Kenyon College ‘Whiteness Group’ discourages white students from asking minority students questions

At a Kenyon College club dedicated to dissecting white privilege, white students are advised not to ask students of color questions.

That’s just one of the ground rules at the Snowden Multicultural Center’s Whiteness Group. A group of about 50 students, most of whom are white, have been attending the weekly meetings to discuss the privilege and power that come with their whiteness.

Juniper Cruz, a junior at the Gambier, Ohio, liberal arts college, said she’s been “pleasantly surprised” by the turnout.

“White allies have a reputation of talking a lot, putting a lot on social media, but not really doing anything about it,” Ms. Cruz told the Kenyon Collegian. “Not doing much besides default sharing. I’m really pleasantly surprised so many came to take a good hour out of their day to come here.”

The Whiteness Group presents itself as a place where white people can go to talk about their whiteness in a comfortable, judgement-free space.

Attendees are encouraged to speak up if they have unpopular opinions, and what happens in the Whiteness Group stays in the Whiteness Group.

But white students are cautioned not to ask minority students questions; they’re encouraged to “try to answer their questions for themselves.”

Rachel Kessler, chaplain of the Harcourt Parish on the campus of Kenyon College, said in an email to the Collegian that white people “can become paralyzed by our sense of shame for our racial privilege or by our fear of accidentally saying something problematic.”

“Neither of those impulses are actually productive for combating racism and white supremacy,” Ms. Kessler said.

The Whiteness Group hasn’t lacked racially charged material for discussion this semester at Kenyon College.

Wendy MacLeod, the James Michael Playwright-in-Residence at Kenyon, recently penned a new play that students, faculty and administrators have denounced as racist.

One student described the “The Good Samaritan,” a comedy about an illegal immigrant who works on an egg farm just a few miles away from Kenyon College and somehow finds his way to the school, as “harmful on many levels.”

“I personally take issue with The Good Samaritan because it’s yet another narrative written about a person of color from the uninformed perspective of a white academic,” the student wrote in an email to the Kenyon administration and faculty, reported the Kenyon Thrill. “Because of this, the representation of the Guatemalan boy Hector is careless at best and harmful on many levels.”

One professor said she identified 40 “instances of ethnic insensitivity in the play.”

“For example, the characters continually claim Hector is from Argentina though he says he is from Guatemala,” the Collegian reported. “They also repeatedly refer to him as ’illegal.’”

A Kenyon College teaching associate called the play an “act of violence” that makes light of the “many acts of racism and violence that members of the Latinx community endure every day, including on this campus.”

In response to the backlash, Ms. MacLeod canceled the play “out of respect for the concerns of students and members of the faculty.”