Immigrant groups took part in an African community engagement meeting at South Seattle Community College (SSCC) on December 7, 2011. Organized by the Office of Diversity and Retention (ODR) at SSCC with the aim of “sharing information, knowledge and resources,” various groups attended the meeting including Horn of Africa Services, One America, People of Color against AIDS and CAIR-WA, which was represented by Outreach Coordinator Bushra Rahim and Volunteer Coordinator Kelsey Caudebec. This is the third such community engagement meeting ODR has organized after an earlier one for the Chicano, Latino and Hispanic community and another for the Pacific-American community.
This focus on specific communities, according to Cessa Heard Johnson, Dean of Diversity, Retention & Student Life at SSCC, was the right way to go. “What we need to be doing when supporting individuals as they come on campus is to not be afraid of focusing on a specific community’s needs. People talk about needing a color-blind policy, but we didn’t think that (was right for our needs).”
According to census figures, the number of African-born people living in the US rose from 881,300 in 2000 to an estimated 1,492,785 in 2009, a growth of 69 per cent. 41,357 people were estimated to be living in the state of Washington in 2009, many of them Muslims with roots in Somalia and Ethiopia. “We have a large (African) community here,” said Cessa, “We’ve seen them struggle, and we want to know what we can do to help them achieve success in higher education.”
The campus is one of the most diverse in Seattle, and while that is something that deserves recognition, Ricardo Leyva Puebla, the ODR Director, doesn’t think it means the college couldn’t do more. “In fact, we are engaging the community because we want to know how to do it best. (We hope to learn from) your inputs and experience dealing with the African community outside campus and better serve our students.”
An incident that occurred a few years back serves to illustrate the kind of misunderstandings that could take arise on a campus as diverse as SSCC. Once a student wanted to take a test at a later time during Ramadan but wasn’t being accommodated by the faculty member responsible. While the student argued that she shouldn’t be made to take the test when her blood sugar was low, the teacher pointed out that the student’s condition arose out of her fast and since this was something the student was voluntarily doing to herself, an exception could not be made for her. The situation was resolved though after Cessa, who is also a student grievance officer, stepped in after receiving a complaint.
However, according to the staff, situations don’t always turn out this way. Many minority students are usually wary of coming forward and see making complaints as being disrespectful to faculty. Says Cessa, “They don’t have the maturity level to address these issues (through the system either). (Instead of making a complaint) they just get mad and say, ‘I’m dropping the class.’”
SSCC has been active in bringing the community together through awareness campaigns, workshops and multicultural competency training. Adds Cessa, “We also created an American ethnic studies and social justice course which teaches students about multiple forms of repression, how they intersect and how students can eradicate them.” A series called ‘From prejudice to genocide’ has also been started that looks at groups such as Native- and African-Americans and how they had persecuted throughout history.
Students themselves have been recruited in these integration efforts with the cultural center on campus appointing student commissioners to engage with specific communities. One-on-one peer mentoring has also been set up for students to check in on others and help them if they feel overwhelmed.
In response to a question on whether student organizations themselves could take on a more active role in addressing these larger issues, the staff expressed reservation as to whether that would be possible. Says Ricardo, “We do have a student union…various (minority) student clubs…and they can do whatever they want, but they have to do it within the guidelines of the college.” Besides that, there was also hesitation expressed over the extent students could be relied on to address such larger issues in addition to fulfilling the responsibilities they already have as student, the sentiment being that in the interests of practicality, these issues were best addressed through institutional means.
The participants then moved on to discussing the absence of data on African-born students at SSCC. The problem arises from the lack of options in the ethnicity category during the enrollment and registration process to correctly identify 1st or 2nd generation African students. The option for African-American is usually checked off which makes it difficult for the college to disaggregate the data and separate out the students whose families have been living in the US for generations and face different problems.
While there is a general feeling that there are a lot of recent immigrants dropping out, there is no way to substantiate or refute that impression. Says Ali Omar from TRIO –SSS, an office at SSCC which administers the federally-funded TRIO programs on campus, “This is problematic if we want to influence how many African–born students come to school and complete their studies,” adding that work was now going on to get the application forms changed. A process that would require legislation at both the state and federal level, Rahwa Habte of OneAmerica expressed support for the move by SSCC. “(It is difficult) to do anything without hard numbers…(In this matter) it would make sense for SSCC to partner with community organizations in changing these demographic options.”
Getting minority groups to partner with SSCC shouldn’t be a problem however, given their genuine desire that was evident at the meeting to help their students out. The willingness to deal with such delicate and seemingly uncomfortable issues, in particular, is something that will stand them in good stead as they negotiate the complexities of being a diverse and multicultural campus.
Bushra of CAIR-WA was pleased with the possibility of working with SSCC. “We had never done any work with South Seattle before this, but once we met them, we saw potential for a lot of work to be done which we hope in the end will further both our mission and theirs.”
