On July 7, my friend Won Jang ’26 was reported missing and later pronounced dead. He was last seen the previous night around 9:30 p.m. by the Connecticut River. His death was ultimately ruled an accidental drowning. Most days, I cannot help but wonder what might have happened if Won had been six feet tall and white. I cannot help but think that people would have reported him missing that night and stayed behind until he was found. Maybe he’d still be here today.
Yes, I’m introducing Won’s death as an issue of race and racism. This is not to say that Won’s death was a result of hateful actions or racist individuals, or to label the Greek organizations involved as uniquely racist. I am not assigning blame to any person or organization. I also do not want to discount the worthwhile conversations that are ongoing around water safety and the role of Greek Life at Dartmouth. Each of these conversations can and should happen at the same time. We live in a society riddled with structural issues and inequities, and no one person or organization is individually responsible for them.
While racism is often identified by visible acts of hatred, it also encompasses the unconscious patterns that subtly influence the behaviors of even the most thoughtful and compassionate people. These unseen, unconscious roots anchor the whole endeavor in place and remain even when we remove the overt racism above the surface.
This invisibility is what makes this form of racism so hard to talk about. We want to blame, convict and punish an identifiable offender — which is easy to do when someone does something explicitly wrong but near impossible when no one does what is right. Yet none of us can claim to have clean hands, as these processes and biases are so ingrained they’re subconscious.
This hidden side of racism is particularly relevant to us as Asian people, who tend to experience less overt kinds of racism than we have in previous generations. The War on Terror and the COVID-19 pandemic revealed antagonism boiling beneath the surface, but otherwise, we are eminently forgettable — footnotes and bit characters in someone else’s American story.
A symptom of this invisible racism is that we ourselves become invisible — to others and to ourselves.
The immediate aftermath of Won’s death is a case in point. Campus emails and events by both students and administrators commemorating his loss were riddled with misspellings of his name and inaccurate information about his life. The loss of Kexin Cai — a former student at the Guarini School of Graduate and Advanced Studies who admitted herself to Dick’s House due to a “mental health crisis” days before her death — felt like it passed with little more than a campus announcement, a vigil and a stopgap measure in the form of a day of community. There was no lasting public discussion on the racialization of the two deaths. It’s not lost on us that two Asian students died in three months. The College could have named this; they could have made an effort to reach out to the Asian community. This reality leaves me feeling like these conversations can only happen behind closed doors, mostly among Asian students.
I can recall countless conversations with other Asian students at Dartmouth about feeling like our “Asianness” was something to overcome in any recruitment or audition process. We share the experience of standing in a fraternity and feeling like people looked past us as if we were invisible, only talking to us if we were with our white friends. We want to believe that race is a non-factor in our daily lives, but we cannot suppress the sense that something unnamable is deeply wrong. It is not hard to tell when you are just nominally included, rather than seen or appreciated. This happens enough for the thought to creep in: “Maybe no one would notice if I wasn’t here.”
On an institutional level, Dartmouth does not have even the bare minimum support for Asian students. The Pan-Asian community room is the only dedicated community space for the largest racial minority on campus. There have been four different OPAL advisors for the Pan-Asian community across the past four years — in one year, there was no official advisor. This lack of extracurricular support has manifested as a lack of institutional Asian American studies, despite more than 30 years of activism and more than 3,000 signatures across three petitions that called for its institutionalization. When one part of the institution shrugs off Asian student advocacy, that gives permission for another office to follow that line of thinking.
We are allowed to mourn these absences, but only as pinpoints of grief in an otherwise happy composition. The deaths of our community members and the lack of institutional support can only exist as siloed, unfortunate events — as isolated dots on a page. What if we dared to connect them? What would that say about us and the campus communities that we are a part of?
We are familiar with racism as hate, less so with racism as indifference. To most Asian students at this school, however, this is probably racism’s most familiar face. It is subtle to the point where you can gaslight yourself into thinking that you are the problem. When we do call out inequities and voice our discomfort, we’re met with redirections and dismissal. Frankly, I am sick of the empty refrains: “But do you know about this resource?” or “Oh, but we have a lot of Asians.”
The implication is that maybe it’s your fault that people don’t care what you have to say. Maybe it’s not because you’re Asian; you have to be more outgoing, attractive and “chill” to be noticed. And if it is your fault, how dare you attribute the lack of belonging to your race? You’re still part of the group, aren’t you?
Each realization of what we could have had, we experience a sense of loss. We grieve for what we never had. When we voice those needs to be met with dismissal, we steadily rack up shame for even thinking and feeling in the first place, but also for daring to seek validation for that feeling. In the face of that repeated deprioritization, we are denied both our ability to feel and to voice those feelings. Devoid of these basic human functions — to think, to feel and to speak — we are rendered less than human. It’s suffocating.
The solution, then, is to shove these feelings aside and become someone else in order to exist in the community that created those feelings. In doing so, we are denied our own interiority and lose ourselves in the process. But what else can you do? Where else can you go? What would you hope for instead?
I hope for some sort of racial reckoning on campus, and for people to think about how they are positioned and how they perceive each other. I hope for a consistent space for Asian students to find a collective community. Most of all, I hope for Asian students at Dartmouth to have permission to feel, to grieve, to recognize something is wrong and to ask hard questions about this place and what it means for us to be here.
Asian students at Dartmouth face a cultural atmosphere of indifference. No one hates you enough to bar you from the room, but they do not care enough to truly listen. It often manifests as an unease subtly underscoring daily life. In Won’s case, it might have led to his death.
Daniel Lin is a member of the Class of 2023. He was involved with the Dartmouth Asian American Studies Collective and bandmates with Jang in Catalysis, later renamed Silkstream. Guest columns represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
