climbing the ivory tower
A topic that has come up recently in my conversations with my sister is the issue of diversity in higher education. I’m talking about more than demographics and ststistics, what I really mean is diversity in ideas.
I’ve had several instances of extreme isolation when I am in a classroom and people are talking about how all poor people are passive how exconvicts are traitors to the social contract or how women are naturally “catty” in positions of power and how women’s sexual promiscuity merits verbal abuse or worse.
Why is it that these same people do not question how the “social contract” was broken when we stepped foot on this country, when we traded slaves, when people of color and poor people have no access to education, jobs, or the basic means of survival, including hope.
Part of what I want this blog to be is a view of the ivory tower, looking down, but always also looking up, from the outside, from the ground we continue to stand on as we struggle with poverty and our identities as people who do not know whether the climb of those gleaming ivory steps means that we won’t be able to come back down. In my four and a half years at DePaul, I feel that isolation more and more every day. When knowledge of Latin American Politics is reduced to spring break in Cancun or when Latina girls are inherently traditional because their parents won’t let them watch Sex in the City. I’m questioning not so much whether I belong here, but how the navigate into a world that most people from my roots have never seen.
-MC Coqui
