Pilot diversity program builds insight and understanding

Some 80 freshmen and 30 upperclassmen participated this year in Building Understanding Across Differences, a collaborative program offered by the offices of Student Life and the Dean of the College to increase understanding and dialogue among students of differing social identities related to race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, ability and class

by Mary Jo Curtis

When Kolajo Afolabi ’03 arrived on campus for his freshman year, the multi-racial student admits he was pretty pleased with himself.

“I was so proud of myself getting into Brown,” he recalls. (That's Afolabi far left, with Swan Lee and Michael Chen-Illamos.) “But it was pretty shocking to realize most of us came from the same kind of schools, even if we had different racial makeups.”

That lesson was honed this year, when Afolabi took part in a pilot program on diversity called Building Understanding Across Differences (BUAD). Listening to one classmate talk about her lower-class background and “what she had to go through to come to Brown” was a revelation to Afolabi, who was raised and educated in Longmeadow, Mass., an affluent small town next to the poverty-riddled city of Springfield.

“I realized it’s not a level playing field…. It was hard for me to come to terms with knowing there were others out there who put in as much effort in high school as I did, but didn’t have resources to get here,” he said. “You want to think you did it all on your own, but if I had gone to high school in the next town over, would I have made it to Brown? I doubt it.”

Some 80 freshmen and 30 upperclassmen participated this year in BUAD, a collaborative program offered by the offices of Student Life and the Dean of the College to increase understanding and dialogue among students of differing social identities related to race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, ability and class. The monthly sessions – led by Deans Jean Joyce-Brady, Margaret Klawunn and Kisa Takesue – were kicked off during fall orientation week with a two-day retreat. Since then the deans and students have tackled a number of diversity-related issues, using varied methods to drive home their lessons. Opening up the discussion was the first – and perhaps the biggest – hurdle.

“Diversity is an issue that we avoid, because it makes us uncomfortable,” said BUAD participant Swan Lee ’05, a Korean-American from northern Virginia.“It’s difficult for those who have been personally affected to share their experiences, yet it’s also difficult for people to care about fighting injustice and discrimination unless they’ve been personally affected by it.”

“Discussions here are very politically correct,” added classmate Michael Chen-Illamos ’05, who is West Indian, Latino and gay. He found many of his BUAD classmates hesitant to confront and embrace their differences; he encouraged them to “dig deep down into their personal life to talk about things. Even if that means not being politically correct, it’s okay if the intent is good.”

“There is a tendency to stay with one’s own kind,” continued Chen-Illamos. “Caucasians who come from small towns may not know how to address [minorities]. It’s not a matter of being homophobic, but maybe they’ve never known someone who’s gay and they don’t know how to talk about it. Programs like BUAD can help us get beyond that by teaching us how to discuss these things.”

Klawunn described one particularly difficult exercise on class differences, in which students were asked to step in or out of a circle according to their answers to questions such as, “Did your family pay someone to clean your house?” and “Do you choose your classes based on the cost of their books?”

“We saw a lot of students struggling with that – mostly those who were privileged,” Klawunn said. Afolabi agreed that session was an uncomfortable one; he found topics such as disability awareness much easier to assimilate.

“It’s really easy to acknowledge [one’s physical] advantages, but when we talked about class or race, it was more difficult,” he said. “We don’t talk about money in our culture.”

Joyce-Brady said 18 upperclassmen, including Swan and Afolabi, have recently been accepted to work as mentors with BUAD next year; that group itself is the picture of diversity, with nine women and nine men, various races, ethnicities, religions and sexual orientations being represented in its mix. The upperclassmen will not only serve as role models for freshmen, but will play an active part in the development of the content and activities for next year.

“We’re still talking with students about changes for next year,” Joyce-Brady said. “This was a pilot, so we expected some bumps in the road. We were literally creating the program as we went along.”

Afolabi said, among other things, BUAD gave him a chance to vent about one of his pet peeves.

“People come up to me and think it’s okay to just touch my hair,” he said. “They never think of it as a degrading act – or that it’s an invasion of personal space…. It’s condescending, but I don’t think there’s a conscious decision to be condescending.”

His classmates in BUAD, he added, “know not to do that anymore.”