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The following is an opinion contribution and reflects the author’s views alone.
Princeton’s First Year Orientation Experience (FYRE) this year was strikingly different from what I experienced my Freshman year. My orientation helped my fellow 2023s acclimate to campus by introducing new students to life, opportunities, expectations, and resources at Princeton. However, this year, FYRE pushed a specific political agenda by interpreting lived experience along racial lines and addressing perceived racial inequity as a value of utmost importance. This divisive ideology of race fixation is ultimately detrimental to the experience and welfare of the students.
This year’s orientation included a video by The Office of Diversity and Inclusion that addressed parts of Princeton’s legacy in systemic racism through a digital archive, including a question and answer session with several University professors. In response to a question from the audience asking how the panel hopes to “see the university address and use the findings of the gallery,” Associate Professor Beth Lew Williams of the History Department articulated her desire, long secretly espoused by the University, to put “in the core of our university values” a crusade against anti-racism and “past histories of discrimination.”
A focus on anti-racism fails to address other forms of discrimination on campus. Although Princeton emphasizes anti-black racism, there are many more legacies of discrimination that the University strategically ignores, such as against women, Jews, and Asians. Apparently, some injustices continue to be worth more than others.
The University’s focus on racial injustice in the context of orientation to the exclusion of others is unjustifiable. Focusing on injustice through almost exclusively a colored lens is to the converse of the University’s values to serve humanity. It demonstrates the University’s acquiescence to virtue signaling above change rooted in facts and material harm.
Racism should absolutely be addressed, but the issue of whether the University should proactively tell students that racism is an amorphous force waiting to be confronted primes the community to see racism where it actually doesn’t exist. Many instances of “microaggressions” and coincidences need not be singled out and attacked as elements of a racist superstructure if the community doesn’t tolerate and support such notions.
Supporting the idea of systemically entrenched racism may force students to question whether honest efforts to improve the University from past mistakes merely obscure racism elsewhere to more pernicious effects than having us able to defeat racism altogether.
First years may be more suspicious of each other, questioning their friends’ racial loyalties and complicity in racial hierarchies as opposed to seeing each other as individuals with unique interests and aspirations that they came to campus to explore and develop together.
Addressing racial discrimination is a very worthwhile endeavor. Tell me who disagrees, and we will convince them otherwise together.
However, as a community, we need to ask at what lengths we are willing to go to expose racism. What could the effects of this anti-racist crusade be on our campus culture that I see as vibrant, inclusive, and already extremely anti-racist today? Princeton students must ask if Princeton’s explicit espousal of the necessity of anti-racism as a value pushes us to a more inclusive future or pulls us back into our more racially divisive past.
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