There’s no conversation on race on this campus. Not really. Not about any hard questions, anyways.
For a time, that worked for me. I have been privileged enough to have never had any major issues, anyways. So why would I care?
All of that changed. It took one shitty encounter for me to realize that we DO have a racism problem, one that nearly everyone knows about, but no one talks about.
It was a regular afternoon. I went up to speak with a staff member. Immediately, I noticed something off about them, in tone and behavior. The staffer in question was outrageously rude, throwing back my words and questions in a way that borderline mocking. I’d never experienced such horrible treatment here before. I was flabbergasted — what on earth could have triggered their behavior? I couldn’t understand why someone could be so mean to a stranger.
And then, they asked me a question that gave it all away. After being ridiculously combative and evasive, they then proceeded to ask if I even had the identification required to work here.
In that moment, it hit me — to them, I looked like an International student. Oh. Suddenly, all the rudeness made sense.
Here’s the thing: I’m a US citizen. But even if I weren’t, nothing I had done warranted the abysmal treatment I received. Period.
Nor am I the only one who this has happened to. Two other friends of mine recount similar experiences with other people. For one, a staffer asked similarly accusatory questions, asking if they even knew what a certain portion of a tax form meant, and whether or not they were even authorized to work in the US. The assumption, again, was made based on the student’s race and despite the fact that all the forms had been submitted correctly. Once the staffer realized their mistake, and realized that the student in question was indeed an undergrad US citizen and not an international grad student, however, their tone COMPLETELY shifted. Suddenly the staffer was very nice and respectful, and the change, my friend said, was downright horrifying. How must they be treating actual grad students, my friend said, if they treat people who they think are grad students like this. For my other friend, the undergrad versus grad status didn’t come into play as much, but they recounted that once again, the staffer in question treated them incredibly rudely for seemingly no reason other than because they thought, once again, that they were simply not from this country.
Stevens’ staff thinks it’s OK to treat international graduate students like crap, often because they don’t know better, don’t understand that they’re being treated like crap, or are literally under financial hostage. None of that makes what’s happening OK.
Now, to be clear: I make the difference between the experience of international grad students versus international undergrads separate because the higher % of students who fit that profile at the grad level has also opened them to the kind of subtle racism I’m talking about.
And I say this is an open secret because it is. You see it, in the way students trying to work for the school get treated. Again, when professors or TAs are visibly short on patience when answering the question of students who literally speak a different language.
Stevens’ admin needs to step up. Period. The fact that this sort of behavior has been normalized and accepted as ‘the way things are’ is ridiculous. International students are students who are overcoming significant financial, cultural, and language barriers to be here. They make up a substantial portion of the dues Stevens’ makes on the graduate level. So the fact that they are arguably the worst-treated customers in the Stevens’ machine is all types of not OK.
Being mistaken for an international student — God, what a radical shift in perspective that was. I’m embarrassed, really. But it opened my eyes to their experience — and I hope this letter opens the administration’s eyes, too.
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