The simple truth is that any meaningful “transition management” willentail teaching Harvard’s students of poor background out of a sense ofidentity that includes hanging out with questionable characters fromhome.
A few weeks ago a teenaged pot dealer was shot dead in a Harvard dormitory.
That alone was depressing enough. However, Harvard suspects a blacksenior, Chanequa Campbell, of an association with the pot dealer –Justin Cosby, also black — and last week was barred from her dormitoryand prevented from graduating. Campbell grew up in the depressedBedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, but was a star student, aproduct of elite prep school Packer Collegiate Institiute, and fouryears ago was celebrated for her achievement.
The details have yet to be released. But one of the three men whoplanned the murder, and a suspect in the shooting itself, JabraiCopney, is a songwriter from New York who was dating another Harvardundergrad named Brittany Smith who also grew up in Brooklyn. Copney andSmith are black.
Campbelldenies knowing the pot dealer or having given him her swipe card toenter the dormitory, and has presented solid alibis as to herwhereabouts when the murders took place. However, she acknowledgesknowing Copney through her friend Brittany Smith.
At this writing, Harvard has not released an explanation as to whyCampbell has been disciplined while Smith has not. However, the mainquestion amidst all of this is a simple one: why was Chanequa Campbell,as a Harvard student who had triumphed over such odds, associating atall with a shady character like Jabrai Copney or anyone else who would?Or, of all of the men Harvard offered for her to date, including blackones, why was Brittany Smith “dating” Copney long-distance?
The good-thinking idea is, of course, that the problem is Harvard.The big bad bastion of White Power needs to look inward to figure outhow neglect – surely racist on some level – left Campbell and Smithholding on to shady operators from back home for a sense of belonging.
Typical is Jacqueline Rivers, co-director of a program that works with black high schoolers at Harvard, telling the Boston Globethat “there needs to be a lot of work thinking about how you help kidsmanage the transition in a setting where you’re going to be rubbingshoulders with really wealthy people.”
But what does that mean? How would Harvard teach black studentsfrom poor neighborhoods how to “manage the transition” to anenvironment full of affluent white kids any more than they do now?
What, precisely, is there to teach? What wine goes with chicken?Dialect coaching? Unlikely, given that Campbell is clearly well-spoken.A six-week music appreciation program on white groups like Coldplay?What about that these days even affluent white students love the samehip hop Campbell does?
To what, then, is Jacqueline Rivers or anyone who says anythingsimilar referring? Nothing real. It’s a statement typical of the”dance” Shelby Steele eloquently writes about, in which it is eternallywhites’ job to seek redemption for America’s racist past while forblacks, as Steele put it in a recent Wall Street Journal piece, “the feeling of being aggrieved by American bigotry is far more a matter of identity than of actual aggrievement.”
What, for example, do we make of Campbell’s claim that she has beentargeted because “I’m black and I’m poor and I’m from New York and Iwalk a certain way and I keep my clothes a certain way”? BrittanySmith, after all, is black and from Brooklyn too, and I will venture,especially if she was dating someone of Copney’s, shall we say,demographic, that she is no Malia Obama, overlapping to some relevantextent with Campbell in the kinds of traits Campbell was referring oralluding to.
The idea that Harvard was at fault becomes even harder to processwhen we consider the conflict between teaching students like Campbellto “manage the transition” and the noble idea that students like hercontribute “diversity” to the campus. There would be a fine linebetween teaching students like Campbell how to “manage” the differencesbetween them and Caitlin and Justin and teaching them how to be likeCaitlin and Justin.
Last time I checked, the idea was that Caitlin and Justin were theones who were supposed to do the “managing,” with taking in the”diversity” of students like Campbell as a key component of a liberalarts education.
“Students of all kinds should work together in managing the culturaldifferences between them” would be the administrator-speak answer -which looks great in print, but again, what, precisely would this meanin practice? What programs could be set in place to do better than thecurrent situation at Harvard, where Campbell was apparently valued bynon-black students for a warm, outgoing personality despite her”background” and, for the record, was not prosecuted for a case ofcheck fraud during her first year (perhaps allowing for the “diversity”of her background)?
Chanequa Campbell (and Brittany Smith, of whom we will likely hearmore later) demonstrate not that Harvard has an under-the-board problemwith racism, but that cultural legacies die hard for all of our goodintentions. Campbell is clearly a star, as likely is Smith. However,they remain to some extent culturally rooted in the neighborhoods theygrew up in, where activity on the wrong side of the law is, sadly, afamiliar sight to all.
There’s no need to assail either woman as criminals themselves, andthe comment board chatter along the lines of “You can take the ******out of the neighborhood, but …” are contemptible. Yet, the fact isthat Campbell and Smith lacked the basic sense of recoil from people ofshady inclinations that most Harvard students have. The typical Harvardundergrad knows no one who gives the slightest indication of beingcapable of casual murder, or even of owning a weapon. A person inBedford-Stuyvesant is much more likely to know such people. ForCampbell and Smith, four years in Cambridge did not change that.
The case is reminiscent of the one in New York in 1985 where EdmundPerry, black, 17, fresh from Exeter and on his way to Stanford, wasshot dead by an off-duty policeman he tried to rob with his brother, asophomore engineer at Cornell who fled. Robbing a passerby on impulsewas not as foreign a concept to these Harlem brothers despite theirpromising futures. “We got a D.T.!” Edmund’s brother Jonah yelled as heran away, as familiar with the local slang for “detective” as someonewho had stayed behind on the corners.
Edmund Perry himself harbored the idea that whites were in some wayresponsible for adjusting to his blackness, having stated in the Exeteryearbook “It’s a pity that we part on less than a friendly basis. Workto adjust yourself to a changing world, as will I.” But whatever heexpected those Exeter scions to do by way of adjustment, it wouldappear that neither he nor Chanequa Campbell and Brittany Smith managedto do their share of “adjustment.”
The simple truth is that any meaningful “transition management” willentail teaching Harvard’s students of poor background out of a sense ofidentity that includes hanging out with questionable characters fromhome. Harvard’s black studies department is named after W.E.B. DuBois,celebrated for his plangent exploration of black people’s “doubleconsciousness” between American and Negro, “two warring ideals in onedark body.” Okay, but Du Bois wouldn’t think twice about associatingwith riffraff.