Hampshire College is a private liberal arts college located in Amherst, Massachusetts. It was founded in 1965 as an experiment in alternative education, to be in association with four other colleges in the Pioneer Valley: We know then to be Amherst College, Smith College, Mount Holyoke College, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

The College is widely known for its alternative curriculum, (this is a key part) its focus on portfolios rather than distribution requirements, and its reliance on narrative evaluations instead of grades and GPAs. It is known particularly for facilitating the study of film, theater, and the visual arts.
Now i don’t know much about this area since this is just my second semester here but form what information i did find is that Hampshire College had a small undergrad thats close to 1500 students. Majority of these students derive from again large white communities found in Massachusetts. From the school web site about 75% all the way to 85% of the students are in state. So here is a problem. In the State of Massachusetts the black population only accounts for 5.4% as of 2004. With all other ethnic groups falling around the same line.

Is it just me or is it hard to hold Hampshire College to being a state where
“the campus is built so that it is truly racially just”. The majority of the students applying for this college specializing in film, theater, and the visual arts. Furthermore the fees are $36,545. That’s in state (http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/usnews/edu/college/directory/brief/drglance_4661_brief.php)

Hey i’m all for making a campus filled with a wide range of cultural differences. However if any school wants to do that don’t they need to attract different ethnic groups.
Look at the Alumni… nothing but a bunch of white dudes.

Perfect example was when New Orleans was hit hard there was a picture of white’s and black’s pushing there way throught waist deep water. The whites where said to be “taking what valuables with them they could”… while on the other hand the black were “looting and stealing” Now clearly that was not the case but it is important to ask what made that person believe that? The article raises a really good point

“the racism they experience may or may not be manifested through particular White individuals but are almost always reinforced and perpetuated by institutional and organizational forces that frame that particular situation in favor of Whites and at the expense of Blacks”.

Lets face it, nothing changed for anybody. Over the years racial discrimination has evolved and changed into new ways. But is still alive and living today

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/26/nyregion/26bell.html?ref=nyregion

Has anyone heard about this crazy incident that happened a while ago:

The Sean Bell shooting incident was a shooting incident that took place in the New York City borough of Queens on November 25, 2006 in which an unarmed African-American man was shot and killed and two others wounded by plainclothes New York Police Department detectives (two of whom were themselves African-American) in a hail of 50 bullets. The incident sparked fierce criticism of the police from the public and drew comparisons to the 1999 killing of Amadou Diallo. Three of the five detectives involved in the shooting went to trial on charges ranging from manslaughter to reckless endangerment, but were found not guilty.

April 6, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
Our Racist, Sexist Selves
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
To my horror, I turn out to be a racist.

The University of Chicago offers an on-line psychological test in which you encounter a series of 100 black or white men, holding either guns or cellphones. You’re supposed to shoot the gunmen and holster your gun for the others.

I shot armed blacks in an average of 0.679 seconds, while I waited slightly longer — .694 seconds — to shoot armed whites. Conversely, I holstered my gun more quickly when encountering unarmed whites than unarmed blacks.

Take the test yourself and you’ll probably find that you show bias as well. Most whites and many blacks are more quick to shoot blacks, no matter how egalitarian they profess to be.

Harvard has a similar battery of psychological tests online (I have links to all of these from my blog, nytimes.com/ontheground, and my Facebook page, facebook.com/kristof). These “implicit attitude tests” very cleverly show that a stunningly large proportion of people who honestly believe themselves to be egalitarian unconsciously associate good with white and bad with black.

The unconscious is playing a political role this year, for the evidence is overwhelming that most Americans have unconscious biases both against blacks and against women in executive roles.

At first glance, it may seem that Barack Obama would face a stronger impediment than Hillary Clinton. Experiments have shown that the brain categorizes people by race in less than 100 milliseconds (one-tenth of a second), about 50 milliseconds before determining sex. And evolutionary psychologists believe we’re hard-wired to be suspicious of people outside our own group, to save our ancestors from blithely greeting enemy tribes of cave men. In contrast, there’s no hard-wired hostility toward women, though men may have a hard-wired desire to control and impregnate them.

Yet racism may also be easier to override than sexism. For example, one experiment found it easy for whites to admire African-American doctors; they just mentally categorized them as “doctors” rather than as “blacks.” Meanwhile, whites categorize black doctors whom they dislike as “blacks.”

In another experiment, researchers put blacks and whites in sports jerseys as if they belonged to two basketball teams. People looking at the photos logged the players in their memories more by team than by race, recalling a player’s jersey color but not necessarily his or her race. But only very rarely did people forget whether a player was male or female.

“We can make categorization by race go away, but we could never make gender categorization go away,” said John Tooby, a scholar at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who ran the experiment. Looking at the challenges that black and female candidates face in overcoming unconscious bias, he added, “Based on the underlying psychology and anthropology, I think it’s more difficult for a woman, though not impossible.”

Alice Eagly, a professor of psychology at Northwestern University, agrees: “In general, gender trumps race. … Race may be easier to overcome.”

The challenge for women competing in politics or business is less misogyny than unconscious sexism: Americans don’t hate women, but they do frequently stereotype them as warm and friendly, creating a mismatch with the stereotype we hold of leaders as tough and strong. So voters (women as well as men, though a bit less so) may feel that a female candidate is not the right person for the job because of biases they’re not even aware of.

“I don’t have to be conscious of this,” said Nilanjana Dasgupta, a psychology professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. “All I think is that this person isn’t a good fit for a tough leadership job.”

Women now hold 55 percent of top jobs at American foundations but are still vastly underrepresented among political and corporate leaders — and one factor may be that those are seen as jobs requiring particular toughness. Our unconscious may feel more of a mismatch when a woman competes to be president or a C.E.O. than when she aims to lead a foundation or a university.

Women face a related challenge: Those viewed as tough and strong are also typically perceived as cold and unfeminine. Many experiments have found that women have trouble being perceived as both nice and competent.

“Clinton runs the risk of being seen as particularly cold, particularly uncaring, because she doesn’t fit the mold,” said Joshua Correll, a psychologist at the University of Chicago. “It probably is something a man doesn’t deal with.”

But biases are not immutable. Research subjects who were asked to think of a strong woman then showed less implicit bias about men and women. And students exposed to a large number of female professors also experienced a reduction in gender stereotypes.

So maybe the impact of this presidential contest won’t be measured just in national policies, but also in progress in the deepest recesses of our own minds.