I must confess that I’ve never really fit in at Georgetown. I’m white. I’m from the Northeast. I’m not on financial aid. I should fit in, but I don’t. I’m also Jewish, from Long Island and probably what any legacy snob would call new money. I’m getting to a point where I’m okay with all of those things, but are you?
You’re not, but hopefully you know that. I have no problems with racists, if you can believe that; at least they’re honest. What I do have a problem with is those who really think they are open to anyone, but then shut themselves away on a campus that is 6.5 percent black in a city that is 60 percent black. People who lament the fact that a menorah gets stolen nearly every year, but do nothing to stop it from happening again. People who flippantly toss around words like “gay” and “fag” because they’ve never known anyone who was actually gay, and if they did would never openly call them a friend.
I’ve tried my hardest to just be a typical Georgetown student, but I’m coming to understand that it will likely never be the case. That was never hammered home more clearly than a few nights ago, in my own house no less.
I was sitting on the couch watching Monday Night Football, and everthing seemed pretty standard: Tostitos on the table, football on the tube and sprinklings of light conversation in between the chirps of Instant Messenger. Then one of my housemates came down. It is worth pointing out that he is the son of two well-off Georgetown graduates, the kind of kid who joins in making this campus 109th in a ranking of the most diverse in the country, according to the venerable U.S. News & World Report.
Somehow, we begin talking about ice cream. Apparently, the ice cream truck around him sold some kind of baseball mitt concoction with a gumball stuck to the mitt. My housemate and I looked at him, puzzled, our faces asking, “Uh, what are you talking about, dude?” From there, it deteriorated into a regional debate about what the ice cream man carries in the Midwest and East Coast, respectively.
“I guess it’s just something they sell to stupid Chicago kids,” I said flippantly, trying to end a banal conversation. Brett Favre was leading another Packers’ comeback.
“I’m sure it’s not much different from what they sell to stupid Long Island Jewish kids.”
“Why do you have to go there?” I asked calmly.
I genuinely just wanted an apology. While I had no intention of trying to string him up as a bigot, some acknowledgement that he had rubbed me, his friend and housemate, the wrong way was certainly in order. But then I realized that diversity is just an admissions catchword.
“I thought it added something.”
Wow. It added something. Getting riled up, I asked if he would go to Northeast and say the same thing there, replacing of course his use of Jewish with a term more befitting the local residents.
“No way, I’m afraid of black people.”
Double wow. Things quickly went downhill faster than a Pinto with a broken emergency brake in San Francisco.
I guess what really grinds my gears is that it could have ended with a simple apology. Actually, a simple “my bad” would have sufficed. But for him to defend himself was somewhat unforgivable.
I’ll admit, it was a harmless joke, and I could have probably just let it go, since there are a lot of other slurs that he might have used, but something about it bothered me. Maybe it was the sneer that accompanied it. Maybe it was that it wasn’t the first time.
I’ve told many an off-color joke, as most of us have, and I have from time-to-time offended people. I don’t defend myself. I feel like an asshole, apologize and hope that I haven’t lost the respect of someone I would call a friend. To date, I haven’t burned any bridges. That obviously was not the decided course of action for my housemate. He had gone there and felt no shame about it. I’m not sure that he is alone.
When I read about the most recent hate crime on campus against a gay student, it made me realize just what a bad job we all do of accepting our peers for who they are. We don’t like Jews, we hate gays, we primarily disassociate ourselves from blacks, Asians, anyone who appears to be of Middle Eastern descent and anyone with an accent. It’s about time people stop writing columns like this one. We shouldn’t need to. The student body represents the elite of the nation’s future leaders. But what will they lead other than a devout following of people just like them?
