An hour after moving onto campus this August, I attended a brunch for incoming Jewish first-year students. As I ate, I met like-minded and equally nervous peers while simultaneously being sold on the copious programming taking place over the rest of orientation. This in-group feeling was wildly comfortable — and not at all novel.
For elementary and middle school, I attended a nondenominational Jewish school, at which all of my peers shared that one overarching religious identity. The more I built affinity with those around me, the more sacred the collective sentiment felt, and the less I was able to connect with those who did not share that common thread. This phenomenon has continued to follow me onto Brown’s campus. Now that a month has passed since the aforementioned brunch, I have realized that along with the comfort and belonging that affinity groups provide comes intrinsic insularity.
Whether it be one of the 10 residential program houses, six student identity centers, 10 religious and spiritual communities or over 100 identity-based registered student organizations, Brown is brimming with affinity groups. With such an abundance of opportunity, anyone at Brown can belong. And this sorting starts before students even get on campus. Brown has four in-person pre-orientation programs, two of which are centered around a shared academic interest and two of which are identity centered. Before a student even has to search for their community, it is spoon-fed to them.
These affinity groups are critical for a student body to feel included and safe, especially for underrepresented students, providing relevant resources, interpersonal connections and organized advocacy. They are communities that students are emotionally invested in, providing an entry point into the advancement of the larger university. These groups significantly benefit students’ wellbeing and the ways in which they can interact with the larger world after graduation. Their advantages should not, and cannot, go unnoticed nor overlooked.
However, at Brown, true diversity of ideas and people is incredibly difficult to obtain, because the very environment surrounding us has been so carefully curated. Not only are organized affinity groups rampant, but subconscious, self-made categorization is constant. Self-segregation, whether based on gender, socioeconomic status, race or religion, is immensely present, and social circles become stagnant with similarity.
When one joins such an organized social group there is a definitive act of identification. The identity of the group becomes one’s self-identity, whether they fully align with it or not. With minimal flow between groups, those who are unwilling or unable to align with the group’s consensus are distinctly divided. The barriers of affinity groups rise and in the attempt for inclusivity, we exclude. In other words, when we seek organized pluralism, it becomes inherently insular.
After eight years of Jewish day school, I decided to switch to a secular public high school that pulled students from all across Chicago. Despite it being harder to find community at first, my high school experience gave me the opportunity to exist without the crutch of commonality, nor a curated experience of comfort. Without the common denominator of shared affinity, I was given the opportunity to both exist with those who were significantly different from me and search for similarity without it being automatically provided. And even when religious identity, or any widespread collective belief for that matter, was not the central unifier, similarity could be found, and I could interact with those around me outside of the confines of my affinity.
As students, we must balance these spaces of sacred similarity with spaces that are centered around, simply, nothing. There is significant value that comes from being around people with whom there is no distinct common thread. When no religion, interest, ethnicity or ideology holds the group together, the barriers of entry begin to crumble, opening the door to those who would otherwise be excluded. There is value in having spaces of similarity, but it cannot constitute the entirety of our social engagement. When we venture beyond what we know, we can exist in the diversity that affinity groups strive to foster.
Talia Berkwits ’29 can be reached at talia_berkwits@brown.edu. Please send responses to this column to letters@browndailyherald.com and other opinions to opinions@browndailyherald.com.
