A week of segregation

During the recent Black Student Alliance Invitational prospective black students are invited to tour campus before their non-black peers, paired with black hosts and exposed to culturally black events like step shows, Caribbean dinners and Gospel choir performances. Although BSAI no doubt contributes to some black students’ decisions to attend Duke, it also encourages an attitude of racial restriction and self-segregation. By bringing black students to campus before the rest of the incoming class, BSAI is fueling the notion that black students at Duke exist apart from the rest of the student population. Indeed, the students are taught from the very beginning that it is solely other black students with whom they will be interacting at college.

By sanctioning this weekend, Duke and the Black Student Alliance are encouraging a stereotypical—and unfortunately, socially accepted—construct of black identity that excludes other races and painfully misrepresents the views of many black students at Duke who identify as black differently than those who run BSAI. As an attendee of both BSAI and Blue Devil Days three years ago, I believe that if Duke wants to stop promoting this blatant separation of students based on race, they should merge Blue Devil Days and BSAI so that black prospective freshmen aren’t isolated from the rest of their classmates. The point of diversity at a school like Duke is not to foster an environment in which students exist comfortably—and complacently—within a social circle of people who look like them. The point of diversity is for people of different races to interact, learn from each other,and begin to see the world from a variety of different perspectives.

Brandon Locke

Trinity ’13