"don't do stupid shit like this" 101

• Do not single out the only person of color (domestic or international) in the room and use her as a "representative" of a culture, race or country. This is racist.
• Just because we have an enormous international population on campus, do not conflate this with racial, or socio-economic “diversity.”
  
• Don't "pull a JoJo" (I saw this with my own eyes) in which you respond to a student's mentioning of her background with, "Oh, wow! How EXOTIC!" Bad word.
  
• Don't treat non-European people and societies as homogeneous monoliths
  
• Don't exoticize different countries, cultures and races (like the Hampshire hippie Indo-phile in my South Asian Studies class did). I'm not even comfortable repeating the spectacularly “Orientalist” and racist comment she made.
• Don't ask someone where someone is from in order to essentially find out why they're not white, or why they have a name that is "unpronounceable" to you.
• One girl complained in a seminar that the film we watched should have had subtitles, basically arguing that it would have been more "effective" if it catered to people who speak English with the mainstream US accent and outlook that she has. The film was about the Jamaican national debt.
• Faculty don't give a white person kudos for repeating a point a student of color just made.
• White students, don't conclude that race doesn't matter, just because it doesn't matter to you.
• During class discussion, pay attention to whose ideas you respond to with follow up questions/comments/reflection and whose you leave alone and move on from (i.e. I've seen in my classes in the past that white students will engage with each other's comments but just sort of ignore the comments made by students of color).
• During class discussion, do not dismiss students' discussions of lived experience as somehow less authoritative or real than the sanctioned theories or dominant views you are teaching (i.e. don't tell a student of color that her story is "an interesting personal experience, but...")
• Faculty be open to students interpreting a paper assignment on their own terms in order to revise any racially-biased criteria you may not have been aware of--don't hold fast to it for the sake of being "right."

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Sulekha '09, Shannon '09, Julia '08, Laura