ALES 50 Years: Alumni Recall Experiences as ALES Members
Current students in Exeter’s Afro-Latinx Exonian Society (ALES) met and reunited with alumni involved in the club throughout its historic 50 years of existence. The May 4 and 5 reunion presented Exonians with the opportunity to reflect on the impact of ALES and its work. ALES alumni, spanning from the Class of 1968 to the Class of 2017, returned to campus and shared stories from their Exeter experiences.
Mike O’Neal ’74 reflected positively on his time at Exeter. Coming from the Mississippi Delta, where racial tensions were at an all-time high, O’Neal described Exeter as an “oasis.” “They have tried to live up to the Deed of Gift, which says they want to get students from every quarter,” O’Neal said. “It might not have been perfect, but it was a heck of a lot better in terms of being in an environment where you can have conversations and relationships with white people that were not based on animosity or any notions of superiority.”
Thee Smith ’69, a co-founder of ALES, recognized the greater sense of community that accompanies an increasing number of Afro-Latinx students. “For my first academic year, there were eight black students out of roughly 800. Then the following year, it jumped to about 30,” Smith said. “By the fact that we had such a large increase in black students shows a greater solidarity and greater ability to identify as a black student community. Even though there were no black faculty or staff, we had each other.”
Despite the increasing number of African American and Latinx Exonians, “I realized when I was here that white people had advantages that black people didn’t have, and if there was a difference in their ability to score higher on the test or do well academically, part of the reason was because all of this stuff is culturally bound,” O’Neal said. “If you are part of the dominant culture, you are going to be more familiar with the cultural ins and outs than someone like me who, within this culture, is perceived as other.”
“[Exeter] is not perfect but it is better than other educational institutions in this country. It’s an institution America should be proud of, and people should continue to strive to make it an even better institution.”
He realized during his time here that wealth and money were additional factors in differences between how people of varying socioeconomic classes performed at Exeter. “I was not too waylaid by it,” O’Neal said.
Several alumni struggled with ignorance from their peers and adult members of the community. “I had this teacher who kept cracking ethnic jokes,” Roberto Garcia ’71 said. “He didn’t say anything about me, he didn’t say anything about people of color, but he kept cracking ethnic jokes, and I was just waiting for him to crack the wrong joke.”
Claudia Cruz ’96 experienced feelings of alienation during her time at Exeter. “Race and ethnicity is something that is jarring for a lot of people. You always have to explain to people where the Dominican Republic is, why you have an accent, how do you do hair, why is your hair so different from my hair. I think the part that was most striking was the class difference. A lot of us do come from disadvantaged backgrounds,” Cruz reflected. “Class coupled with race and ethnicity could aggravate the situation and [make one] feel a bit more isolated.”
In fact, students even questioned the strong bond between ALES members. “We had an all black table [at the dining hall] and the question would always come up: why do all the black students sit together? And we would respond, why do all the white students sit next to each other? I think it bothered some people,” Garcia said.
Bob Gerrard ’70 recognized further discrimination in housing. “I didn’t know until recently that they were not pairing us with white roommates,” Gerrard said. “They would claim that that was because of a level of comfortability for us, when in reality, it was much more the fact that they would be making a white student uncomfortable!”
For Smith, it was most challenging to be in an inherently elite place like Exeter yet be treated as a minority. “Part of what it means to be an Exeter student of any color or gender or background or identity group is that you are acknowledged to have lots of potential and lots of promise,” Smith said. “By contrast, the microaggressions that made me feel so belittled, that was what was so intolerable for us on campus. It’s intolerable on one hand to be told that you’re a special Exeter student, and then by contrast, have all these insults. A kind of torment.”
Smith attributed this in part to a lack of cultural competency from adults. “There was no sensibility in terms of student counselors who were paying attention to cultural differences between black and white students. Boys were essentially left on their own to deal with what might be called culture shock or the problematic effects of implicit bias, the textbook term used nowadays to describe stereotypes and prejudices,” Smith said.
Positions such as the Dean of Multicultural Affairs or the Associate Dean of Multicultural Affairs did not exist for a long time; however, the position was preceded by an Advisor for Minority Students, which was created in 1986. “It was literally one person who they stuck in a little office in the mezzanine in the library back by the elevator. Not even in J. Smith,” Russell Washington ’89 said.
In fact, Garcia noted that when he attended Exeter from 1968 through 1971, students called Jeremiah Smith Hall “the Kremlin.” Garcia explained the reasoning behind the name as, “[the] Dean’s office was there — not a place to visit.”
Washington emphasized the importance of integrating such a position into the Academy’s leadership. “The presence of that position and everything that it does is hugely important, and simultaneously not enough. Because what happened with the first position and what happens with the current stuff is that all of the of color stuff gets dumped there. When you have a designated space and a designated administrator ‘of color,’ there is this effect where the rest of the institution thinks ‘well, we don’t have to be thinking about [students of color]’, when the obligation of the institution is to all [students] in an even way,” Washington said.
Today, the Dean of Multicultural Affairs has not been part of the Principal’s Leadership Team for a decade.
Despite a 50-year gap, alumni sympathized with what today’s current African American and Latinx students experience. “The ALES video last year, that stuff was happening to us too, the issues with getting support, some of the empathy and indifference issues, that was happening to us,” Washington said. “All of this is very, very familiar. I will say that the ability to have an open discussion has improved, but the nature of the discussion is still very fraught and remains very fraught.”
Alumni, additionally, recognized the progress that Exeter had made over the past years. “The difference now would be that there are school counselors and black faculty who are aware that this is what students of color are going through. There were faculty like that in my day, but I’d say that they weren’t as proactive. They weren’t trained, they weren’t coached. They weren’t coaching us,” Smith said, acknowledging the presence of more culturally trained adults.
Gerrard was surprised at the diversity of the student body. “I’m always a little surprised at just how international the school has become. I went to a math class yesterday and the teacher had everyone introduce themselves. Among the 12 or 13 students in the room, there [were students from] London, Beijing, Jordan, Thailand and more. Now that’s virtually half the class,” Gerrard said.
Moving forward, Washington sought a more productive discussion of race and a seamlessly added requirement of diversity into the values of the Academy. “Part of the way we talk about race is we get into [the thought of] ‘are we moving forward, are we better than before?’ But if the past is your reference point as opposed to where you need to be, then you got the discussion all wrong,” Washington said. “I would like to see diversity so embedded in the institution that that’s what Exeter is, not Exeter plus diversity. The diversity is there, and there’s no Exeter without diversity.”
Similarly, O’Neal had high hopes for the Academy’s future. “[Exeter] is not perfect but it is better than other educational institutions in this country. It’s an institution America should be proud of, and people should continue to strive to make it an even better institution,” he said.