Allen: Are the sidewalks at Northwestern too White, too?

Kenny Allen, Opinion Editor

April 5, 2021

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When I first got to Northwestern, I wondered why walking around on campus could be so frustrating. Even when sidewalks were relatively empty, I would often have to walk way around people to pass without bumping into them. At first, I chalked it up to the geographic diversity of the school; maybe the people that came to this school were used to different ways of moving through a public place. But after talking to my Black friends about my experience, they echoed it: people at this predominantly White school would not move out of our way on the sidewalk.

This was one of many reminders that diversity does not mean inclusion at NU. Even though the University has worked to increase the number of Black students here, that doesn’t mean we’re welcomed with open arms. Bedelia Nicola Richards, a sociology professor at the University of Richmond, laid out a set of five questions to determine whether one’s university is racist:

Which group or groups feel most at home on the campus and which ones feel like (unwanted) guests?

Whose norms, values and perspectives does the institution consider to be normal or legitimate? Whose does it silence, marginalize or delegitimize?

Who inhabits positions of power within the institution?

Whose experiences, norms, values and perspectives influence an institution’s laws, policies and systems of evaluation?

Whose interests does the institution protect?

At this school, the answer to most of those questions is White people. Any honest accounting of the decision-making structures at this school would tell you so. And this power dynamic is always present in the way Black students interact with this institution.

So why did my Black friends and I all feel that we were being pushed off the sidewalks?

Almost everybody in the United States gets some sort of education about Jim Crow segregation. Black people had to attend different schools, weren’t allowed to vote and didn’t have any legal protection from discrimination. These laws helped to create an image of Black inferiority after the abolition of slavery. And that sentiment trickled down to the way people interact on an interpersonal level.

The formal rules of Jim Crow were accompanied by a set of informal ones that governed the way Black people approached White people in public space and vice versa. That social order required Black people to yield to White people whenever possible. Both sets of rules told White people that they were superior and Black people that they were inferior — and that this pattern of subjugation was the natural way for things to be. Black people were made to show deference to White people any time they interacted. One of the ways they were made to do so was by stepping off the sidewalk when a White person was walking past.

The informal rules are passed down through generations just like any other kind of etiquette. White people came to expect the right of way in public spaces. White people who were accustomed to moving through the world like that — intentionally or not — taught their kids to move through the world in the same way. And the racism that undergirded Jim Crow wasn’t eliminated just because the laws were no longer overtly racist.

Many White people walk around campus having unknowingly absorbed this particular facet of White supremacy, and the leaders of the institution do little to make us believe that White supremacy is something worth challenging in the first place. This is not to say that giving people space in public is a way to be anti-racist; the sidewalk question is just one way in which Black people are made to feel unwelcome. This is to say that essentially every aspect of our society, including the way we physically move through space, has been shaped by a racist legacy. Uprooting that White supremacy requires both recognizing its scale and disrupting it however it shows up.

If you would like to respond publicly to this op-ed, send a Letter to the Editor to opinion@dailynorthwestern.com. The views expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect the views of all staff members of The Daily Northwestern.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4837590&forum_id=2#42483257)

So because of Jim Crow, this is why black people never move out of the way on the sidewalk?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4837590&forum_id=2#42483277)

So, are the only good walkers Latinx and Native Americans?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4837590&forum_id=2#42483296)

it’s possible going around with perpetual feelings of aggrievement, resentment, and inferiority contributes to the answer here.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4837590&forum_id=2#42483294)

marxism was subverted and used as a weapon by the rich to attack white majority labor...old hls dood is not really well-read enuf or perceptive enuf to see that, so he just mouths the standard talking points of the faux-populist "Right"

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4837590&forum_id=2#42483706)

https://twitter.com/KennyAllen_

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4837590&forum_id=2#42483373)

Kenny Allen, a senior at Northwestern University and active player in the college men’s division, penned a blog calling out an often unacknowledged problem in ultimate, but one that players of color frequently experience — cultural appropriation. Allen highlights the public use of rap music by predominantly white teams and schools as an example of privilege and connects it to the larger problem facing the ultimate community: better understanding race and how community members’ actions indirectly perpetuate racism.

“Before the ultimate community tries to change how white the sport is, we need to think about the environment we’d be introducing people of color into.”

https://usaultimate.org/news/2021/02/edi-update-february-2021/

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4837590&forum_id=2#42483705)

Kenny Allen

Kenny Allen

Dec 26, 2016·3 min read

For the past few months, just as many other high school seniors during the fall, I was stressed. I applied to seven very selective colleges and nine colleges total. There were two important components: education and money. Obviously, people apply to selective schools because they offer a good education, but I’m also poor, so attending a college that could meet my financial need was very important. Thankfully, I was admitted to Northwestern a few days ago, and they’re paying for $65,000 of next year’s $70,000 tuition (they expect me to pay for the rest through work study and a summer job). Thankfully, I no longer have to worry about college admissions (for 4 years). I don’t have to think about test scores, typos in my application, or proving to colleges that I’m worthy of an acceptance letter.

