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December 14, 2004
The Race Files: Racial perceptions at Hamline
The Race Files are brought to you by Hamline’s 2004 delegation to the National Conference on Race and Ethnicity, the NCORE Network. Our goal is to engage, inspire, enrage, and enlighten the Hamline community about racism and privilege. We hope that this series of articles will challenge the community and provide them with tools to confront the realities of our racialized world.
Hamline University prides itself on being a colorful campus. Diversity and people of color are stressed as important subjects in both advertisements and literature meant to “sell” the university. The university is like many liberal arts colleges in that it claims to strive toward a diverse community. Yet the campus is still predominantly white.
The Multicultural and International Student Affairs (MISA) Center’s mission statement is to support, assist, empower and promote the success of students of color on Hamline’s campus. It is one of the only offices on campus that caters to students of color, along with a few other offices that support MISA. There is currently no similar facility for staff and faculty of color.
While many people feel as though campus relations and support for students and faculty of color are good, there are also plenty of critiques. It is important to analyze the perception of race relationships at Hamline by students of color and white students, both on- and off-campus.
In a recent Gallup survey poll on race relations from June of 2003, perceptions varied on the question “Do you feel that in this country racial minorities have equal job opportunities as whites, or not?” According to the poll, 55 percent of whites said that they agree with the statement that there is equal job opportunities for racial minorities when compared to whites. However, only 17 percent of blacks agreed with the statement and only 39 percent of Latinos agreed from the populace that was polled.
The poll also asked, “Do you think this is mostly due to discrimination against blacks, or is it mostly due to something else? In that question, forty percent of blacks pointed towards discrimination, while only sixteen percent of whites also pointed towards discrimination. Racial bias and the perceptions that allow whites to ignore these governmental statistics is part of an ignorance that continues today.
In general, the poll found that perceptions of race relations and how we all get along, or even just how well things are going, seem to be split more along the lines of what race a person is.
For a senior sociology seminar paper, Colin Smith gave a survey to 100 CLA undergraduates on campus.
The survey was given to a random sampling of 50 domestic students of color and 50 domestic white students on campus. The purpose of the survey was to determine the attitudes and perceptions of race relations on campus.
Ninety-eight percent of students of color agreed with the statement that “On Hamline’s campus, one’s race matters,” while only 58 percent of white students agreed. Ninety-eight percent of white students agreed that Hamline was dedicated to diversity, compared to the 78 percent of the students of color who disagreed with the same statement.
On the statement “The curriculum at Hamline adequately addresses the issues of race and racism,” only 14 percent of the students of color surveyed agreed with the statement, while 78 percent of white students agreed.
This survey showed the stratification and perception differences between races here at Hamline.
It appears that the majority of white students may have a rosier picture of campus than students of color do. Unfortunately, until these perceptions and realities change, Hamline will continue to struggle for racial equality.
Posted by msveum at December 14, 2004 10:34 AM