Education has always been political. Still, in the past few years, debates about education, including what we have the right to learn and who we can learn about, have been in the spotlight. Throughout history, people have not only had to fight for the right to be in school but also for the right to learn about their own histories. This struggle was present at WashU as students and professors fought to have educational programs like Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) and African American Studies (AFAS), which included an eight-day sit-in in Brookings Hall in 1968.

People have fought for the right to learn about marginalized and minority identities, their cultures, and their histories at WashU. People are also actively fighting against that same right. It is imperative that students from all backgrounds take classes that involve identities other than their own. Unfortunately, this is not nearly as common as it should be.

While speaking with professors teaching in and students majoring in cultural departments — AFAS, Latin American Studies (LAS), and Jewish, Islamic, and Middle Eastern Studies (JIMES) — we learned that these courses, especially higher level ones, are often composed solely or mostly of students with ties to the culture being studied. While there is inherent value in creating a space for students of one culture to learn about that culture together, it is the role of a liberal arts institution to ensure that students of all cultural backgrounds are learning about cultures other than their own.

We’d argue that this is not a conscious decision for most WashU students. Structures as complex as systemic racism and as simple as course requirements all contribute to why students, especially white students, don’t take classes outside of their own identity. 

One of the reasons white students often don’t take these classes is that they are uncomfortable talking about race, whether subconsciously or not. White fragility — the idea that deeply segregated societies shield white people from engaging in difficult conversations about race and white privilege — is a key reason why cultural classes are important in the first place. It is especially important that white students at WashU take these classes because they compose the majority of the student body, often without even a diverse social circle.

According to LAS Professor Ignacio Sánchez Prado  (“Nacho”), a highly regarded professor who has historically encouraged students to take classes in LAS regardless of their cultural background, understands this fragility to be a matter of perceived danger: “To be a foreigner is a very valuable experience, and to be an outsider is a very valuable experience. There is this concept of mistaking safety for always being inside your comfort zone. And I think it is really important to learn to be uncomfortable, and learning outside your culture is a way of having productive discomfort that is not going to make you unsafe at all.”

Students often do not register for cultural studies classes in these departments because they feel like they are inserting themselves in a space that does not belong to them. Junior Maya Rodriguez-Clark, a Latin American Studies major, attributes this discomfort to a broader notion: “We have this view where culture is to be owned and to be protected.”

In today’s political climate, where many people in power don’t want cultural studies departments to exist at all, it makes complete sense that people feel defensive of their cultures in these classes. On the other hand, the students opting to take classes outside of their identities are usually not trying to tear those minority cultures down.

In a structurally discriminatory society, spaces for people who share one identity are important for safety and organizing. The classroom should be safe and foster organizing, but also must expand people’s perspectives and understandings of the world. Something we repeatedly heard from interviewees was that minority students know discrimination; they know how racial differences manifest socially. While it is important that they are able to relate and build solidarity with one another, the people that need to learn about these things most are currently rarely in the classroom, and they need to be.

Students often feel like certain classroom spaces and conversations do not belong to them when they are not about them. Yet, the reality is that students from minority backgrounds have had to learn about cultures other than their own for their entire academic careers. When we allow this kind of fragility to influence our decisions, we give fragility the power to crystallize, while some of these courses would work to break it down. 

While there is a clear issue with students not taking these classes, the University is also not encouraging them to do so — or at least not all of them. Cultural diversity requirements vary drastically between schools, with ArtSci carrying the most robust cultural diversity requirements and Sam Fox the least. Whether a student is going into business or law should not determine the importance of understanding different cultures.

Moreover, strict major and minor requirements make it difficult for students to take classes that won’t count toward their programs, as many students are fulfilling their academic requirements through their senior year. In order to remedy this issue, departments should make concerted efforts to cross-list cultural classes in their areas. When a class is cross-listed, it appears in the Course Listings under multiple departments, and it is made clear from the start that the course can satisfy requirements for different areas of study.

Humanities departments like American Culture Studies and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies are very good at this, allowing students to take a wide variety of classes home-based in other departments. However, others are not. The Political Science department, for example, rarely cross-lists except in some cases where the professor has a PhD in Political Science (which is rarely the case for classes home-based in the department). This lack of cross-listing is especially apparent because there are so many classes about politics across cultural departments. 

