Studies show that alienation is why most students drop out of college, and why colleges across the country have such high freshman dropout rates (often reaching 20% or more of first-year students). Higher ed administrators have responded to these numbers by sponsoring a range of programs designed to create a sense of community on campus. Freshman orientation is one of the most important of these. For all its faults--there are many, some of which I have blogged, some of which I will be blogging soon--freshman orientation is an important, even defining moment in the college experience. In its activities, it choice of speakers, its pacing, and its carefully cultivated atmosphere, it sets the tone for that difficult first semester, easing students through the transition to college by introducing them to the campus culture and giving them opportunities to meet people and make friends.

So where do minority orientatations figure into this logic? As separate, separatist entities, they both do and don't create community. Welcoming and hostile at once, the race-based community built by minority orientation comes at the cost of connection with the wider campus community. Held before regular orientation, sometimes even as an alternative to it, minority orientation functions in large part to "hook up" students of color; it makes sure that the first contacts one has on campus are with other students of color, and in so doing they do what they can to make sure that the primary relationships formed by incoming students of color are with other students of color. By the time regular orientation rolls around, freshmen of color have already found friends and formed social groups. They may have even moved into racially-themed dormitories (many campuses have all black dorms, for example). There is no need to break out of those groups to meet the white kids who have just arrived; those kids tend to form their own groups as a consequence. That the content of the orientation almost always centers on "identity" helps enormously with this separatist project: cultivating "identity" at minority orientation is a code word for cultivating a sense of oneself as dispossessed, as the victim of racism, as one who is automatically marginalized by the "dominant" (white) culture. The result is a pattern of socialization that approximates racial segregation--one that, crucially, is initiated and encouraged by school diversity experts who then turn around and point to the racial division on campus as a rationale for expanding and extending their diversity programming.

One could argue that minority orientation is profoundly disempowering at precisely the point that it aims to empower. The message of minority orientation is the message of identity politics--that you are your race (and your gender), and that as an enlightened representative of your race (and your gender) you naturally hold certain beliefs about what your racial (or gendered) background means, about what oppression is, and about what a more perfect world would look like. This is supposed to create a feeling of personal power--through an act of self-definition that is always also an act of political affiliation. In theory, under identity politics you get a sense of self and a sense of group belonging all at once; the existence of minority orientations speaks powerfully to the strength of this fantasy on campus. In practice, though, identity politics is undercut by an ugly undercurrent of condescension, defeatism, and even despair.

To tell someone that he is his race--rather than a self-determining, independent agent--is to tell him that he is effectively helpless, that the most important thing about him is beyond his ken. Thus does the putatively empowering atmosphere of the minority orientation undercut itself. The entire enterprise is predicated on a profoundly disempowering concept of what makes you who you are, and of how much about your life you can shape, determine, and control. Your race is something you cannot change or alter (unless of course you are Michael Jackson). If you are defined by the color of your skin, or even by your ancestry, you are radically disempowered, a victim of forces beyond your comprehension and your control. No amount of hot air about racial empowerment can hide or obviate this simple, devastating fact.

There are intellectuals who will tell you otherwise, though, and it is to them that minority orientation owes its peculiar rationale and its special place as the scene of initiation into a voluntarily segregated campus culture. The rationale for minority orientations like Brown's comes from the rationale for Afrocentric education. Made famous by books such as Martin Bernal's Black Athena and championed by radical black academics such as CUNY's Leonard Jeffries and Temple's Molefi Kete Asante (do not miss this priceless website), who coined the term "Afrocentrism" and founded the first Ph.D. program in African American Studies, Afrocentrism seeks to raise self-esteem in black students by teaching them that they are the living heirs of Africans' noble past.

The idea is that the contemporary black experience is directly connected to African history and inherited African culture. The aim of the idea is to combat "Eurocentrism" (white man's history) by producing an "Afrocentric" account of history that celebrates black achievement and that responds to black ways of knowing (according to Afrocentrism, blacks do not think or feel the way whites do: as Asante puts it, "Africa is at the heart of all African American behavior"). Rewriting Western history as the history of how the West appropriated African achievements, Afrocentrism whitewashes that past (overlooking, for example, the fact that enslaving blacks is not a European invention, that Muslims have held black slaves, and that blacks have enslaved one another in the past and continue to do so today). At times, Afrocentrism even stoops to blatant misrepresentation, teaching such patent falsehoods as that Socrates and Cleopatra were black, that the ancient Egyptians were black, that Aristotle stole his ideas from black Egyptian intellectuals, and so on. Ancient Greece, according to Afrocentric thought, plagiarized Ancient Egypt. You can get a stiff dose of Afrocentric thought by reading Asante's The Afrocentric Idea. And you can get a stiffer antidote by reading the classic refutations of Afrocentrism, Mary Lefkowitz's Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History and her edited collection, Black Athena Revisited.

So the separatism we see espoused by minority orientations has a scholarly backing, as do the identity politics, the militant historical revisionism, the abiding hostility to Western history, Western culture, and white people that provides the frame for "orienting" minority freshmen. Indeed, Afrocentric scholars have been instrumental in institutionalizing the idea that expressing hate toward a putative "oppressor" (or member of an "oppressive" group) can be a legitimate, even central, component of campus culture. Hence the freedom with which Afrocentric scholars spout rabid anti-Semitic sentiments, both in and beyond the classroom.

Wellesley's Tony Martin, author of the telling Jewish Onslaught has become notorious for requiring students to read--as truth--the Nation of Islam's anti-Semitic screed, The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, which argues that Jews were the "key operatives" in the African slave trade and so bear "monumental culpability in ... the black holocaust" (Henry Louis Gates, Jr., chair of African American Studies at Harvard, called the book "one of the most sophisticated instances of hate literature yet compiled").

Likewise, CUNY's Leonard Jeffries (who teaches that blacks are "sun people"--warm, humane--while whites are "ice people"--cold, hard) was stripped of his position as chair of CUNY's Black Studies department for making anti-Semitic remarks and arguing that rich Jews ran the slave trade. He subsequently won a $400,000 civil suit against CUNY for violating his rights, and continues there to this day, inciting outrage with his racist remarks.

Not surprisingly, anti-Semitism is a disturbingly common feature of black student groups. And, not surprisingly, they--and other minority student groups--get away with it. It would not be going too far to say that minority orientations such as Brown's Third World Transition Program plant the seeds for such virulent campus strife. Certainly, they translate into practice the theoretical basis for racial separatism (and the rationale for rabid, unapologetic "reverse" racism), using the settling-in period to teach new minority students that people with non-white skin are always already horribly wronged, that they will continue to be wronged by their college and by society, and that because their lives are definitively shaped by the institutionalized racism of American life, they must band together in supportive, politically aware solidarity. Otherwise, they will fail to make it through college, or--even worse--will sell out to the dominant white culture by adopting its values wholesale while betraying their roots. To this way of thinking, Clarence Thomas is such a sellout, as are Condoleeza Rice, Thomas Sowell, and Shelby Steele.

It's angry, destructive stuff. It corrodes the mind and erodes the heart in the name of raising consciousness and increasing self-esteem. And yet it is presented--packaged, sold--to students as the truth that will set them free. It should seem strange to us that such a poisonous world view can be so easily passed off on students--and their parents--as a positive, hopeful thing. And yet, all too often, we don't see it that way. The reason why lies in the language of therapy, which marinates the divisive and frequently hateful logic of diversity in the warm and fuzzy rhetoric of self-actualization.

More soon.