Sunday, April 06, 2008
(11:29 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
bell hooks at Olivet
This weekend, I received Olivet's annual report in the mail, and I am reading Teaching Community by bell hooks. This combination reminds me of a nice memory that strikes me as pretty illustrative of race relations at Olivet. When bell hooks' book All About Love came out, the bookstore put up a big poster that they left up for what seemed like months -- yet at no point did they actually stock the book!Perhaps things have changed, though, because a few of the students pictured in the annual report are black. When I was there, we had to settle for just one black person in all the promotional literature -- and it was doubly misleading because she was one of the most gorgeous women ever to set foot on the campus. I feel sorry for those young men who came to Olivet expecting to find "exotic" beauties. It is true that evangelicals have been getting progressively better dressed over the years, but there's ultimately no way of hiding the fact that you're from Indiana.
