Sinners and the Dangers of Integration

This article contains mild spoilers for Sinners.

The campus of Hamilton College, where I got my degree, is divided into two halves, known familiarly as light side and dark side. To the north of College Hill Road is light side, your prototypical image of a centuries-old college with its rustic stone buildings. To the south of College Hill Road, dark side, marked by its brutalist architecture and modern interior design. The nomenclature is more than just a geographical distinction, though: it is also a cultural signifier. The stereotype is that dark side is the alternative, indie side of the campus, and darksiders are artsier hippies, as compared to the more serious, buttoned-up ethos of light side. I emphasize this as a stereotype because its correspondence with reality is spotty at best. My own personality aligned cleanly with dark side, but I lived on light side all four years I spent at Hamilton. But though faulty, the light side/dark side division still carries a lot of weight at Hamilton, mainly for its historical roots.

What we now call dark side used to be its own institution altogether: Kirkland College, a women’s college founded in 1965 across the street from Hamilton, which was all male at the time. Kirkland was founded on bold ideals of creativity and free thought which made it a counterpoint to the traditional liberal arts education Hamilton embodied. There were no grades at Kirkland, instead professors provided written feedback to students as final evaluations. Neither were there academic departments, classes were interdisciplinary and almost always discussion-based, and students would design their own paths of study. Students took a heavy role in the governance of the college, and many professors lived on campus. It was a progressive vision of education that centered the empowerment of students and the interconnectedness of its community. It did not survive.

Money, as it so often is, was the chief culprit. Kirkland struggled to build its own endowment and depended on continual loans from Hamilton. Eventually Hamilton stopped giving them, claiming Kirkland had yet to demonstrate a path to financial independence. In 1978, the colleges merged, making Hamilton co-ed. In some respects, the spirit of Kirkland made its way into Hamilton after the merger: the college’s culture relaxed and Hamilton now offers students the ability to design their own major. But Kirkland’s legacy at Hamilton is mostly symbolic. There is the increasingly archaic light side/dark side distinction, and the ongoing tradition of students handing a green apple to the college president at graduation rather than shaking his hand. This practice originated as an act of protest against the merger – Kirkland was built atop an orchard and would give its students a green apple at graduation – but nowadays it’s frequently unclear even among those who give the apple what the aim of the protest is. And of course, there is plenty of Kirkland College merchandise for sale at the Hamilton College store. But while Kirkland gets remembered and outwardly celebrated, the dream it stood for has largely been swallowed up by the wealth and tradition of the institution it became a part of.

At this point, you’re probably thinking, “Hang on, I clicked on this article thinking it would be about Sinners. What’s this guy doing rambling for 500 words about the history of his alma mater?” To answer: I was illustrating a phenomenon, one that is increasingly pressing and at the heart of Sinners. The history of Kirkland College is an example of a subculture becoming engulfed and vanquished by the dominant culture to which it stands in contrast. Sinners examines this very phenomenon: the proposed integration of cultures as pretext for a dominant culture’s erasure of a subculture. Such cases force us to question the so-called ideal of integration, of melding cultures together in a big pot. What we need, these cases show us, is not integration but preservation: we need to fortify spaces for marginalized communities rather than fold them into the mainstream, lest their cultural identity get snuffed out.