Suggestions for alleviating segregation in Binghamton University’s dorms, dining halls and cliques range from randomly sitting down with people of a different race you don’t know to painting a multicultural mural around the Old Union to foster understanding.
Scott Goldstein / Managing Editor
“I think that’s a great idea,” said the moderator, a geography scholar who studies Latino migration at a forum Tuesday evening on campus to combat racism and segregation.
The evening began with a multicultural quiz that helped the audience assess how much they knew about different cultures — What is a WASP? (Answer: White Anglo-Saxon Protestant.) What is kim chee? (Korean cabbage.) What does the NAACP stand for? (The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.) During the 1930s and 1940s, which group made up the majority of professional basketball players? (White Jewish males.)
Organizers asked students to form small groups to answer the questions with people of different background from their own.
Several of the questions came from Mark Reisinger, an assistant professor of geography, who moderated the discussion for the several dozen BU students who attended. The people in attendance were predominately Asian, although there were a handful of different races.
He said that systemic racism goes all the way to the top of American power — to the White House.
“They’re racists. There’s no other way to say it that they are racist. You can’t tell me that the current administration,” Reisinger said, “that they don’t believe that they’re better than everybody else.”
Several students at the forum — sponsored the Student Association group CARP and the traditionally-Asian fraternity Pi Delta Psi — suggested that the University purposefully segregates minority students in the oldest, least kempt facilities in Dickinson Community.
(Housing assignments are done by a random computer system at the Residential Life office; students are also allowed to pick their roommates.)
Reisinger suggested that students direct their suggestions about how to diversify the campus, from campus racism to segregation in the dorms, to the BU administration’s official diversity committee.
“No one knows about these resources,” complained one of the students at the forum, held in the Engineering Building’s lecture hall.
Toward the end of the forum, which stretched over two hours, the moderator cautioned students that the ’60s generation also spoke a lot about stamping out racism.
“My generation said the exact same things,” Professor Reisinger said. “All my friends moved to the suburbs. They left the city.”