In my last blog, I offered some prefatory remarks about the philosophy that underwrites the concept of "minority orientation." Today, I develop those remarks by spotlighting one of the oldest and best known minority orientation programs around: Brown University's Third World Transition Program, a four-day orientation for "students of African, Arab, Asian, Latina/o, Multiracial, and Native American descent on this campus." Founded in 1969 as the "Transitional Summer Program" for incoming black and Latino freshmen, the program was originally designed to help give students with weaker educational backgrounds a jump start on college. The program did not have an appreciable effect on academic performance, however, and as the years passed, it began to focus more on building community than on scholastic preparation.

That's very much what the focus is at TWTP today. This year, for example, TWTP held a range of workshops and discussions designed to help students explore their identities and to bond with one another. Devoting seaprate sessions to racism, sexism, classism, heterosexism, religion and spirituality (treated as a "lens" for understanding one's place in society), Third World history, and Third World identity and community, this year's TWTP sought, in the words of one student coordinator, to make students "feel comfortable talking about issues they might not have talked about before" and so to give them "a chance to find a voice and to speak out." According to Karen McLaurin-Chesson, associate dean of the College and director of the Third World Center, TWTP is b one of very few societal forums for students of color to build lines of communication between each other."

An example of how such lines of communication were forged: at the workshop on classism, "the facilitator read out statements meant to divide the group along socioeconomic lines, such as 'I consider my family to be wealthy' and 'I get my clothing second-hand.' Participants stepped in or out of a circle on the floor according to whether the statement was true for them."

When students were not bonding by baring their souls and bank statements, they did get some useful information. In between all the workshops on building self-esteem and berating social -isms, TWTP scheduled sessions on time management, study skills and communication, and campus safety. These took a back seat to the more important work of self-exposure and social critique, however. According to McLaurin-Chesson, exposing students to Brown's academic resources is a "secondary function" of TWTP.

190 students attended TWTP last week--about half of the minority students entering Brown this year. TWTP sessions were closed to "non-participants," meaning whites. As a student coordinator explained, while the sorts of discussions that take place during TWTP "definitely should happen across races .... I don't think TWTP is the space for that to happen."

Are you writhing yet? Though I have given in to snideness at a couple of points, I've held off commenting during this description of TWTP, which is culled largely from the article that appeared in the August 29th issue of the Brown Daily Herald. I figured readers deserved a factual account of what the program does before I launch into a critique of it. Even so, I feel as though the description I've put together here practically critiques itself. TWTP is so over the top that it looks more like a parody of minority orientation than an orientation per se.

First, there is the hysterical surfeit of -ism workshops, each designed to teach new students the One Right Way of looking at this prejudiced and morally reprehensible world. It's hard not to picture TWTP as a sort of PC game show-- "Name That -Ism," perhaps--in which the most successful participants are those who can identify insensitivity or intolerance faster and more adamantly than everyone else. It's also not hard to imagine that the central message of these sessions is that Brown is a hotbed of these -isms; that as a predominantly white, privileged institution, it cannot be otherwise; that one needs special tools--awareness, community--to make it through such an inherently hostile environment; that those tools are being supplied to otherwise helpless and hapless freshpersons of color by TWTP through its workshops; that these students would most likely be lost without TWTP and the support network it offers them. TWTP isn't preparing people to be succesful college students (that is after all only a "secondary" priority); it is, however, preparing them to be campus thought police. It's also using minority orientation to perpetuate minority orientation: TWTP is above all a rationale for having TWTP.

Second, there are the games played during these enlightening workshops--values clarification exercises that belong more to the therapeutic setting than the academic one, and that make revealing one's private feelings about such personal issues as one's economic or religious background the means of "build[ing] lines of communication." Such workshops make confession into the condition of community; they teach students that privacy is essentially anti-social and they suggest that telling strangers your secrets is the key to intimacy. Within the context of the values clarification exercise, collective self-exposure creates the effect of instant community. There is nothing like feeling vulnerable to make you want to trust (that no one will laugh at you, or talk about you behind your back); if everyone is feeling that way at once, the illusion of community can be created. Thus do brief orientations convince people who do not know one another that they have "bonded," and are thus a "community." Thus do such orientations stage their "success" and so rationalize their continuation in the future.

