September 16, 2016 - 17:27
Slipping is a form of “ecological thinking and acting: diverse, inevitable, unruly and fertile; conditional, uncertain and incomplete- an unending process, very much dependent on the unexpected. (254) After a deep review of Grace Pusey and Emma Kioko’s history of Bryn Mawr, I cannot deny the fact that there is a grave allowance of slippage. Slippage in the form of the inevitable ghastly issue of racism. Albeit Pusey and Mercado’s history of Bryn Mawr explores and clearly depicts the racist acts during the development of the college in the medieval ages, the racial status quo between the black and the white still remains apparent almost everywhere in the world today and persists to bar the proliferation of humans.
The most substantial form of racism in the ‘Black at Bryn Mawr’ is the plight of African Americans and the injustices shown to them. The only black people allowed on campus were domestic service staff. They provided cheap labour under harsh working conditions; in the corridors beneath some buildings and the cramped rooms in the fourth floor of Merion. No one acknowledged them and as Pusey and Emma put it, the college was supposed to appear as self-sustaining. Their supervisors belittled and demeaned them even in the public.
Racism continues to take up through the marginalization of black students. The college’s first black student, Enid Cook, and the stipulated conditions of her being in college is again, a slip. The college went ahead to use her experience as grounds to hinder other blacks from applying. Racism is also channelled by the surrounding community in an occasion where Evelyn Jones Rich is denied service at a restaurant on Lancaster Avenue. Also, the main line shops bar the Jewish and blacks from accessing their stalls.
M. Carey Thomas, the first president and founder of the college, contrasts the notion of a good leader; one who is supposed to be unbiased on the basis of race, religion, gender or class. Her main legacy is hinged on her blatant racism. She started the college with a white supremacist vision; an institution where only white elite women from utmost affluent families would get to study. She creates controversy in perpetrating racism in the college.
I strongly feel that she is a representation of the society at large, where racial discourse and prejudice have become rampant and the black people are often seen as the ‘slave race’. However, The Bryn Mawr committee and the consequent deans who followed after M. Carey Thomas felt the need to address this slip of racism. “…which begins with a walk through a restored tall-grass prairie, and invites us to think from that place about the concept of “restoration,” of “undoing harm,” rebuilding a system that has been broken” (266).
The black fraternity began to be treated with dignity and the committee in conjunction with other students would often march up when they felt there was a slip that needed to be resolved. I believe this is the main essence of the Black history at Bryn Mawr. “…about embracing difference, acknowledging a “racial unconscious” that needs to be-indeed, cannot avoid being-brought into the open, in order to be addressed.” (255) That when one slips either by actions or words, let’s call a spade a spade, and a spoon a spoon. By this, they will correct what needs to be corrected rather than giving a blind eye to issues that hurt others and cause things to fall apart.
As Nelson Mandela once said, “No one is born hating one another because of the colour of his skin, his background or his religion. People learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love because love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.”
References: Jody Cohen and Anne Dalke-Slipping.