Tag Archives: opinion

Follow-up: Why Olin Is Racist

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Hi again, here is another article from Olin’s resident angry black lady (a title I’ve heard around campus used to describe me). For freshmen I would suggest reading my previous two Frankly Speaking articles, “Olin Is Racist” and “Follow Up On Olin Is Racist”, before this one to best understand my points and perspective. For those of you who don’t want to go read old articles, I’ll give a quick summary here:

I’m a black female student at Olin and last year I sent an article to Frankly Speaking describing all the ways I have been mistreated, discriminated against, and insulted at Olin for my race. highlighting an instance where another Oliner told me to my face that, “people like you don’t belong here,” insinuating it was about my race. It is an undeniable fact that Olin is racist and needs to be improved, but recently I was asked about my article and I started thinking about why Olin is racist. It’s a good question, and while there is no one decisive answer, I have a few reasons that contribute to racism on campus. 

  1. There are not enough black students: The other day a friend and I were wandering through the Campus Center and ended up in the 3rd floor hallway across from PGP. Shiny class portraits of past and current Olin classes hang on the wall with pride. Jokingly, we decided to look through each class picture and count up the number of black students we see. The game started out fun, like an Olin version of Where’s Waldo, but quickly got depressing when we realized how few black people there have been. Our final count was 52 students. In almost 20 years of graduating classes, only 52 black people have graduated from Olin. You might be thinking: “Olin is a small school, these numbers make sense,” but I did some research: Olin has had approximately 2000 students, so in the entire history of Olin, only 2.6% of students have been black. This is low even compared to other engineering schools. The percentage of black students in the history of MIT is 5%, and at CalTech, 7%. Around 14% of the American population is black, so a diverse school should have approximately 14% black students. Never in Olin’s history has there been a time where the percentage of black students in the student population was 14%. The percentage of black students currently at Olin is 4.5%, that is already an accomplishment for us. Many non-black Oliners will never meaningfully interact with a black Oliner, so how can they fix their internal racism without working with black engineers long-term?
  1. There are not enough black faculty: There are currently 2 black professors and 3 black associate professors at Olin. Out of 39 full time professors, only 12.8% are black. Even still, only in the past 5 years has the number of black professors at Olin dramatically increased, as originally this school was founded with no black professors involved. Non-black Oliners have less chances to interact with black engineers. Without exposure or a guiding hand, Oliners will never learn to let go of biases or hateful stereotypes. Furthermore, prospective black students don’t get to see themselves reflected or represented in the faculty, making this school unappealing to them, and contributing to reason 1. 
  1. Olin is designed to exclude black students: Olin college recruiters go to high schools that are majority white and Asian, and have historically avoided advertising at schools with majority black and brown students. Olin made a decision to not promote at those kinds of schools knowing that many prospective black engineers looking for a great college will not know about us and never apply. On top of this fact, to be admitted into Olin, prospective students are required to have taken calculus. Many schools in low-income neighborhoods that primarily serve black students don’t offer Calculus because of underfunding. When a black person goes to a mostly white high school like I did, it’s a battle for us to get into advanced math and science classes. In my senior year of high school I wanted to take AP Calculus, and requested it, but was placed in Statistics because my vice principal thought I wouldn’t be able to handle “the academic rigor of AP Calculus,” despite the fact I had a straight-A report card. I had to petition my school to put me into AP Calculus, and I ended up thriving in the class (I even got a perfect score on the AP exam, no joke). However, other black students at my school weren’t as lucky. They were also automatically placed in the lowest level classes, but most of them failed in their petition and never got to take advanced classes that could have helped their college applications. It is not a secret in the educational world that black students are systemically excluded from taking this class.  Last year, Olin ran a beta program that partnered with a math camp to sponsor incoming first-years to learn calculus before attending—but this option was not advertised anywhere online, and to access it, students had to personally reach out to admissions after acceptance and organize the lessons themselves. The fact that Olin was designed with a calculus requirement that directly disadvantages students of color demonstrates an internal attempt to keep black students from attending Olin.
  1. Black people at Olin are not respected: Every black student at Olin has been called by the wrong name repeatedly, even by the same people after correction. How would you feel if people don’t work hard enough to remember who you are? How would you feel if your own professors grouped you into a character in their head with all of the other students who share your pigmentation rather than taking the time to get to know you and differentiate you from other students who look like you? This is blatant disrespect and humiliation that black Oliners are forced to live with. People ignoring this issue spreads the internal belief that we are all the same and negligibly different from one another. But it’s more than just names. It’s hard to verbalise microaggressions and small acts of disrespect, but I have a story that I think conveys these effects. At the start of this semester my friend, another black Oliner, and I went on a grocery run together. When we were driving back to campus and turning into Lot B, a white woman stood in front of the car and asked “Are you guys lost? This is Olin College.” We told her we weren’t lost and her reply was “Well, this is student parking.” Once we corrected her and explained we were both students, she walked away with a confused look on her face. For those who can’t understand the racism in this situation, my friend and I were assumed to not be Olin students, which is an odd assumption to make about 2 college-aged students on Olin’s campus. And what’s worse was that we were at first assumed to not even have a reason to be at Olin. This woman’s first thought was that 2 black students shouldn’t be here and tried to shoo us away. We should not be harassed like this on our own campus. 

