When talking about the state of dialogue on campus in class a couple weeks ago, I felt surprised and encouraged that some students felt positively about the discussion on Wesleyan’s campus for my perception was overwhelmingly negative. The majority of examples that popped into my mind when writing the reflection consisted of derogatory comments and insulting jokes that I overheard friends making about race. Over the next couple weeks I decided to pay closer attention to the conversations I witnessed. I hypothesized that dialogue about race happened much more often than I realized when paying close attention.

With close observation of different conservations I was involved in, I began to find substantial evidence for the notion that White Americans “actually talk about race all the time” but do so by utilizing “code words” (Kivel, 58). The first striking example that I experienced occurred off-campus when talking about violence and crime on campus with extended family. A relative was interested in the crime rates on Illinois Wesleyan and another small liberal arts college that one of my cousins attends. I noticed immediately that everyone spoke in code words because as an entirely White family we “can count on a mutual (white) understanding of the implications of the words without having to specify [a] comment is about race” (Kivel, 58). I mentioned that a couple violent attacks occurred on campus in the last couple of years, and one family member commented on how the location of Wesleyan’s campus next to a “low-income” neighborhood perhaps increases the rate of crime. After this initial observation of code words in action, I began to detect these words quite frequently in several different settings. When talking about politics and current events it seemed that phrases like “inner city” students and “low income” communities came up repeatedly and allowed White people (myself included) to talk about race “without having to admit to doing do” (Kivel, 58).

While I noticed this pattern prior to writing my reflection about the state of dialogue on campus, I had no concept of how common these colored-coded words are until really paying attention to the discussion around me. In my initial campus dialogue paper, I wrote about how students seemed to conform strongly to the societal norms – especially the status quo of silence. After recognizing the recurrent and repeated use of these code words, I would revise my paper to state that students on campus seem to actually converse about race daily and comfortably. These discussions on race, however, center around the use of codes and stereotypes, and consequently perpetuate the “awful, uncomfortable silence” (Kivel, 58).