Professor Daniel Butler, the Director of Undergraduate Studies in Political Science, explained that the reason for this is the brevity of the major, which in theory would allow students to finish it more quickly and take classes outside the department afterward. However, at a school like WashU, where students are often pursuing two majors and a minor or a major and two minors, maybe even with a concentration or two, this optimistic view is not the case for many students. 

Additionally, the onus is often on individual professors and students to request cross-listing with other departments. This causes a large number of classes to go un-cross-listed despite being applicable to different departments. Putting the onus on individual professors and students to make these requests means that only people already highly motivated to take classes in cultural departments, or, for professors, to diversify their classes, end up in them. Departments should instead actively seek out classes in cultural departments to cross-list in their discipline. This could be as easy as searching for every class with the word “politics” in it and reading through the syllabi to see if it is a good fit.

While our experiences as students are different, they have been greatly enriched by classes focused on identities other than our own. Classes cross-listed between our majors and cultural departments such as “Women and Crime in the Evolution of American History” in AFAS and Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies; “Freedom, Resistance, and African American Political Thought” in AFAS and Political Science; and “James Baldwin Now” in English and AFAS have been especially impactful and some of our favorite courses we have taken for our majors. Because these classes were cross-listed, we were able to approach them with a base knowledge of our majors and ultimately felt more comfortable about what we could bring to the class, while expanding our understanding of our disciplines from diverse perspectives. 

Obviously, existing cultural classes cannot be cross-listed to fit the needs of every department. Every department, especially those that do not have applicable classes in cultural studies and those that are insistent on keeping strict policies, like Political Science, should make a concerted effort to hire more professors with research related to marginalized communities and countries other than the U.S.

It is also these students pursuing multiple programs that may have significant contributions, certainly more than they think they do, to conversations in cultural classes. Ayala Hendin, a teaching fellow in the JIMES department, says that her classroom conversations are always enriched by students coming from other departments. 

Even beyond academic study, everyone brings something valuable to the classroom. For example, Dr. Hendin described a British student who took her course on Arabs in Israel, where colonialism and settler colonialism are discussed in-depth. She explained how the student’s British identity and upbringing in the context of extreme colonialism added to the experience of everyone else in the course. Similarly, STEM courses teach a particular kind of critical thinking that may be absent in humanities classes without STEM students, and this adds another layer of perspective to everyone’s academic experience.

According to Hendin, this experience was a reminder of the kind of questions we should be asking when we enter these spaces: “What are our identity traits that are maybe more public: ethnicity, race, gender, things like that? What are some of our lived experiences? What is the knowledge that we are coming in with? What are the skills that we are coming in with, and how do all of these interact with what it is that we are learning and the ways that we are forming our opinions?”

In addition to the benefit of cultural education on understanding different communities’ histories and experiences in the current day, as well as how our own identities converge and diverge from one another, Hendin also described the critical skills students gain from learning in diverse classrooms.

“I believe that diversity is good for education, I think that it enhances curiosity, that it brings in more voices to the conversation, that it limits group thinking, and that it requires many skills of working and engaging across differences,” Hendin said.

We urge you to step outside of your comfort zone and take classes in cultural departments, particularly those that are unfamiliar to you. In conducting these interviews, we received a slew of glowing recommendations for courses offered this spring, including Intro to Africana Studies; Blackness in Brazil; Islam, Culture, and Society in West Africa; Wolof Language and Culture; and Survey of Mexican Cultures.

The barriers we have discussed are far from the only ones that limit the diversity of students taking cultural classes. There are many structural obstacles related to these departments including how the school prioritizes cultural departments (of which creating a building partially dedicated to AFAS is a great step), hiring faculty from and who teach about marginalized communities, and funding research that focuses on minorities.

Education will always be political and, therefore, will likely always carry some level of discomfort. However, discomfort with politics and with discussions of race and ethnicity are exactly what we should be confronting as part of our college education. We have a responsibility to take classes about identities other than our own, especially those of us not from historically marginalized communities. 

At the same time, this responsibility should not be the sole reason you take these courses. Nor should you take them because you want to put on a facade as an ally to minority communities. (These classes can be an important first step, but allyship requires more than sitting in a classroom or performative support — it requires action.) You should take them because these classes are interesting and engaging; each student brings a new perspective that enriches the conversation, and because of diversity in the classroom, everyone will walk away with a broader worldview and a more robust learning experience.