September 18, 2015 - 16:33
In her essay “Slipping into Something More (Un)Comfortable: Untangling Identity, Unsettling Community,” Professor Dalke introduces the concept of “slippage” in regards to social faux pas. But what is slippage? In my opinion, it is the involuntary expression of thoughts, impressions, or ideas within one’s mind through speech, actions, or reactions. Over the course of our tour, I noticed that the execution of the tour was a slippage itself, and it impressed upon me the ways in which the Bryn Mawr community has to grow in order to truly achieve its ideal of racial equity on campus.
The “Black at Bryn Mawr Tour” is the culmination of a research project on the history of black people and their treatment at the college. It was instituted in the wake of an incident involving two southern students hanging a Confederate flag on their door and creating a “Mason-Dixon Line” out of duct tape. The incident was so shocking and hurtful for the community that they decided to commence research into the history of race at the college, and the possible legacies of racism present in the institution. The tour itself started in front of M. Carey Thomas Hall, and took us through the servant passages built under the buildings, Taft garden, and in front of both Taylor Hall and Merion Hall, in order. All the areas we toured played a historic role in the oppression of black people on campus, or have been a symbol of their exclusion from the college.
The most obvious slippage during our tour was the fact that, while it purported to tell the history of blackness at BMC, it focused largely on the racist roots of Bryn Mawr from the perspective of the racists. While this is not an uncommon trait in the recitation of U.S. history, I found it strange that a tour claiming to be about “being black at Bryn Mawr” would focus so heavily on the narratives of racists, and have so few stories from the point of view of those discriminated against. The slippage, in this case, was not the blurting of a thought that would have gone unvoiced if possible, but instead an absence of thought. While the existence of three particularly prominent black people in Bryn Mawr’s history were mentioned, one was not given a name, nor a background, and another was never permitted to truly attend the college. Glaringly absent from the entire experience were quotes from the diaries of servants, the names of black workers, or even the name and history of the first black professor hired. Overall, the tour focused more on the racists present in the college’s foundation rather than the narratives of the people of color who began as a silent presence at the first conception of the college. While not an uncommon presentation of racial history, it is not a productive nor enlightened perspective.
When viewed as a slippage, the tour’s execution of its concept largely indicates to me that while we’ve made a positive step towards a productive dialogue about race on campus, we have a long way to go before we reach that goal. De-idolizing M. Carey Thomas is a good and necessary part of mending the campus, but more needs to be done to lend power to voices denied that power in the past. In short, we need to spend time taking a deep look not only into the campus’ history with race and racism, but also the ways in which that history has influenced BMC’s student experiences and the ways we respond to that history. For example, I identify as white, and I therefore have the privilege of hearing history told from perspectives similar to my own within my society. However, for several years now I have been attempting to train myself out of my ethnocentrism when it comes to hearing the histories and experiences of people different from myself. I think the tour (and college at large) would benefit from a similar introspection into how they present the complex history of race at the college, and worked towards including perspectives from black students, faculty, and staff, both past and present.
The Black At Bryn Mawr tour, while a step in the right direction as far as the community’s efforts at creating an open dialogue about the legacies of racism on campus, still has a long way to go. When the concept of “slippage” is applied, several aspects of the tour’s handling of the demands placed upon it indicate that there still exists a tendency to give the power of voice to racists in the college history rather than the people who were subject to that racism. I believe that the college at large, and the Black at Bryn Mawr tour in particular, should spend time examining their responses to the college’s tumultuous past in regards to race, and why they’ve chosen to portray that history the way they have.