Sabrina Murray

I find it difficult to be a minority in this environment at Lewis and Clark because everyone is white. When I look around the majority of classmates, teammates, and teachers are white. I always count the number of colored classmates when I walk into the room. Is this an unusual observation or is there more at play? Lewis and Clark prides themselves on being diverse and when I was thinking about coming here it was under the pretense that this would be a diverse campus. I even asked my coach if the team would be diverse, and he replied “yea, there are a lot of athletes that are from different states.” Why did that answer shock me as much as it did? Why did his automatic response not relate to race when my first thought about diversity is about race? I think that there is a sociological problem with diversity in institutions.

Lots of advertisements pride themselves on having a diverse group of people in the workplace, school, or in certain jobs. There was a presenter during one of the opening activities for first year orientation, and he talked about the common ad that shows at least one black, Asian, Hispanic, white, and guy in the wheelchair on a college website. We all laughed, but what is weird is that sadly that is the truth. The advertisement is completely different from the reality of what college often looks like. Here, Lewis and Clark do have great opportunities for diverse pupils on campus to be included with a diversity program. The program is called Inclusion and Multicultural engagement, IME for students that are part of a minority. I understand that the college wants to be diverse and it has symposiums, it has classes, and it even has an essay portion when you apply that asks about diversity. But, do I ever see someone not a part of a minority or the group come to any diversity meetings? No, I only see the people that identify as a minority, but that does not help the people that have no clue what diversity is/means. A school, work place, or ad can claim diversity all they want, but it does not count when not everyone is learning about the importance of the word. I know that if a school did not promote anything about diversity then it would automatically be cast out by students who are people of color or it would be called a racist institution.  

Lewis and Clark is a private liberal arts college, so of course there are not going to be as many people of color here. That is not me stereotyping, it is a fact in society that people of color tend to not continue on to higher education. Institutions have made the pathway to higher education continuously hard for minorities to succeed. A study by Young Invincibles posted their findings in USA college today that in “2015, 36.2% of white students, 22.5% of black students and 15.5% of Hispanic students had completed four years of college.” The finding is two years old but judging by the number of colored students I see around campus, I would agree with a statement that there is a limited amount of diversity on campus. Institutions, especially one like Lewis and Clark are pushing more for diversity because minority students like myself, who decide to go to a majority white school would feel ostracized. People have realized that diversity and inclusion are more important now because minorities are slowly rising up and wanting to be seen more as equal. Minorities want to see that educational gap get smaller and institutions are recognizing that so they push for diversity and advertise it to convince people they are.