Students in Affinity Houses Say They’re Not All About Identity

When Shelby Steele, whose father was black and mother was white, arrived in 1964 for his freshman year at Coe College, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, he was assigned an African American roommate.

They were two of nine black students on campus, and the administration housed them together, he was told, to spare them embarrassment. Steele went to the college’s president, complained that black students were being “ghettoized,” and demanded to be assigned a new roommate. He was, and his new white roommate became a good friend.

Steele, who has written often about segregation, is among those appalled that in recent decades, college students have segregated themselves voluntarily in so-called affinity housing for those of particular races, genders, sexual orientations, religions, or other distinctions.

“I just cannot imagine a worse sort of program to introduce on a campus than that, where you literally follow the rules of Jim Crow segregation,” says Steele, a former English professor, an author, a documentary filmmaker, and a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. “That might take it a little far; they certainly don’t intend that.” But what is affinity housing, he asks, if not self-segregation?

But students say it’s more complicated than that. The housing allows them to immerse themselves in cultures and viewpoints of interest to them, and to share those cultures with classmates. They draw strength from living situations that allow them, they say, to explore other facets of college with a more confident sense of who they are. Even after they leave affinity housing, they take that confidence with them.

Colleges, meanwhile, strive to accommodate the demand for affinity housing but must be careful, one expert says, not to lean on it too heavily at the expense of other diversity measures.

Steele has heard about the ostensible benefits and remains unpersuaded. “The idea that there is something really special about being with your own ethnic group or race is abhorrent, a badly thought out and socially engineered idea,” he says. “It pretends to solve a problem of alienation but only alienates people further, only makes people more self-conscious, more self-absorbed, more given to a narcissism about their own ethnic group at the expense of all others.”

For Janae Lewis, however, who lived for two years in Mount Holyoke’s Shirley Chisholm House, for students of African descent, it wasn’t racial narcissism that spurred the move but exasperation at being a rarity in a predominantly white college for women.

A senior studying gender studies, anthropology, and reproductive justice, she remembers as a first-year student getting tired of explaining to white classmates her evening hair care, with its oils and twists. She grew up in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston around other African Americans and missed being around them that first year of college.

After two years in the Chisholm community, Lewis elected this year to live in a general residential hall. “I got what I needed from it,” she says of Chisholm, and she wants to make room for younger classmates to live there. (With dozens of residents, it is in demand.) Chisholm helped her “normalize” the Mount Holyoke experience, she says. In contrast to her freshman year, when she didn’t want to stand out and “make myself a spectacle, now I can go out with my hair in twists without caring about being looked at or asked weird questions.”

Khadija Diop, a junior at McDaniel College, in Maryland, sees affinity housing as a platform from which to educate her peers and herself. Born in Senegal, she was brought to the United States when she was 8 months old. Majoring in German and Arabic, minoring in education, she plans to join AmeriCorps after graduation and become a middle-school language teacher.

Are Students in Silos?

Students were asked whether they “frequently” or “occasionally” engaged in the following:

SOURCE: UCLA’s Heigher Education Research Institute

As a sophomore, she lived in McDaniel’s German House. Aside from being a bit crowded, with eight students, it was a fun and effective language-immersion experience, she says.

This year Diop will be the resident life adviser in the Africa’s Legacy affinity house. She is friends with the other four residents. The house sponsors activities like cookouts with face painting and traditional clothing, and sewing clothes to send to children in West Africa. It also hosts a fund-raising dinner that highlights various regions of Africa and features dancers, skits, spoken-word poetry, a fashion show, and African food.

McDaniel is “not the most diverse campus,” Diop says, and “it’s nice to be able to educate people and see other cultures of the world.” She adds: “I don’t think any members feel constricted at all.”

Still, she’ll probably leave it next year. After all, it’s a big world, and Arabic House beckons.

