Why Affinity?

Last winter, Brimmer held an affinity dinner for families of students of color for the first time. We shared the event with the entire Brimmer community, and any family that identified as a family with students of color was encouraged to attend. Childcare was provided, and about 40 or so people, including Middle or Upper School students with their parents, filled the Dining Room. There was time for casual conversation and fellowship, and a more structured and facilitated dialogue focused on the different experiences of being part of a minority community at Brimmer. We received wonderful feedback regarding the event, and we plan to move forward with more affinity dinners.

 

There were also some people who wondered about the need for such an event asking questions such as: “Wait, if I’m white and I support diversity, can I go?”; “I know that people see me as white, but my family is Middle Eastern, and I don’t identify as Caucasian. Does that mean I’m a person of color?”; and finally, “Doesn’t a group like this separate the community? I thought Brimmer was all about inclusion.” These are perfectly valid questions, and it is understandable to wonder about affinity spaces, especially if one has not had the opportunity to participate in such a space before.

 

At its core, any affinity group exists to affirm the identity that the participants in that group share and to validate and support common experiences (NAIS explains this well in a 2012 article). Just like the Brimmer Families of Students of Color affinity dinners, the level of personal sharing that takes place and even attendance itself is always optional. Affinity groups are most often created for people who belong to more marginalized communities or who feel as though their identities are not fully represented within the community in which they are operating. The content covered in an affinity group can depend on its size, the population it’s serving, the greater population it’s coming from, and even identifiers such as its gender and age make-ups. But the overarching goal is to facilitate opportunities to affirm, nurture, and celebrate shared, lived experiences and discuss issues in an environment with others who are connected by a shared aspect of identity.

 

I identify as African American, and most of the African American affinity groups in which I have participated have existed within the independent school community. In those meetings, there is the shared celebration of and comfort in looking around the room and seeing our racial identities reflected in our peers, something that is not often the case for us in the independent school world. At the same time, there are also difficult conversations about shared challenges. Like I was, many of my African American colleagues at other schools were independent school-educated in the 80s and 90s, a time when there was far less diversity of any kind in our schools. I was the only black girl in my grade until I was in the 7th grade. I thrived socially and academically, but it was quite hard, at times, and in complicated ways, to look different from my peers. I wonder what it would have been like if I’d had a group of people my age who looked like me with whom I could have simply shared that difficulty. I didn’t feel as though my school was doing anything wrong, per se. Yet, there existed a lack of awareness of the unique experience that one can have if they belong to a historically marginalized group that continues to feel, at times, the residual effects of that history.