After the protestors appeared on Middle Path a little over a week ago, discussions of sexuality, gender, religion, diversity and accessibility began to pop out of the ground. It’s as if, by some strange miracle, Kenyon had skipped the misery of winter and February. We entered a spring of discourse with articles like Devine ‘18, Miller ‘19, Lagasse ’16, and Thompson ’16.
My immediate reaction was to be jump-around-light-off-intellectual-fireworks-follow-every-Tumblr-blog-talking-about-the-issue happy about the profound and thought-provoking honesty surrounding these topics. The more I read, though, the smaller I felt.
Don’t get me wrong; I don’t disagree with the refreshing ideas coming from our students. Hopefully, it’s abundantly clear that I support and celebrate, with the little understanding I have, the steps being taken towards a more equal or—at least— a more accessible life on and off campus. Therein seems to be exactly my problem… “the little understanding I have” sometimes feels like it isn’t enough, and for some if it isn’t enough now, it seems that it and I will never be enough.
What I do I mean by this?
I mean that as a cis-gendered, white female raised in a Midwestern, somewhat Christian-based household, in many aspects I have lived an extremely privileged life. While there might be more privileged people on campus in some respects, and I might be able to highlight the ways I have been marginalized myself, these facts in NO WAY cancel out the truth that I often feel like Kenyon wants me to deny for sake of being labeled ‘liberal/ progressive/ politically correct and so on: I WILL NEVER BE ABLE TO COMPREHEND THE EXPERIENCE OF THE PEOPLE AFFECTED BY SUCH LARGE SCALE DISCRIMINATION AND PREJUDICES.
There, I said it. There is no way for me to quantify and understand an inside perspective of the injustice others have witnessed. My own experience as a woman and other personal experiences are valid in a struggle for equality for women and victims of assault, but that doesn’t give me the authority or insight to the hundreds of other types of issues going on in the world. Furthermore, I’d never had any kind of encounter with most of these issues until I came to Kenyon, not first hand or second hand and only a very, very censored and limited amount of third-hand exposure. People find this unbelievable, but as I’ve gotten to know members of our freshmen class, they’ve expressed the same fears and ignorances. And it is neither of our faults.
Empathy, support, caring, protesting, petitioning, voting—every action I take in an effort to assist and stand by these values does not make me anymore a part of others’ personal struggles and experiences. They own them and I will happily play part-time cheerleader and part-time bodyguard for them. However, I refuse to try to own a struggle that rightfully belongs to a group of warriors whom I was not born a part of. And now I’m putting my neck on the line by saying what others on this campus have felt before me: “I am not confident in my ability to talk about these issues.”
Wait, allow me to rephrase: “I do not feel comfortable or safe talking about these issues in public, at Kenyon, due to a lack of terminology and experience with both these issues and with the Kenyon student body.”
Ironic, isn’t it? To be scared to talk about acceptance, or the discourse of diversity, with those who are supposedly the most inclusive out of a fear they will judge your outdated lingo, lack of exposure, or uncertainty about issues that you’ve never before encountered. But if you come from a historically conservative state or city or neighborhood or family, you might be just as clueless as I was, and as I am.
Before I came to Kenyon, the only type of “PC” I knew was a computer. Someone, a rather flabbergasted upperclassmen, had to explain to me the abbreviation. Politically correct was not unfamiliar, but where I grew up, it certainly wasn’t used enough to warrant its own acronym. It might shock you to learn that Nebraska isn’t a political hub for the newest or most accepting ideology. Those who live there and share these ideas are silenced, isolated, and told they will be the downfall of society. Access and resources using the most up-to-date and politically correct terms or theories usually involves a lag that can extend from between a month and a year to travel across state and headlines. Culture moves slowly, and no amount of googling and internet reconnaissance can prove to you the language of a movement until it has feet (or in this case mouths) on the ground. For all the acceptance and open-mindedness Kenyon students have, there is very little forgiveness for this.
After a semester of late night chats behind locked doors, embarrassing foot-in-mouth moments and one too many botched attempts to ask for a Kenyon-worthy dictionary of the PC world, I finally gave up. I shut up and stopped asking. The quietest person in the room supposedly listens and learns the most, right? I figured that if I pick up the student mentality I took in high school, I’d learn this material as fast as I did then.
There is one major difference with this situation: no one asked me elementary-level questions. Everyone came from a melting pot of words and worlds I’d never heard before. They didn’t need to be informed of the cultural terminology and it’s rules because they already knew how the game was played.
Thankfully, someone else who is as confused as I was last year confessed to me the same feelings I’ve been harboring for two years. I decided to swallow my pride (well, I swallowed 5% pride and 95% fear), and approach the most PC woman I know. Her advice to me was to ask for help, ask for clarification. Crozier has an “Ouch, oops, educate” philosophy that identifies, forgives, and corrects mistakes and misunderstandings like mine, but will every place and person on campus be as accepting or forgiving as Crozier?
What if the same sort of linguistic mistake happens in a classroom or over a lunch table or a Wiggins coffee, leaving someone totally unaware and with the reputation as a racist or sexist? I’ve seen friendships fall apart over misunderstandings of perspectives on political, cultural, and religious issues far too often to stay silent any longer.
It is unfair to refuse to educate and accept people who are unknowing but not unwilling to learn. You cannot learn until you have the opportunity to do so. You cannot know that you need to learn until the need is identified.
I cannot become a better person unless people tell me when I’ve made a mistake.
If Kenyon wants to be “PC,” we need to accept that not everyone on our campus knows what that necessarily means and maybe no one on campus knows what it means. We need to be open to education and dialogue and forgiveness for the limiting variable of our pasts, which are out of our control and have prevented us from knowing any better. Without accepting that we need to foster acceptance can we call ourselves “accepting” at all?”
Image Credit: NPR, Tumblr, Thought Catalog, Celebuzz, Kosher by Default