Large institutions are no stranger to racially-charged controversies, sadly, but at least student organizations are making efforts to push back and also to educate. New York Magazine reports that,
In response to growing demand from student activists, administrators committed Friday to adding a class in power and privilege to its orientation program for incoming first-year students.
In the past few weeks, privilege has become to now hot topic, thanks to an infamous essay. We won’t link it here, but have fun searching. If you haven’t read it or watched the author of the piece in question on television, consider yourself fortunate.
According to Salon,
Reetu Mody, a first year masters student in public policy, organized the movement that eventually led to the course addition (which is so far unnamed). Mody recently told the Crimson that she started HKS Speak Out in response to the disappointment that her courses “didn’t really address race at all” when examining policy issues. The group’s first session attracted about 80 students last fall, and a recent petition attracted more than 300 signatures — about a fourth of the school’s student population — to push the administration to offer “mandatory privilege and power training.”
Mody does acknowledge that the concept of privilege and how it affects different people is largely misunderstood. She says of individuals like the infamous article writer,
“If what you’ve been told all your life is you’re really talented and you deserve what you have, it’s going to be really hard to find out Maybe I don’t deserve it, and all these other people equally deserve it but never even had a shot,” she says. “Schools are not giving students a space to manage that loss of identity.”
The content of the program, conceived by HKS Speak Out and the university’s administration, has not been finalized.
[…] Thoughts on the push back going around college campuses: It’s a good thing….the black face incidents have become a national phenomenon. I initially had the black face story line in my script but I took it out because I thought it was so ridiculous. A couple months later it happened on the UC, San Diego’s campus, this really liberal college, so I started to do a lot of research on the issue and found that it was happening everywhere at Yale, Harvard….Initially I suppose the students doing this stuff weren’t dumb enough but put it on Facebook but they’re bold enough to do it now. We would screen the film and two days after, it would happen on a college campus…that whole Julianne Hough situation. If you’re a white kid going to school often times you don’t realize that the minorities around you are having a completely different experience. They’re not getting the full experience of what America is really like, so I think the pushback and dialogue is great! […]