September 27, 2016 - 21:46
Living in a dorm is a funky thing. It's a weird quasi-freedom where you don't live with your parents but you also don't really live alone; someone else cooks your meals, someone else cleans the bathrooms, you only occupy one room, and you live with at least 100 other students. (And the people who clean the dorms, who cook the food, who keep the college running are majority people of color. The wonderful wonderful Erdman housekeepers, Evelyn and Tenida, are just as much a part of the dorm community as any resident and treated with about 1/100 of the respect, which is a whole racist/classist issue that I don't really know how to get into right now.) Living in close quarters with our classmates means that we hear each others' music, we see each other brushing our teeth/in our pjs, we keep our food in the same fridge, and we have lots of potential to hurt each other - to see how we all play a role in the systems that control our daily lives.
Thinking about living in a dorm, I think about my role as a CDA. (Community Diversity Assistant - there are 3 of us in this cluster, and I think a few people who have been CDAs before.) I am one of two white CDAs and I worry that my whiteness stops students of color from coming to me with their problems. And I hope that I'm able to use the power afforded to me - that other white students will come to me more willing to listen to someone "like them" than a non-white CDA, hope that I can meet them where they are and deconstruct their baggage with them. I worry that people in my dorm don't talk about race - that they don't care, that they don't feel safe discussing it, that their neighbors won't listen - and that I don't have the tools to facilitate these conversations. I worry that people expect me to be perfect, that people don't realize I'm also still learning. I worry that people don't think I'm perfect, which is an image I feel the need to project into the world.
Residents don't come talk to me. That's okay - this dorm is pretty insular; most people don't know their neighbors. But I feel like I don't know why I'm here. I'm a member of the community and at the same time I go to DLT meetings and talk about what's happening in this community. I get paid to sit with my door open during office hours. I am a part of this community and I am not because on some level I am responsible for the well-being of the people in this dorm - and I do not feel at all qualified for that. I like being a CDA, and I'm really grateful to have the opportunity to be one. I'm just sometimes not sure where regular-student-Franny ends and CDA-Franny begins, especially within the (stylish concrete) walls of this building. I am always regular me and I am sometimes CDA me - or am I always CDA me?
I don't know. I'm grateful to my community and confused by my role in it. I guess it's okay to be both of those things.