Returning to regularly scheduled blogging today, I offer the latest installment in my series on freshman orientations. Today, I focus on the concept of "minority orientation."

So great is the desire to "orient" all students that schools are increasingly offering special, custom orientations to special kinds of students. In addition to the standard freshman orientation, there are orientations for transfer students, international students, graduate students, law students, medical students, nursing students, parents, and, most importantly, minority students. Minority entering students are often encouraged to attend a separate "pre-orientation" in addition to the standard freshman orientation. Typically, students attending minority orientation arrive on campus before other students do, and they spend the intervening days attending talks, workshops, socials, and informational sessions designed to address their presumably special needs.

Judging by the itineraries of these orientations, minority students' special needs center as much on developing a politicized consciousness as on acquiring practical skills. There are as many sessions on "identity" as there on on networking and choosing classes; cultivating a sense of oneself as a minority appears to be at least as important, in these orientations, as touring the library or meeting faculty. Indeed, many orientations make ideological participation the price of gaining access to practical information: in order to profit from the orientation experience, you have to buy into a certain set of views about what it means to be a member of an ethnic group, about what the relationship between ethnicity and identity is, about how oppression works, about what racism is and where it comes from.

It makes sense if you think about it: the whole concept of minority orientation derives from the notion that one's ethnic or racial background is itself a form of orientation; indeed, the idea behind minority orientation is that one's ethnic or racial background is the determining orientation in one's life. Minority orientation is thus a form of racialized handholding that has as its central ambition the induction of incoming freshman into a campus community based not on common interests, beliefs, or even heritage, but on physical traits such as skin color and the shape of one's eyes. By definition, minority orientation presumes that phenotype is the basis for cultural continuity. That's how such programs justify themselves, and that's how they can speak of such broad and imprecise categories as "African-Americans," "Asians," and, of course, "whites" as if they were coherent, distinct, unified entities. When you think about it, it makes no sense to speak of "white culture," or even "the black community." But such peculiarly eugenic fantasies about how one's external traits must determine one's experience lie at the core of the entire minority orientation endeavor.

The two-pronged thesis of minority orientation is 1) that you are your race; and 2) that the amount of power you have, and the amount of hardship you suffer, has just about everything to do with what side of the color line you were born on. A common message in such orientations--and at the diversity workshops held at regular orientations--is that all whites are racist (they can't not be, having been born into the privilege of whiteness, of not having to be aware of themselves as belonging to a race) and that those who are not white cannot be racist (because they do not possess the social power to institutionalize, via discrimination or organized persecution, negative feelings about whites, or indeed, about other ethnic groups). This is, for example, the point of celebrated diversity trainer Jane Elliott, whose workshops, lectures, and film "Blue-Eyed" are enormously popular with college diversity programmers across the country.

Too often, minority orientation ties the genuine support it offers to disingenuous manipulation; for too many freshmen anxious to get settled into college, help goes hand in hand with pressure to identify with a set of controversial, deeply political, and sometimes extreme views about who they are (or ought to be), how they feel (or ought to feel), what their experience is (or what they should understand their experience to be).

In my next installment, I'll develop this claim by focussing on specific orientation programs at specific colleges and universities. More soon.