GUEST COLUMN: Divided colors of Penn

Eric Wenke puts into perspective the touchy issue of separation based on race. I find the symbolic and influential nature of colors on behavior to be amazing. People can be moved to fight wars for the Red, White and Blue; get overly uptight over issues of Black and White and can be goaded into toast-throwing frenzies over the mention of the good old Red and Blue. What is it about the sight process that makes the perception of color so important? Elementary school classrooms are often painted a soft blue, as it is believed this color will have a calming effect on students. If the walls were painted Red and Blue, would the children be mad half the time and serene the other half? It probably is not the nature of the color that influences behavior, so much as it is the constancy of it. Sudden changes in color appear to excite people. Personally, I feel our forefathers made a mistake when choosing our school colors years ago. As the story goes, Penn's colors were chosen based on a crew win. (The Red was taken from Harvard and the Blue from Yale.) Red and Blue, however, do not have a slimming effect and therefore will never be seen as the en vogue color scheme for dress on campus. We simply look better in black. If the school colors were Black and Black, though, Locust Walk would look like it contains a lot more school spirit. Alumni would probably go crazy if I put through a movement to change the school colors, for as I said before, people seem to feel most comfortable with colors to which they're accustomed. A variation on this theme would be to test and see if people feel more comfortable with their color of choice. Every entering freshman could be asked to fill out a form detailing his or her preferred color. The campus could then be segregated into little modern clothing houses, where students could only wear the clothing color of the school-run house they lived in. Instead of everybody partaking in a total Penn experience influenced by a diversity of colors, those who chose to wear blue freshman year could opt to live in W.E.B. DaBlue house. Their Penn experience would be totally different from those of students living in DaGreen, DaRed or DaBlack houses, since residents of DaBlue House would enjoy a Penn experience centered solely around the color blue. Because I have met most of my friends at Penn outside of classes, in some form of social or residential setting, I would imagine that if I lived in DaBlue house, most of my friends would be those who wore blue shirts just like me. Of course, there would be other houses for all the different colors of the rainbow. Admissions criteria could be changed from the current secretive Penn equation (2x + 1, which everybody learns freshman year), to a new and improved one based on color preference. Quota standards could be set for each color preference, and Locust Walk could look like one big rainbow everyday. Groups of students from different clothing houses could be grouped together for photo opportunities, and admissions brochure pictures could be made to look a thousand times better. Honestly, what's more important, building a student union from a plan that students actually like or improving admissions brochure pictures? As long as there are equal amounts of blue, yellow, green and red shirts walking around the campus than you can be sure progress is occurring. This is a shallow, appearance-based, PC-influenced diversity that says nothing about actual University life. Thank God it is just a fantasy, because having a University-run residence hall system based on a color would be as preposterous as building a Penn Women's Center right in the middle of a co-ed campus. Both of these institutions sound as if they are a throwback to a policy of "separate but equal," which should really be read as "segregation as a result of unequal treatment." I propose a sink-or-swim policy of blind equality. Only then will we be able to see everyone's true colors.