‘My Place to Recharge’

Language-themed houses have a clear educational benefit, says Heather Mac Donald, author of The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture (St. Martin’s Press). But, she says, “I don’t believe that the more typical features of identity politics, whether it’s sex or skin color or sexual orientation, are particularly interesting accomplishments or grounds for grouping people together.”

Julie J. Park, an associate professor in the department of counseling, higher education, and special education at the University of Maryland at College Park, takes a warmer view. She says administrators remain committed to affinity housing but wrestle with how it fits into broader goals to improve racial equity and inclusion on campus. Park, author of Race on Campus: Debunking Myths With Data (Harvard Education Press), says that students usually reside in such housing for a year or two, and that their experiences are generally positive.

But students should feel supported outside of their affinity house, too, and not find that their residence is the only calm in a campus storm. Most important, Park says, colleges shouldn’t use affinity housing as a crutch. “It is a vital support, especially when there aren’t a lot of students of color on campus. But I would like to see campuses step up to overall racial diversity and have that not be the only place where students of color feel at home.”

Marisol Fernandez says her experiences with Mount Holyoke College’s Mosaic, a residence for people who identify as or “want to celebrate” people of color, as well as with other living and learning communities there, have advanced her education and given her professional goals. Born in Lima, Peru, she grew up in Miami and enrolled at Mount Holyoke through the Posse Foundation, which offers promising students a tuition-free education at elite colleges where they might not otherwise apply. The foundation emphasizes the role of having a “posse,” other students from their underrepresented cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds, in making their college experience successful.

Now Fernandez is a senior community adviser who helps coordinate the living and learning communities. After graduation, she plans to work in student affairs. Mosaic helped her feel comfortable as a low-income, first-generation student of color, she says. She wants to help others coming up behind her feel comfortable, too.

Sara Sarmiento was in the Mount Holyoke Posse program in Miami one year behind Fernandez. The Bogotá, Colombia, native helped found Mount Holyoke’s Mi Gente community for Latinx students. She organized trips to see a Frida Kahlo exhibit and a staging of the Lin-Manuel Miranda musical In the Heights. Like Fernandez, Sarmiento is now a senior community adviser.

Students have asked Sarmiento: Why self-segregate? She answers that the Mi Gente students who are involved in student government and other activities throughout campus tell her, “This has been my place to recharge and grow so that I can carry that energy into the rest of campus.”

A Cultural Adventure

For the new resident adviser at Emory University’s Bayit, which offers a Jewish living experience, affinity housing isn’t isolating or primarily a matter of identity politics. “I don’t think there’s anyone in that house whose only interest is being Jewish,” he says. And he thinks the eight or so residents will have exposure to other ways of living and thinking.

In fact, he’s sure of it. His name is Xavier Sayeed, and he’s Muslim.

The senior got to know the Bayit through friends in interfaith groups. He saw in the residential-adviser position not just a good student job but also a chance to put into practice the kind of religious pluralism he encourages and enjoys. Of his fellow Bayit residents, he says, “everybody seems to be really accepting. I’ve been warmly received.”

Sayeed is from Indianapolis, where his mother’s family is from. His father is from Bangladesh. Growing up in the post-9/11 era, he says, he felt that everyone made assumptions about him. He realized early on that a strong character and living up to his own principles of tolerance and intellectual curiosity were key to his happiness.

He is a classical violinist and a jazz drummer and is considering becoming a musicologist. “I feel like my whole life I’ve been waiting,” he says with a chuckle, “for the situation where just going to concerts and thinking is considered a productive activity.” While in Israel this summer, he studied Judeo-Muslim relations as manifested in music, particularly the Moroccan musical diaspora.

Beyond cultural interplay, Sayeed says, the Bayit has practical advantages for him. Emory doesn’t have an Islamic house, and if a Muslim wants to adhere to halal meat preparation, a kosher kitchen, which “is even more strict,” he says, is just the ticket.

Alexander C. Kafka is a Chronicle senior editor. Follow him on Twitter @AlexanderKafka, or email him at alexander.kafka@chronicle.com.