Therefore I reasoned until now and still do, that were discrimination as restricted by question 1 between students, faculty, staff and administrators a problem, it would come up, because other topics of racial inequality do freely come up in discussion.
Are people of your race and ethnicity proportionately represented...
Getting back to sample size, if I know say ten candidates for differential treatment based on race, and they are only a few of say several hundred at Springfield, then the fact that race has not come up in casual discussion with these few students of color, does not represent a random or large enough sample to represent the population. What I can see is that Springfield outside the college windows is disproportionately black, while the population in the classroom is overwhelmingly white, as are students and faculty in all the pictures on the splash pages that loaded when I opened up the College home page, although there may be some pages I didn't see that show racial minorities in student-centric activities. Likewise in the classroom the faculty is overwhelmingly white with a few professors I know of with apparent Hispanic, Black and Asian traits, although again this is hardly a representative sample, based on superficial observation. I would say that the faculty and student ethnicity probably fairly closely matches the overall national U.S. census ethnicity results from a nonscientific, casual observation, but this demographic is highly and noticeably at odds with the population...
Likewise the textbooks and classroom learning materials seem to represent U.S. diversity fairly appropriately based on general census results from casual observation, although the content of the material presented by the institution at large, i.e. The academy, higher education in general, represents the white point-of-view where such a view can meaningfully skew the perspective of the materials. Routledge, Doubleday and Wiley et al. are apparently conscientious about including pictures of scientists with apparent minority characteristics in the textbook although there is not much racial bias to the Kreb's Cycle or differential equations. Where the difference arises is in the empirical events the humanities textbooks choose to consider important, rather than which corporate model they select to represent a police officer or not. No matter how many inserts promote George Washington Carver's contributions to the peanut industry, the fact is that the perspectives and contributions of minorities relative to the sweeping majority of content which describes history, politics, economics, and what does or does not constitute literature, remain bolt-on footnotes to a main story that is invariably white. These observations are all based on my perceptions in the classes I have attended, and I suspect that if I went and specifically asked my friends of color, they might have specific examples to change my mind, although the questions here were restricted to my perceptions and not anecdotal investigation.
