An extremely heated topic that has arisen at Western in the past few years is the issue of Diversity. Just walking around campus and interacting with people I have heard many perspectives on this topic, whether that be “I think Western is an extremely diverse place” or “Western is not that diverse at all.” With these mixed responses it can be hard to come to an unbiased conclusion, which leads to the question, is Western diverse?
So let’s look at the statistics. According to the diversity page of the WWU website (http://www.wwu.edu/diversity/stats.shtml), in the 1980s, out of the 10,616 students only 388 students were people of color (POC). That means 96.3% of the total student body was Caucasian. Now flash forward to 2014. Out of the 15,060 students that were attending Western, 3,547 (23.6%) of those students were POC. So Western’s diversity has definitely improved in the past thirty years, jumping about 20%, but as a school with a ratio of 4 Caucasians to every 1 person of color can we really call ourselves diverse?
In April of 2014 our Western Washington University president, Bruce Shepard made a speech on diversity that caused news stations to buzz and conservatives to speak out in outrage on a specific quote he made, stating “if in the decades ahead, we are as white as we are today, we will have failed as a University.” In response to the outrage the University President spoke on television with KOMO News saying that he had intended to provoke people with the statement, commenting that “the word white is a lightning rod for people’s feelings” and that he welcomes “vigorous and respectful debate on the issue of diversity” (http://www.komonews.com/news/local/University-presidents-comments-on-race-stir-controversy-255582491.html?tab=video&c=y).
The topic of racial diversity on campus can spark up many awkward conversations and I have personally found that many get oddly defensive when challenged with the racial statistics of the school, common comments being “well they are called ‘racial minorities’ so obviously there would be less of them” and “look at Washington, the state itself is predominantly white”. But these comments don’t even make a dent in the topic at hand when everyone making those comments are also white, as is 75% of the student body.
So there it is. Racial diversity is a big issue for Western right now, not only because of the numbers, but because of the ignorance about people of color due to the imbalance. Interacting with people of different ethnic groups and cultures is big in the process of having an open mind and understanding the difference between a racist joke and a respectful comment, which in my own experiences at Western as an Asian woman and as a person of color have shown me, is a big problem. There is no way to empathize with a person of color if you never make the effort or never have an opportunity to build a relationship with one, and many students at western will never have a proper opportunity if the statistics don’t change.
That isn’t to say that Western does not have proper communities for POC. Western has student organized clubs from almost every ethnic/cultural background that you can think of, like the Black Student Union, Chinese Student Union, South Asian Student Association, Latino students Union, and so many more. And even if you don’t fit within an ethnic minority group, it never hurts to attend a group to at least gain insight on different ethnic groups. The most important thing is to remember to be respectful and open minded.