These are the simple reasons I can name without going into the larger history of deep rooted prejudice in education and eternal biases Americans are raised on. The main point is that Olin is a toxic environment towards black people, and in 25 years of operation has failed to make proper actions to address these issues. Olin needs to change, and until it does, expect more articles from Olin’s Resident Angry Black Lady. 

Olin is Not a Jewish Space

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Nearly 10% of Olin’s campus is Jewish. Consistently I can find between eight and ten Jewish students in every class. Compare that to the national population of two percent, and I expected a very different campus culture when I came to Olin. I would imagine people talking about the holidays in casual conversation, or find dining hall meals dedicated to the larger festivals. This does not happen at Olin—not in the years I’ve been here, and I don’t foresee this changing any time soon. 

From a top-down perspective, Olin is too small to appeal to observant Jewish students. There’s too much work for resting on the Sabbath. The dining hall doesn’t serve kosher meals. We don’t have a Hillel chapter. In case you don’t know, that’s an affiliation with the largest international organization dedicated to providing Jewish students resources on campus, and our school is too small to receive their services. 

Because of these top down limitations, students are restrained from creating their own bottom-up solutions. The school’s structure discourages observant Jews from attending Olin. The students here who try to run events operate on severe deficits in Jewish knowledge, and there’s no time at Olin to study up on how to properly run a celebration. Student initiatives barely get off the ground and seldom reach the broader Jewish community. Thus, Jewish life remains vacant. 

When I came to Olin, I wanted to explore more what it meant to be Jewish at college. I visited Jewish organizations at other schools, each with their pros and cons. Brandeis was too far away, Wellesley felt strange being a man, and the prayers at Babson were sexist sometimes. Then I went abroad for a semester and the one service I attended there made me so upset I wrote a FS article about it (It’s one of my proudest. You should read it if you haven’t). I gave up looking after that. 

Judaism at Olin is a journey traveled alone, and the institution will not help you through it. Heed my warning: The dining hall will NOT give you the food you need for Passover. 

That’s where JOO fits in. The Jewish Organization at Olin is left in a terrible position. The resources are sparse, the leadership lacks expertise, and our most active member is a baptised Catholic (we love you Azzy). Historically, JOO buys food from local Jewish vendors a few holidays a year and hosts small celebrations. However, these events could serve a greater purpose. These food events could gather Jewish students before the holidays, and we can popularize all the inter-school activities that happen in the near future. JOO doesn’t need to be a hub of Jewish culture at Olin. It can be a vehicle to transport Olin Jews to the communities they find solace with.

Serving as a guide instead of the host enables JOO to stay lean and serve the community with greater precision. It can focus its small events toward building something greater, and it can stay true to a mission instead of what I saw as failing to live up to its name. 

Seeing so many freshmen stop by on Rosh Hashanah for apples and honey filled me with hope. This FS would have been far more pessimistic otherwise. I hope to see more people going to Babson Chabad, and I recently became friends with a few members of the Wellesley Hillel e-board, so I’ve been going to their services every Friday. Let me know if you’d like to join.