Less than two months into the academic year and our freshmen are greeted by the bewildering reality of racial discourse on campus. Take a quick stroll across the campus and you will be bombarded by signboards reminding you of your ethnic origins. Or better still, open your mailbox and you will be flooded by quarter cards, letters and pamphlets from the most obscure sources, exhorting you to “respect diversity, discover your community and celebrate race and ethnicity”. Just pick up any official document and you will find this printed in small but bold letters-“Cornell University is an equal opportunity affirmative action educator and employer.” I have never seen so many oxymorons in a single sentence.
This is the place where it is dreadfully common to find people, especially in positions of authority, talking about achieving “solidarity, empowerment and equity” by building a “community of student power”. Little do they realize that these are loaded words with dangerous dual meanings. What’s more, they whip them into a frenzy of synthetic anger at the “silent siege on the basis of implicated race and gender, sexuality and gender expression”.
But then the point behind these banners is that you are never told what to do, apart from simply talking. In fact, you are left paralyzed as no matter how enlightened your views on diversity are, there are ten others out there with even more liberated opinions, ready to pounce on you like predators in search of prey. For instance, when you start getting co-opted into believing that it is normal, indeed desirable, to address peoples’ identities, you get these:
Coming from India, I had always thought that English was the only language spoken in this country. But lo behold, the bastion of bilingualism and the great “Americano Dream” is right here:
And sometimes they even betray all sense of time (or place):
The 90s will never end.