Finding Jim Crow at Princeton

Let's talk about race.

Thanks to the persistence of Leslie-Bernard Joseph '06, President Tilghman and others, this suggestion is not as shocking as it might once have been. We are increasingly comfortable talking about — if not dealing with — issues of race on campus.

The pursuit of diversity in the faculty and student body always seems to top the agenda of the administration. And rightly so: As revealed in the recent Survey on Race and Campus Life, students of color still encounter implicit and explicit barriers in their social life and academic pursuits.

Our quest for diversity is well-intentioned but ultimately doomed to failure as long as we limit its scope in the way we do now. We talk about the need to provide more and less-exclusive social options, to improve the academic advising system and to break down social cliques based on racial affiliation, but we almost always leave something out: We fail to talk about the ways in which the University is complicit in keeping the two Americas, so visibly juxtaposed in Princeton and Trenton, separate.

When in the summer months we allow some of our service workers to go homeless, we rape their dignity and reinforce the notion among our students that opportunity and class are inextricably linked to racial background.

When we extend a housing benefit to our highest paid employees — faculty and administrators, most of whom are white — and deny it to low-paid service workers, most of whom are men and women of color, it tightens the grip of New Jersey's apartheid-like residential segregation.

Throughout our nation's history, America's racial divisions have been reliably reinforced by the University. In the 19th century wealthy Princeton students would bring their black servants with them to school, where they would attend to the needs of the student during the day and retire to the all-black John-Witherspoon neighborhood at night.

In the 21st century, wealthy Princeton students pay the University to hire mostly black service workers to attend to their needs during the day and then take the New Jersey Transit buses home to Trenton at night.

Jim Crow is back, and this time he's legal.

To be more precise, Jim Crow never really disappeared. De jure segregation — legally banned in 1954 after Brown v. Board of Education — was swiftly replaced by a de facto segregation, which trapped blacks in deteriorating cities and prevented them from joining the flight of the white middle class to the suburbs.

Only by changing the way we do business can we change things in New Jersey and America. For starters, though, let's take an honest look at what it takes to raise a family in Mercer County. What we pay our service workers now is almost never enough to buy a home and build equity — even in Trenton — and it's certainly not enough to move to opportunity in the wealthy suburbs surrounding the city.

Princeton's staff turnover rate — the rate at which workers leave their jobs and are replaced by new hires — is stable and low. But just because the wages and benefits offered by Princeton to service workers compare favorably with those offered by other regional employers does not mean that our current offerings are adequate. The wage rate set by the free market (Princeton pays slightly above this rate) is a pittance compared with the true living wage needed to raise a healthy family in central New Jersey.

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The formation of the Diversity Working Group — an initiative that will take a fresh look at diversity in nonacademic regions of the University — is a good sign that the administration is willing to assess the totality of diversity efforts on campus. Let's urge them to deal forthrightly with the issues of race on this campus that have for too long been swept under the carpet. Thomas Bohnett is a sophomore from Princeton Junction. He can be reached at tbohnett@princeton.edu.