Students from the open but fiercely inward-focused Wesleyan University would benefit from talking to people in the local Middletown community.
Wesleyan is where woke kids go to get points for their hot takes. When the afro-indigenous girl in your indigenous literature class makes a succinct, venerable comment, now you can raise your hand and respond rephrasing the exact sentiment diluted and expounded upon with superfluous detail to a room full of applause and white gazes. You can write a whole opinion piece from the point of any number of diverse groups you’re not actually a part of. You can echo all those hashtags you learned on twitter, or better yet, plaster your laptop with them! You’ll be getting high-fives in no time.
You can become the image your sardonic uncle has in mind when he says these liberal nannies need to learn about the real world. What happens when your cultured knowledge is fully contained within the walls of a private, competitive, 50k a year tuition? Or worse yet, when you’re rewarded handsomely merely for performing social awareness and activism? Like the Stanford student who wrote only #blacklivesmatter 100 times in an admissions essay only to be accepted…
It is not my intention to minimize the actually impactful organizing efforts of people on campus or to dissuade people from flexing their social understanding and imagination muscles. But just as anthropology should be informed by actual field work, and academics and students theorizing on social issues should be testing thoughts and ideas on people, especially outside of their peer group.
A boy at a party, an event that is all too common place for some folks, once cornered my nonbinary friend and I only to belligerently, loudly apologize for misgendering them ages prior, for an incident their mind had completely and pleasantly strayed from, as we were then grossly engaged in a conversation about shrimp.
Wesleyan students also tend to undulate on a spectrum of comportment between calculated, hyper-concern and cynical, dark humor- both M.O.s that feed an uncle’s kind of polarized detachment from mindful empathy and taking things as they are.
However, the one honest fix I swear by is getting out of that shell which confines your mind, outside of your routine, and outside of those cushy insulated internet niches or comfortable social circles you patronize, and talking to real people you wouldn’t normally. Accept the attempt at conversation from that old man at the bus stop! So long as it’s not leery… But seriously, when was the last time you asked a service worker how they were doing, and meant it?
The only way to know the world is to seek to understand that which is outside yourself. This is how we come to know what we know, in conversation and in practice. I am advocating for earnestly getting at the structures and systems, ideologies and faiths, experiences and revelations which guide daily lives of others completely different than you, who have seen and know something that you do not at all. Better if you don’t agree- you’ll come away more tried and certain about your feelings on a matter. But everyone is a product of their experiences, experiences worth knowing if we’re to truly grow and understand the people who cohabitate this town and this country and this world with us.
A community that does not feature people from many walks of life, circumstances, experiences, and ages is not a true community, it is a scene. Wesleyan needs less lofty armchair philosophizing on how to save the world. Less posturing as if enlightened only for social points. Less corpus entangled only within scholarly throws. Wesleyan needs more ways of being, together, connecting under shared inhabitance of this Earth.
