Will Barratt, Ph.D.
Adventurer
In diversity work in the US, especially on campus, the minority members of a community typically get more attention than the majority. That is a good thing. The majority members of the community are often dismissed as the oppressor, as the privileged. Simply being dismissive is a bad thing. Being dismissive dehumanizes whoever is being dismissed. That is a bad thing.
If you upend any campus and shake, what falls out? People. All kinds of people. Campus policies, procedures, campus climate, campus culture, physical reality, social reality, perceived reality, and everything else was developed by people. All kinds of people. Organizations are a formal fiction made by people.
First Generation students on campus, however defined, are an important part of any campus community. People who are First Generation have issues that are unique to that group: food insecurity, economic insecurity, social insecurity, lack of membership, belonging, and mattering. (Note please that there is a literature on each one of these issues, and a growing business in helping campus leaders realize their own role is making life difficult (oppressing) first generation students.)
And . . . First Generation students exist in a larger social class context on campus, in the US, and in the world at large. That larger social class context is inhabited by people, people who make policies, procedures, organizational maps, and all the rest that is a campus and a culture. Where is the attention to this larger context, this majority group of people and their creations? Should we just dismiss all of these people at oppressors? Or should we pay attention to these people, many kinds of people, and seek to affect them in order to create a more just campus?
Surly a knowledge of social class, in all of its manifestations on campus and among people, is critical to leveling the playing field.
Why not both?
How much emphasis should be placed on members of minority groups and how much on members of majority groups? Good question. How much does adding attention to members of the majority groups on campus detract from attention to members of minority groups on campus?
Crowdsourcing this question tells me that very few people want to focus on majority members of campus. Where are the programs on telling truth to power that challenge the majority social class? There are the slogans like "When you're accustomed to privilege, equality seems like oppression." Unpack this a little. Is this dismissive? Is this blaming? Is this telling truth to power? Does this accurately reflect the experiences of social class majority members on campus?
Challenging campus members of the social class majority about their personal role in creating and maintaining an unjust and inequitable campus system is a difficult conversation. Is the focus on First Generation students, as I said this is critical on campus, a way to speak truth to power? To address social class inequality on campus? Or is direct confrontation better?
tl:dr - focus on a symptom or focus on a cause?