Third, there is the terminology of TWTP itself. Calling an Ivy League minority orientation a Third World Transition Program announces in no uncertain terms the counterhegemonic pomp that underlies the orientation, which cannot call itself an orientation, but must represent Brown students as oppressed, exotic Others and must represent itself as a type of indispensable missionary work. That pomp is also a politics: the TWTP web site offers a remarkable explanation for why well-heeled, privileged Brown students should choose to call themselves "third world" students. It's a remarkable explanation, which I quote here in full:

Students first began using the term "Third World" over "minority" because of the negative connotations of inferiority and powerlessness with which the word "minority" is often associated. Although the term "Third World" may have negative socioeconomic connotations outside of Brown, Third World students here continue to use the term in the context originating form the Civil Rights Movement.

Frantz Fanon, author of The Wretched of the Earth (1961), urged readers to band together against oppression and colonialism, by pioneering a "Third Way" meaning an alternative to the ways of the first world (U.S. & Europe) and also the second world (USSR & Eastern Europe). When students adopt the term "Third World", they use it in the sense of a cultural model of empowerment and liberation.

Brown students of color continue to use the term "Third World" in a similar fashion: to describe a consciousness which recognizes the commonalities and links shared by their diverse communities. This consciousness at Brown also reflects a right, a willingness, and a necessity for people of color to define themselves instead of being defined by others.

The concept of "Third World" has special meaning for minority students at Brown. It is not to be confused with the economic definition of the term used commonly in our society today, but understood as a term that celebrates the cultures of Arab, Asian, Black, Latino, Multiracial and Native Americans.

TWTP thus understands itself as a local materialization of Frantz Fanon's vision of resistance to oppression and colonialism--a vision that was explicitly violent in nature: "Violence," Fanon argued, "is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect." The TWTP website glosses over the fact that Fanon's "Third Way" was the way of revolution, that his notion of liberation involved completely destroying the present world order. But in affiliating itself with Fanon's vision and vocabulary, TWTP nonetheless expresses a distinctly militant perspective on what exactly constitutes racial empowerment. The Wretched of the Earth, hailed by TWTP as the origin of Brown's ideal "cultural model of empowerment and liberation," was hailed by its publisher as "the handbook for the black revolution." A Marxist account of Fanon's experiences in Algeria during its struggle for independence, the book outlines the role of class conflict in the creation of a new nation's national consciousness, arguing that postcolonial African nations will implode if they merely replace white leaders with black ones while conserving an essentially bourgeois capitalist social structure.

From the inside flap: "Fanon conducts, for perhaps the first time since Engels and Sorel, a brilliant examination of the role of violence as the most efficient midwife of historical change. He demonstrates how violence in the colonized countries of today's cold-war world reflects the violent relations that obtain between capitalism and socialism, and shows how violence affords a colonialized people its first sense of community. ... Writing in the name of an ideal Third World unity yet to be forged, Fanon has here provided for leaders in under-developed countries a veritable handbook of revolutionary practice and social reorganization. ... To read Fanon is to read the passionate revolutionary bible of a latter-day Machiavelli, urging us all to bring the colonial period of world history to an end by all possible means, including violence. As Jean-Paul Sartre points out in his now-famous preface to this book, we must have the courage to read this speaker for the Third World, for he will make us ashamed, and shame is itself a revolutionary sentiment."

This is heavy stuff to lay on freshmen. But it is the guiding spirit behind Brown's Third World Transition Program, which openly embraces Fanon's vision and which designs its itinerary in explicit sympathy with Fanon's project.

What connections are there to be made between TWTP's touchy-feely workshops on identity and its revolutionary outlook? How exactly are we to understand the connection between TWTP's emphasis on values clarification and community-building--the all-too familiar stuff of today's therapeutic academy--and its allegiance to a Fanonian concept of radical global revolt? Is there even a connection to be made?

Most definitely. More to come.