Claremont Independent

Claremont McKenna's Associate Dean of Students Jennifer Jimenez Maraña convened the new RAs for an obligatory, hour-long diversity training this past March in the lounge of Claremont Hall.

Most controversial were the remarks of Hughes Suffren, Associate Dean of Students and head of the Office of Black Student Affairs. According to Dean Suffren, the years since the 1960s have been framed by a constant struggle by its black students to achieve three goals at the Claremont Colleges: "more faces that look like theirs"; "more faculty that look like them" and a "curriculum that spoke to them." [Pull quote] This forms part of a larger narrative of struggle against oppression by an unjust majority -- a narrative that at times is nothing short of revisionist.

Although OBSA is not as militant today as it was during the turbulent close of the '60s, there is a troubling continuity of ideology. The racialist -- that is, race-focused -- ideology that to Suffren justifies race-retreats forty years ago justified violent uprising. This link, naturally downplayed by Suffren, was powerfully illustrated by Claremont government professor emeritus Harry V. Jaffa, in his 1989 valedictory lecture, "The Reichstag is Still Burning: The Failure of Higher Education and the Decline of the West."

In what Jaffa suggests may be the first acts of terrorism on an American campus, two bombs went off on Claremont campuses in February 1969. One of them exploded in the basement of Balch Hall on the Scripps campus and only damaged property. The second, placed in the mailbox of Lee Macdonald, chairman of Pomona College's political science department, severely wounded a 19-year-old secretary of that department. Despite her loss of sight in one eye and disfigurement so serious as to require at least twenty-five reconstructive surgeries, Pomona College paid her no more compensation than was due her under Workman's Compensation Law. According to Jaffa, the bombings were followed by twenty-five fires over ten weeks, the worst of which burned down Story House and Pitzer's Mead Hall. No arrests were ever made, and no charges were filed. Meanwhile, one of the leaders of the Black Student Union declared openly in Collins Dining Hall that someone ought to shoot Professor Jaffa -- but again no criminal complaint was ever filed. Jaffa recalls that at a climactic meeting about the crisis, one black student who had served in Vietnam said that he had seen what bullets could do and therefore knew what they could do in Claremont. Another woman (who incidentally went on to become an assistant dean at Pomona) asked rhetorically, "Do you want this campus burned down this summer or next summer?"

Black student radicals eventually met with CMC's President George C. S. Benson, who capitulated and created a Black Students' Union (BSU). For the BSU, wrote Jaffa, "education was understood to be, not a function of the freedom of the human mind, but of its determination by race and ethnicity." In acquiescing to the radicals' demands, the College acknowledged that it was at that time "a white college that gave a white education." By extension, the solution to CMC's inherent racism was not less emphasis on race, but more - not a focus on unity but on separatism. That's where the problem started, and the reason why people like Dean Suffren continue to see our school's problems through the lens of racial identity.

And so, even forty years after violence and intimidation were excused as a response to a "white culture" on campus, racialist ideology is still justified by the existence of a perceived exclusive majority culture. Returning to the RA meeting in Claremont Hall, Dean Suffren reportedly described CMC students as "culturally insensitive" and asserted that every single year there is a racial incident on Claremont McKenna's campus.

One can understand why Suffren is unhappy with CMC. The numbers of students at CMC majoring or dualing in Black Studies is zero for the past six years, according to figures released by the Registrar. Many students are questioning the need for racialist education at the expense of the intellectually egalitarian traditions upon which the College was founded.

They raise questions - louder by the year - about why in the midst of genuine financial hardship for many CMC families, we still award scholarships like the John E. Allen Award, which offers $5,000 to black and Latino students solely on the basis of race. One recipient doesn't speak Spanish or look Latina - she is third generation American and has only a grandfather who is Hispanic - and yet by the "one-drop rule" of college admissions, she receives a scholarship. Students rightly wonder why the sons of surgeons deserve a scholarship for happening to be black. According to Candace Valenzuela, CMC '06, who as both a black and Latina student received a John E. Allen award, few of the students who receive them are needy or even middle-class.

No one disputes that the legacy of slavery and discrimination in American history has left a disproportionately high number of those two minorities below the poverty line. Yet the priority should always be need - to ensure that the most qualified students are able to attend Claremont McKenna, no matter their ability to pay. To assist a qualified but poor black or Latino student to attain their education here is undeniably noble. Yet to exclude a more qualified poor Caucasian or Asian student from our community by awarding the scholarship to a black or Latino student who can pay his tuition is deeply misguided.

We return to the question of racial identity on campus. Is the racism on our campus serious enough that minorities must band together for defense? If so, the issue must be addressed in the open so that it can finally be put to rest. If not, as seems more likely the case, we are faced with a different problem. By encouraging students to identify themselves primarily in terms of race, OBSA and other groups perpetuate the need for their continued existence. It would therefore be very much against their interest to ever see the campus as anything but a racist and threatening place.

Perhaps the most cynical of these attempts to paint the campus as the home of racists is the case of Kerri Dunn. This March marks the five year anniversary of Dunn fiasco in which a visiting psychology professor faked a hate crime against herself. After speaking on tolerance at the Athenaeum, Dunn destroyed her own car, slashed its tires, broke its windows, and spray-painted several ethnic slurs and a partial swastika on its doors and hood. On March 9, 2004, the same day as the hoax, Dunn lectured on hate speech and claimed that white male racists were responsible. The college offered a $10,000 award for information leading to the apprehension of the alleged racists, only to discover that it was Dunn who had damaged her own car. Dunn was convicted by a jury that found her guilty of one misdemeanor count of filing a false police report and two felony counts of attempting to file fraudulent insurance claims on her car. Dunn was sentenced to one year in prison and forced to pay $20,000 in fines. Judge Charles Horan said that Dunn "…terrorized minority students on the campus and made suspects out of all the other students."

And so we return yet again to the meeting in Claremont Hall. If minority students continue to be fed a racialist reinterpretation of CMC's history, and if non-minority students continue to be viewed with deep suspicion, we can never heal the old wounds that so many paid in blood to close.

Instead of identifying each other and ourselves on the basis of race, we must do on the basis of the good we can do for one another and the ways we can advance the grand tradition of ideas that gives this place life.

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