A comment elsewhere

One of the first things I learned when working in Washington my sophomore year is that I couldn't understand what it was like to be a minority until I was one. I lived in a majority-black neighborhood, and was the only white on my bus until we crossed the Potomac. (I also dealt with the poor infrastructure of DC every day, with roads so clogged I could often get out of one bus and walk down the street for 15 minutes to catch the one ahead.)

But in any case, there was something unique in walking every day to the bus knowing that I would be the only white person at the stop, and something unique feeling "different" each day in that bus. But that was an hour-long commute each day, and the moment I got to Eastern Market in DC, other white people appeared everywhere.

My point is that I noticed it - it was a part of my experience - and that I could not have understood that feeling from a description, because it was new. I am sure that if I felt something for an hour a day on a bus, that black Williams students feel something 24/7 on campus, where they are often the only black students in a room or around a table.

But I can't tell you what that is, because I'm not a 11% minority here. I can't understand or really describe to you what it feels like to be black, and why my classmates can get so fed up with Williams that they head back to the BSU to regroup. I don't understand, and I can't help you to understand.

So to your question:

I don't know. My guess is yes, but not having been in that situation, I can't tell you, because I know how hard it is to communicate that sort of feeling from my experiences elsewhere. There are black students at Williams who do fine, and black students that do not.

But let's take a look at the historic policies. We know that blacks in this country (and especially in my native south) suffered discrimination through Brown vs. Board and for some years thereafter. We also know that blacks were denied many of the benefits of the G.I. Bill, and I have heard other students state (but haven't looked at the sourcing myself) that national policies were destructive to the black family in the 50s and 60s. Those were our parents.

The result today is that where I went to school in Decatur, there were three black and four white elementary schools, which some black kids were bused to. The black schools had chronic issues and two were closed down during consolidation. The white schools became the administrative offices, the 4/5 academy, and two others remained open as elementary schools.

In my school system, blacks were generally not prepared at the same level as whites, with an "achievement gap" that started at birth. This meant that the Honors and AP classes at my high school were accordingly white dominated. The best and brightest blacks from my school, who took AP Calculus, went to Florida State.

Williams has a hard time finding qualified minorities because of the structural achievement gap. Part of that gap's effect is cultural - blacks who studied in my school were called "oreos" and often bullied. I never had to deal with that. Additionally, the public schools I went to were improved if you could eat breakfast at home and had a good dinner ready, something many blacks didn't have because of the different socio-economics. So there's a mixture of factors, some of them tied to money, and others tied to skin, that work against black students.

I would argue that the issues about money and class are more problematic, because blacks of means can find private environments for their children to learn, but both are aspects that would have made my life more difficult in Decatur had I been black. Not because Decatur was a bad school district - indeed, its one of the best - but because of a wide variety of factors that made stereotypes into reality within my high school's cafeteria.

So when you take the top 1% of white students and the top 1% of black students, they are probably going to look different. Add various factors that make being aware of one's blackness a liability in standardized testing and you make that 1% look worse than it relatively should.

One of the problems with our current policies (we being society) is that we pluck out that top 1% or 5% of minorty populations, and provide lots of resources - the national achievement scholarship for one - but there are two structural issues here. First, when you take that top percentage out, you are ignoring the greater mass, which is where the momentum needs to be shifted. Second, when you create special programs, you give an implicit message that "you aren't good enough for the *real* program so we have this special one." That doesn't mean such programs are bad, but rather that there is no perfect bullet to resolving the legacy of discrimination that my homestate and others unleashed on minorities.

So when a black student comes to Williams, I'm willing to state that they run a risk of being less prepared. Their school might not have had the same high standards; other factors can underlie this issue. But Williams throws them in, having recruited them, and expects them to sink or swim in a brand-new environment where they are, often for the first time, a minority. Unsurprisingly, it can be difficult, and they might have a lower GPA their freshman year.

I know this narrative because it also applies to me. Deprived of my friend group, I languished a bit in my freshman fall, and my freshman GPA was significantly lower than my other years at Williams. That one year can doom you from achieving PBK when going against others who walk into Williams intending Med School or Grad school.

So yes, I think there are issues at Williams that relate to people's backgrounds, and please note that the issues raised in Stand With Us aren't even a piece of this post. I'm only telling part of the story, whatever it is. There are issues relating to class (poor white kids are very underrepresented here relative to the country), and issues relating to race. Both are not positive, and Williams isn't on top of these issues yet.