Now that I know the college I will be attending, and hopefully graduating from, I’ve started to reflect on my K-12 career. Ever since my family heard — I told my mom and she immediately called everyone — the news about where I’m going to school next year, they’ve been telling me that I should be proud of myself. But nobody has reminded me about my luck.

My mother is an immigrant who works as a nanny; for most of elementary school, I went to a school that was eventually shut down because of abysmal performance; I spent most of my days at my grandparents’ house watching TV and eating Burger King; I was assigned to a middle school where I, and my peers, would be expected to walk through metal detectors every morning. Thankfully, I went to an amazing private school instead of one with metal detectors at the front, but the school that I was assigned to shows the path that somebody with my demographics is usually headed down. When 11-year-olds are made to walk through metal detectors every morning, they’re being told that they’re more likely to end up in a jail cell than at a school like Northwestern.

Because of the pervasive myth of the American meritocracy, I’m supposed to be very proud that I persevered through difficult circumstances, but I’m not buying it. Throughout all my life, I’ve been able to understand the content in almost all of my classes (geometry and biology were rough) and except for a few occasions, I haven’t had to work for it. I keep asking myself what I did to separate myself from some of the poor black kids I went to elementary school with, but I can’t come up with a satisfactory answer. In elementary school I was able to read faster than, add triple digit numbers before, and spell words better than most kids, but I didn’t go home every night and study in order to make that happen. I’ve come to terms with something that many people in America have difficulty admitting: I just got lucky. We have this idea that everybody born here has the opportunity to succeed, but we forget to talk about the advantages some people are born with. I was lucky enough to get the ability to do well in an elementary school classroom and to not have a tumultuous life, and because of where I go to school, nearly all of my friends were born with white skin and college-educated parents. All of those attributes will help us go to good colleges — or at least go to college at all — but now that I’ve gotten my acceptance letter, I wonder about all of the people who were born with so little going for them.

I’ve come to the conclusion that we need to do more to acknowledge chance in our lives and work to make sure people start on a more level playing ground. Was my college admissions completely serendipitous? No. I am a smart kid who deserves to a good school, but it isn’t happening because of my blood, sweat, and tears; it is happening because I got lucky.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4837590&forum_id=2#42483814)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4837590&forum_id=2#42484484)

Kenny Allen

Kenny Allen

Oct 12, 2020·3 min read

As it stands, ultimate is a white sport. And as a black player, it doesn’t always feel easy to fit in with teams. But one thing that has been especially alienating is the way the ultimate community consumes music made by black artists. Teams listen to it during warmups and feature it in their highlight reels. Before expanding on that, I want to talk about my ultimate background a bit: I’m a senior at Northwestern, and most of my experience with the sport has come in the college men’s division, so my impressions are largely informed by that context.

Being a white person and listening to rap or other music by black artists isn’t inherently bad; the issue in the ultimate community is that the consumption is not paired with enough thinking about the implications of that consumption. White people can loudly listen to (gangster) rap music in public without people labeling them as thugs or not worthy of existing in public spaces. At worst, people would only apply those labels to that specific group of white people. When a group of black people does the same, those labels are applied more often, and more likely to be applied to the entire racial group. Because whiteness is often assumed to be the default, white people are not asked to be representatives of their racial groups in the way that people of color are. And even if stereotypes are applied to white people, they don’t carry nearly as much weight as they do when applied to people of color.

Even though loudly listening to music may not seem like a privilege, that level of access to public space is one that black people often don’t get. And in at least one case, listening to loud music has been a death sentence for a black teenager. In 2012, a white man named Michael Dunn fired 10 shots into a car of black teenagers after asking them to turn their music down. Two of Dunn’s shots killed 17-year-old Jordan Davis. This is a severe contrast to how ultimate teams can reasonably expect to be treated when they do the same exact thing. This was especially salient during the end of the college season when teams were releasing highlight/Callahan videos. White editors at white schools created a lot of reels of white players and chose gangster rap as the soundtrack — often using the n word. Those videos are often the only public-facing content teams have. The songs can be exciting and fun, but they’re used in the context of a sport where black people are largely absent and excluded when we do participate.

But cultural appropriation is just a symptom of a larger problem: the ultimate community does not have a sophisticated enough understanding of race, and its white members haven’t done the work to understand how their actions contribute to racism. With all the teams I’ve been a part of so far, race has not been a discussion unless I brought it up. Carrying that burden of being a teacher on top of the burden of not feeling accepted in the first place gets tiring. And not feeling accepted has come in the forms of

· “not a thrower” calls from the sideline before the team ever saw me throw

· Teammates repeatedly touching my hair without permission

· Jokes about whether or not I needed sunscreen at tournaments

· being told that my athleticism is my biggest strength (it’s arguably a weakness of mine)

I won’t say that the ultimate community is particularly racist as far as predominantly white communities go. But that’s a really low bar.

Whenever I’ve had conversations about race in ultimate, the topic of how to make the sport more diverse always comes up. But how can people of color be asked to join a community that has yet to come to terms with the racist behavior it engages in? Before the ultimate community tries to change how white the sport is, we need to think about the environment we’d be introducing people of color into.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4837590&forum_id=2#42483816)