The Myth of Integration: Social Divides at Amherst College

When I entered Amherst, I, like countless others, had the general hope that the optimistic diversity percentages laid out by the college — particularly for me, the percentage of Black students — would create the sort of cross-race, cross-class meshing that would provide some internal insulation against the brutal external divides that mar our country. It has always felt like Amherst College is a sort of bulwark against the troubled outside world of the United States. Particularly since the political ascension of President Donald Trump, Amherst has appeared to be — and sometimes presented itself as — an egalitarian utopia amidst bigotry and chaos.

It did not take long for me to realize that this was not a reality. While I have been extraordinarily fortunate to make friends I deeply respect and admire from a variety of backgrounds, Amherst’s structure is not oriented in a way that promotes this engagement. The divides in our campus run deep — not created by Amherst, but often left largely undisturbed by college policy. 

This is not a new criticism. In 2018, Jae Yun Ham ’22 wrote an article titled “Grappling with Self-Segregation on Campus,” where he rhetorically asks, “How can a diverse student body be of any use in the context of self-segregation?” Ham recounted personal experiences of forming friendships with students primarily from the same racial background, and persuasively argued that “both Amherst’s administration and its diverse student body should make a more concerted effort to promote student interaction between students of different cultural identities.” The pervasive trend for individuals to make friends of their own racial groups is called “racial homophily,” and has been well-studied in social science literature. Americans adhere to racial homophily above all other kinds of demographic divisions, and young people are no exception. As Elizabeth Stearns, Claudia Buchmann, and Kara Bonneau write, “the most salient characteristic of college students’ friendships is that they are homophilous with respect to race.”

Ham understandably mentioned affinity groups as a possible point of concern. Counterintuitively, however, studies on affinity groups at other colleges have proven that these groups do not decrease interracial contact. Scholars Nicholas A. Bowman and Julie Park write that, “perhaps by serving as a ‘home base’ for students, students of color feel more comfortable on campus, enabling them to have higher rates of [cross-racial interaction]. As a result, ethnic student organizations may actually constitute an effective means for promoting meaningful interaction both within and across racial groups, which suggests that institutions should support these organizations in a variety of ways.” In fact, while affinity groups composed of racialized students are a frequent target in critiques of self-segregation, it is white students who self-segregate more — and yet, escape criticism.

While Ham discussed affinity groups, suggesting how they can offer comfort and familiarity at the expense of cross-cultural interaction, one aspect of Amherst that Ham did not critique in the article is athletics — which arguably promotes the same for white students. 

Athletics, historically, have proved oppositional against strides for diverse exchange at the college. They have cultivated and bolstered the familiar ‘student-athlete divide’ via training, events and traditions that isolate athletes — the largest extracurricular group, constituting about a third of the student body — from the larger campus community. The 2016 report proved especially damning regarding the student-athlete divide (which, it notes, has a long history, dating back to an earlier 2001 report), linking it to the prevalence of wealthy white students across both women’s and men’s teams, whose choices of pathways through and beyond Amherst are similarly lopsided (with student-athletes more likely to major in economics and pursue careers in business, and less likely to choose the arts or write a thesis).

The student-athlete divide is doubtlessly alive and well, stubbornly persistent despite the earnest attempts to mediate this cultural clash. The issues in Amherst’s athletic culture have been so visible as to have been analyzed beyond The Amherst Student. In 2017, after the leaking of horrifically racist and misogynistic emails from the cross-country team, The Chronicle of Higher Education published a precise critique of the Amherst campus culture: “Many professors on campus hypothesize that the cross-country team’s bad behavior could have manifested in any group. But the specter of an unchecked cultural problem within athletics has serious implications at Amherst, where athletes exert an unusual degree of dominance over the social life of the campus. They set the tone, in part because their numbers are so great.” A few years later, another Amherst team’s racism again bled into the public consciousness: Members of the lacrosse team chanted a racial slur outside of a Black player’s room. Apologies have been offered, punishments have been meted out, but how do we make preventative and lasting change?

The student-athlete divide cannot be uncoupled from the serious mistakes made by athletes and the tendency for Amherst to privilege predominantly wealthy, white athletes in its competitive admission cycle, heightened even more by the overruling of affirmative action. When we talk about racial division and the student-athlete divide, we are talking about two issues braided together as one — one that limits our opportunities to learn from our peers and gain the benefits of other perspectives, glowingly advertised yet not always genuinely enjoyed at our small liberal arts college.

The movement to #IntegrateAmherst in 2020 was a powerful cry to challenge the unexamined racism that had shaped the college for decades. Still, the student-athlete divide creates fault lines amongst the campus community, which efforts at diversification and unity fail to address.  The work remains still, as ever, unfinished.