Racial tensions on Loyola’s campus came to full boil at the start of the 1991-92 school year when the editor of The Maroon wrote a column in which he satirized what he saw as the social behavior of Puerto Rican students. He said later that he was trying to say that they could have a richer experience here if they stopped hanging out almost exclusively with each other and speaking Spanish all the time.
He forged his satire into a sledgehammer, rather than a scalpel, however, and because of that it missed the mark. It was seen as a racist attack on the Puerto Ricans, if not on all Latin students, and they were hurt and angry.
They raged at the editor in a torrent of letters. Many students from the mainland failed to understand their distress. One, however, responded after reading the column, that “I realized how little I understand the culture of Puerto Rico and why its citizens are so unique at Loyola.”
In more recent years, we have seen the Sig Ep fraternity characterized in print as “Spic Ep” and in reference linking Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS, to the Asian Student Association. The DKEs held what they billed as a “fried chicken and 40 ounce” party over the Martin Luther King holiday weekend in 1997. Individuals from time to time have written “nigger” on Alpha Phi Alpha and Black Student Union posters. Someone just a few weeks ago scrawled “nigger lover” on the dormitory door of a white resident assistant.
The sorry list goes on. I could spend my allotted 800 words bemoaning similar incidents. All point to our failures on this campus to understand other cultures – and how much we sometimes feel threatened because of our own ignorance.
I got to thinking about all that when I saw that fishbowl office in the Danna Center that has been turned into quarters for the new Center for Intercultural Understanding. Maybe Lisa Martin, a longtime extraordinary faculty member in the Department of Communications and the center’s first director, can help us all improve our cultural eyesight – to look at others as they are without imposing our own stereotypes on them.
“I’d like people to have a better understanding of the differences of other ethnic groups. Then maybe we will realize we are more alike than different,” Martin says.
Black-white relations, of course, have to be a priority. The ignorance we have of each other is centuries old.
But Loyola also is host to nearly 200 students from around the world. They come to us from neighboring Canada and Mexico, from Honduras and Peru, from Spain and China – some 45 countries altogether. What an opportunity they provide us insular residents of the United States. With greater knowledge and understanding of the rest of the world, you who are students now will be better able to avoid the kind of mess into which our current leaders have now driven us.
You have a great opportunity, too, to help our students from abroad come to a better knowledge and understanding of the United States and her people. Hardly a day passes that we do not learn of some act of hatred committed against us by people to whom we are threatening stereotypes.
Debbie Danna, director of the Center for International Education, told me the story of a young Saudi Arabian, the son of the vice president of ARAMCO, who was studying at Loyola. He went home for a visit after 9-11, leaving his car here and keeping the lease on his apartment, which he shared with two students from Puerto Rico. Sad to say, he could not get clearance from the U.S. government to return.
Why? He doesn’t know, and neither does Danna.
What she does know is that “he loved Loyola. He liked studying in the U.S. And he’s the kind of person we want. He was integrated into the culture. He has friends among us.” She paused. “He also made us realize that not all Saudis are the demons they have been made out to be.”
There’s no doubt that Professor Martin has a difficult task ahead of her after that ribbon-cutting ceremony at the center next Wednesday at 12:30 p.m.
But we can make it much easier for her if we all work harder at our personal intercultural understanding.
The people we deal with each day will benefit most, of course, if we take that posture. But there are rewards for us, too. My colleague and friend Dr. Maurice Brungardt, professor of Latin American History and director of our study abroad program in Mexico City, is fond of quoting an observation by the Peruvian journalist/politician Jose Carlos Mariategui on the benefits of foreign travel: “We went abroad not to learn the secret of others, but to learn the secret of ourselves.”
Insofar as we can go abroad here, on our own campus, by coming to know individuals unlike ourselves, we will come to know ourselves better.
What of greater value could we take away from Loyola at the end of our years here?
Larry Lorenz is the A. Louis Read Distinguished Professor in Communications.
