This is not a politically correct article. This article is a step towards removing the veil of political correctness to hopefully arrive at the TRUTH.

Disclaimers: 1) We are not presupposing that some forms of diversity are more important than others, nor are we trying to de-legitimize oppression felt by others. Rather, we are trying to say that all forms of diversity are equally important and therefore equally deserving of our attention. 2) While we may include some instances where a certain group has been victimized, this is not an article aimed at finding the most “oppressed” group on campus. 3) This is not an angry article aimed at people who have been assholes in the past. We are not writing this article as angry Christians, atheists, liberals or conservatives but rather as concerned Whitties.

In last week’s article, we discussed some intricacies of diversity (primarily focusing on racial diversity), some reasons why Whitman desires diversity and how this targeting of certain groups can be sometimes harmful.

Whitman strives to be an all-inclusive community—one that does not impose judgments on people or cultures. Nevertheless, Whitman does not target diversity groups consisting of “race, color, sex, gender, religion, age, marital status, national origin, disability [and] veteran’s status” equally. This blurs the importance of diverse people, not just diverse races.

One group in particular is often ignored and ridiculed freely and often quite viciously (not just a side joke) by many on the Whitman campus without there being the second thought of, “Hey, this might be wrong because they are humans too and I just don’t understand them.” Let us give you an example.

Imagine you’re walking through the Lyman lounge and you hear a group of people discussing the best words to put between “Martin” and “King” to be most offensive to blacks. They then proceed with great delight to say “Martin-c***-sucking-King” or even “Martin-mother-f***er-King.” Now, what would you think? How would you react?
You would be disgusted. You would be outraged. And so would we—and we were when we found that this exact instance happened to a Christian friend of ours at Whitman—except this time, fill in the blank between “Jesus” and “Christ.”

If you still believe that Whitman is not hostile to Christians, take this example: During the spring semester of ‘07, the Stevens Gallery hosted the Post-Secret project where Whitman students anonymously submitted index-cards containing their secrets. To our dismay, one of the postcards read, “I am a Christian.” That was someone’s SECRET! Whitman is supposed to be this open and accepting community that has been rated by the Princeton Review as #1 for “Happiest Students,” so why would anyone be afraid to admit their own identity here?

Maybe it’s hard for students to actually be Christians at Whitman. Since both of us are (we both have our moments where we try to hide it), we face being charged as people who don’t think for themselves, want to constantly convert non-Christians into Christians and are close-minded, crazy and homophobic. What’s interesting is that now, as juniors, we have learned to suppress our beliefs in our conversations—even though our Christianity has A LOT to do with how we live our lives and how we view our world.

These days, racial insensitivity is a definite no-no, but religious insensitivity is not just OK, it’s accepted because many believe that Christians and other religious sects deserve it.
Anyone might argue that in fact, yes, Christians do deserve it because they have persecuted and killed people all over the world in the past and in the present have been gay-hating mongers against all women having the freedom of choice over their own bodies. But look what you just did if you argued that. You categorized all Christians.

Now take Muslims for example. You could argue that in general all Muslims deserve oppression because of 9/11. How ignorant that would be. Doesn’t it sound silly?

Whitman categorizes Christians and many other religious groups. A great example of this was when a friend of ours was literally pushed against a wall and questioned, “So, do you hate gays?” by someone who had found out that our friend was a Christian. Did this person have the right to assume that?

No. He or she did not. And do you know why? Because all people are unique and can have many varying definitions of themselves within their identity all at once. This is “inventive syncretism,” as James Clifford describes in “The Predicament of our Culture.” Because, as we discussed last week from Said, we humans are all guilty of systematically organizing people in categories, we often cannot think of such would-be oxymorons as an “open-minded Christian” or a “pro-life liberal” or a “pro-gay-marriage conservative.” This causes us to further separate ourselves from “the other”—being anyone we think isn’t similar to us—again and again without questioning whether or not this person is a unique human being and might be much more than meets the eye.

These assumptions happen on campus not only to Christians, but to various religious groups as people disrespect others in their personal and often times very private beliefs.

Holocaust survivor Victor Frankl wrote in “Man’s Searching for Meaning,” “From all this we may learn that there are two races of men in this world but only these two: the race of the decent man and the race of the indecent man. Both are found everywhere, they penetrate into all groups of society. No group consists entirely of decent or indecent people. In this sense no group is of pure race.”

No group of any kind consists of people who are all alike. The true difference between each other is whether we decide to hate, to love or, as Frankl so eloquently puts it, to be indecent or decent. Every day we must decide who we want to be. Will we show love to one group and not another because we think they deserve it? Or everywhere we go, should we try to be decent human beings no matter what?

We challenge you to ponder this.

More to come next week. Please respond and say if you wouldn’t mind being quoted in our next article. Remember, this is the beginning of a discussion and we hope to discover new solutions and further expose problems. Please comment freely.