Last year in a public speaking class a professor assigned a list of vocabulary words to be memorized.
One of the terms was “bete noire,” a French derived phrase the professor defined as “object of hatred.”
Because he knows French, Jesse Cooper, one of two African-American students in the class, asked the professor if he knew that the literal translation of the word meant “black beast.”
The professor responded he hadn’t been aware of that and said he intended to check it with a colleague. The word was never taken off the vocabulary list.
“I was hoping he’d choose another word and felt that I’d sort of tried to get him to change it, but he didn’t get it at all,” said Cooper.
For Cooper, a transfer student from Johnson & Wales University who grew up in Madawaska, this kind of thing happens all too often.
“In Madawaska I was the first black person to attend the public schools, and people were afraid to offend me because they didn’t understand me,” he said.
“When I moved to Providence to attend Johnson & Wales things were completely different. People were more politically correct, but I think they felt they had to be careful of what they said. There would be cliques among the students where all the black students would be friends and all the white students would be friends.”
Now as a USM student Cooper lives in Woodward Hall on the Gorham campus.
He is one of the University’s 330 minority students and one of the few to live in Gorham. There are 10,962 total students at USM.
“A lot of USM students are experiencing for the first time what the Madawaska students experienced when I was in high school,” said Cooper. “But it’s different here because it’s not as extreme. I don’t feel that people here are as afraid to offend me. If I find something they say to be offensive, they are usually willing to discuss it, and a lot of times I find that they just didn’t know it was offensive.”
He said he’s never felt like he was in physical danger, but is sometimes the victim of stereotypes.
“I’ve never had anyone attack me personally [because of my skin color], but sometimes I feel that people expect me to be the stereotypical MTV generation type of person. And I’m definitely not.”
Indeed Cooper, a 21-year-old history major who already holds an associate’s degree in Baking and Pastry Arts, is anything but typical.
His academic interests lie in Mesopotamia and the beginnings of human history, where he said the facts are disputed and ambiguous. He is currently considering doing a thesis on relating what is known about the beginnings of civilization with one or more major religions.
“Eventually I’d like to be a teacher during the school year and a pastry chef during the summers, because that would give me a chance to express different parts of myself and be a way to keep from getting bored.”
Still, once he graduates, Cooper doesn’t plan to teach in Maine for long. Instead he plans to move to a city such as Providence or Boston, where he feels he would be more accepted for who he is.
“A lot of people in Maine have been sheltered and are ignorant to people of color and other minorities, and I just can’t change a whole community,” he said.
However, Cooper is quick to point out that for the most part he finds the USM community to be open to discussion when it comes to racism.
“When I hear something offensive I try to teach people and inform them, rather than get them so angry that they don’t hear what I am saying,” Cooper said.
“I think a big part of this issue is to get people to understand rather than push them away from the issues.”
This need for a continuing dialogue, Cooper said, is why he thinks the University should spread out its Black History Month events throughout the academic year, instead of concentrating the majority of them in February.
“People can only do so much in a month and I don’t think it would really upset anyone to spread the activities out. I think it would be better.”
Activities should also be spread out evenly between the Portland and Gorham campuses, he said, to encourage event participation and accessibility to all USM students.
Cooper says that he hasn’t had any issues come up this year regarding his race, and that in the past when he has been offended, he has been hesitant to attribute it to racism.
“I don’t think a lot of people are racist,” he said. “Racist makes me think of knowing what you’re doing and hating me because of my ethnicity or skin color anyway. I think a lot of students just have a lack of experience with diversity, and that can lead to misunderstandings.”
Contributing Writer Maria D’Andrea can be contacted at: [email protected]