“I am the daughter of African immigrants,” said a classmate of mine, “and I’m going to exploit that for all it’s worth.”
It was the middle of October 2005 and we were in the midst of applying to college. I never studied for the SAT, much less took prep classes or bribed a proxy for five figures to do my application for me—but the hysteria was unavoidable. There were essay-writing workshops, meetings with counselors, solicitations of recommendations. I guess it wasn’t too blown out of proportion because it was important—not as important as it is in rich Northeastern suburbia or prep school, where the marriage plot has been replaced by the college-admissions plot and where they teach to the Columbia application as doggedly as failing inner-city schools stick to No Child Left Behind curriculum, but it was important.
The neighborhood was gentrifying, but public schools are always poorer than the cities they’re in—and mine was an inner-city school, with poor people from failed homes. Many were black. That the indigent had no means of social mobility was depressing, but that they were unwilling to play the admissions game was inspiring. This qualified and contextualized my magnet program’s monomania—and yet this girl, comfortably middle-class, with the same opportunities as anyone else, announced her intentions to play the race card.
It worked—she got in. Friends of mine grumbled that she didn’t deserve it, and they might have been right. She maintained tacitly that she’d done nothing wrong—she definitely hadn’t. With college admissions being what it is, who could blame her?
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I like to watch The Wire, which over 60 hour-long episodes portrays Baltimore through the eyes of a grand, silent, third-person narrator. Commonly cited as the best is the first season, a cop show which focuses on drug dealers (indigent blacks from broken homes), but the fourth season is my favorite because it reminds me of the alma mater (though things weren’t nearly as bad). One of my friends from home goes to Tufts. I met him for lunch over break and I brought up The Wire, because I always do. He’d only watched a few episodes, but he responded enthusiastically and said, “Man, it makes me wish that I had black friends.”
He had put his finger on the appeal of The Wire. All of the characters are at least a little sympathetic—they’re the kind of people you’d at least want to meet, if not befriend. Comparisons to Charles Dickens, whose writing has a broad sociological sweep, and who conceptualized his art as the art of inventing interesting characters, are hackneyed, clichéd, and inaccurate. The Wire is much better than Dickens. Dickens’ characters are caricatures, and his society a sham. The Wire’s characters are life-like and “authentic,” and the society they comprise is realistic and full-bodied.
I asked Andrew what he meant. Surely there were black people worth befriending at Tufts, or at the New England Conservatory, where he was training to be a jazz saxophonist. “I meant, real black friends,” he said. “Everyone there is rich.”
The notion that it makes a black person more “real” or “authentic” to be hawking dope on the corner, or less “real” or “authentic” to be educated or wealthy, is absurd and racist, but Andrew is neither. He meant something else. He missed the plurality of world-views—people who cared about what they did, exposed him to different experiences and outlooks, and forced him to justify his own. Tufts’ minority student population isn’t especially low, but what he was missing was diversity.
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What’s “diversity”? To the New York Times op-ed board it means running a Bob Herbert column twice a week. Herbert grew up in Montclair, a community in New Jersey a half-hour from Midtown. His family owned several upholstery stores, and was well-off, “middle-class” in the same way that a hedge-fund manager from Greenwich and a lawyer from Chappaqua would be middle-class.
What I’m hinting at is that this is the background of most Columbia students. Within the context of suburbs and modest wealth, they trace inevitable and uninterrupted arcs from high school and college and a career. Our school and the Times op-ed board are filled with privileged people like this, but Herbert is “diverse” because he is black. I hate Bob Herbert. His columns are the kind of superficial, Dickensian human-interest pabulum that word by word betray he has no idea what he’s talking about and that can be reduced to one of the following paradigms—“someone is oppressed, society has failed, you are guilty,” or, these days, “Obama is awesome.” And what good is journalism like this? Self-serving hand-wringing is exactly the opposite of what is needed by the people he professes to matter to him.
Chris Morris-Lent is a Columbia College junior majoring in English. Blood, Toil, Tears & Sweat runs alternate Thursdays.
Opinion@columbiaspectator.com