals that are working in the United States today. The United States has made leaps and bounds towards equality in a very short amount of time, yet it feels like actions such as this detract from that achievement.
Although Harvard boasts one of the “highest graduation rates for black students out of a list of 18 highly selective schools reviewed by The Journal of Blacks in Education (JBHE), some feel marginalized.” From learning materials to interactions with non-black students, Harvard is apparently a breeding ground for horrible conditions. I often read terms like “microaggression” and “white privilege” during the course of my social media scrolling. I recently looked up the definition of microaggression to get a better understanding of what it means, and found that it is basically behavior that implies the question, “What do you mean ‘you people!’”
I belong to a mixture of two backgrounds that have been historically marginalized, decimated even. I am lucky enough to have knowledge of my heritage as it was incorporated into my upbringing. However, I was not raised to believe that I was any different from other groups of people. This served me well when I enlisted in the Army and found myself in the most diverse setting I had ever seen.
While I am proud of my culture and heritage, I don’t want to exclude others in the course of my achievements. Those next to me contributed to my success and we all shared it. I don’t find microaggression in my everyday life. I don’t understand wanting a separate celebration based on skin color. I can’t imagine wanting anything less than the full honor of graduating with my fellow soldiers.
Harvard students reportedly raised $27,000 to pay for the ceremony and reception. That’s a lot of money that could have gone toward making an actual difference “in the community” if these students were so inclined. That’s what I find insulting about the argument made by one of the participants who wants to “change the trajectory for all of us.” While these Harvard grads cry themselves a river over the $27,000 party they planned for themselves, they didn’t even bother including black undergrad students in the ceremony. But I thought this was a celebration of the black community as a whole. In true Ivy League fashion, even the segregated graduation ceremony is only for those with a graduate degree.
Original article by OpsLens Contributor Angelina Newsom.
