Good day. Let me first express my profound gratitude at the honor of speaking in front of this group today. It is with great delight that we share this hour together in pursuit of advancing racial reconciliation and education on race issues. As a professor of intellectual history and specifically, the individual and collective construction of identity categories such as race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, religion, region and others, I am especially familiar with the challenges of understanding the development, interpretation and motivation of these identities. As an activist, I also have had first-hand experience with the challenges of working through these conversations to achieve the goals of understanding, advancement, and acceptance. Normally when I speak to audiences, as a historian, my work is primarily backed by lengthy research and evidence. As I weave the historical data into discernible narratives that advance our understanding about the complexity of race my work also exists as a political act engaging readers and audience members. While I am cognizant that the evidence may be problematic or that necessary evidence or perspectives might be missing, I am familiar with the frameworks and methodologies in professional historical writing. These parameters serve as guideposts and beacons and I know this path quite well. The same might be said for my previous conversations on race. Within the classroom, the courtroom, the city council, and the streets, there exist familiar points, which teachers and activists must cross. These elicit an entire range of emotions—frustration, happiness, defeat, success, anger, reconciliation, fear and love. Like all activities in life, certain patterns emerge and expectations are set and some are fulfilled, still others are not. While there are challenges in research and activism, there is an understanding by the participants that through perseverance, resolution and reconciliation will be achieved. But what of those moments in which reconciliation is subverted, resisted or consciously averted?
During this past year, I had such an experience on my college campus. While I am still processing my responses and am still trying to articulate the year’s events, I thought that it might be fruitful to share my experiences. I intend not to draw any conclusions or even provide advice, rather, my brief comments will hopefully raise more questions than answers, encourage us to remember to continuously reexamine our approaches to racial reconciliation, the personal and professional challenges, the conflicting and perhaps contradictory approaches of others, to remember that important change does not come with ease and that struggle will always be a part of racial reconciliation. I also know that in involving ourselves in racial education or reconciliation, that there will be setbacks, some shocking ones but we need to accept being knocked down, assess our own culpability while still on the mat, gather ourselves, and finally rise up, dust ourselves off, and begin the conversation with positive intent, love, determination, and a sense of community. I have learned from this experience that no matter how experienced we feel about our ability to approach racial reconciliation successfully, it is important to remember how complex and difficult these conversations are. Because of this complexity, each of us understands race differently and also approaches racial discussions differently. Consensus is not always achieved but in my experience the mere act of conversing about race does advance the project of racial reconciliation. This experience has served to remind me that the type and success of educational and activist work that we engage in requires reevaluation and recalibration. We need to dialogue and repeat these questions to ourselves: why are we here? What are we trying to accomplish? Where have my own fears interfered with the process? Are their points when we abandon this particular vein in the project? What approaches might best serve the uniqueness of the situation? After my comments, I thought that we might engage in a brief discussion addressing the challenges of racial reconciliation conversations between ourselves and family, our students, colleagues, our immediate and distant communities.
Salem College is a small private liberal arts women’s college housed in the city of Winston-Salem, North Carolina. It is the oldest American women’s educational institution and is the 13th oldest college in the United States. It has Moravian roots but broke from the church early in the 20th century. It is a legacy school and up until the last twenty years, it educated predominantly wealthy southern white women. One of the past president’s main goals was to increase diversity in the student population and over a thirteen-year tenure, she increased its minority numbers to an impressive 17%. With a student body of 1200, 600 traditional age students and 600 continuing studies students, this year we have 77 international students from India, Africa, and Europe. The campus has a large African American representation. Emphasizing “sisterhood” over class, ethnic, religious or racial identities, Salem can honestly boast that it lives the dream of reconciliation better than most college campuses today. Women of color have achieved powerful positions as campus group leaders. Examining the public sites, we see less evidence of “self-segregation” than we would see at other schools. Even with its small population, the campus has three strong clubs that emphasize and focus on promoting racial and ethnic issues. Despite this, racial crevasses exist and polarize the students. The same narrative of sisterhood that is so heavily promoted by the College and its students poorly masks the cleavages caused by racialized thinking. White female students are clearly uncomfortable with talking about race, fearful of being thought racist or perhaps revealing their own racism. Black female students speak of the insidious forms of racism that exist on the campus, that bleed into their lives because of the unique racist legacy of Winston-Salem and the larger south, the isolation and marginalization that they feel, and their own subsequent distrust of whites. Notions of sisterhood acted as a temporary bandage and the wounds, far from healing, festered, opened up and rendered the bandage not only useless but revealed a mockery of racial reconciliation. By the end of the year, the racial events of the past year divided the campus. The school year ended without obvious resolution, a professor resigned his position and two other professors were left having their credibility as professors and racial activists in question. Stunned, the students, the faculty, and the administration lowered their shoulders, bowed their heads in temporary defeat--feeling completely lost.
So what caused this break? This rift? What exposed the racial fractures on the campus body? I did. At the center of this controversy was me-- a white, Jewish, woman with a female partner, an extremely radical and well-respected female straight, an atheist English professor who had achieved cult status during her tenure of 8 years, and an Afro-Jamaican Rastafarian professor of sociology. I along with the sociology professor (we will call Robert) were in our second year at Salem when a series of events served to shift and crumble the racial stability of the campus. What is somewhat unusual about these series of events and conversations on race is that we were all fighting to achieve the same goals—that of racial awareness and reconciliation and more importantly understanding, respect, and community. Our different approaches to racial reconciliation and our inability to reconcile these approaches obstructed the project. And while I understood and espoused the notion that there are many ways to approach racial reconciliation, I was somewhat destabilized by the inability of three trained professionals and well-worn activists to move the conversation forward—all under the watchful eyes of students. All three of us understood that how we approached these situations was crucial because students model their own abilities to engage in racial conversations, the utility of entering into such conversations, and the success of achieving their goals by analyzing how their professors and mentors handle these situations. Over the next few moments I will trace the major events that occurred and how they drove the campus conversation on race into discomfort, division, and seemingly defeat.
Now let me state at the outset that I was excited to work with these professors. Upon coming to Salem I was so relieved that I would not be alone in my private and professional fight against racism. I was delighted that these two other professors understood race to be a foundational narrative and issue in their research and teaching and the ways in which it informed their professional development and on and off campus activism. During my first year we shared many a “trenches” story and were pretty much aligned in our thinking as to how to highlight or illuminate the importance of racial reconciliation with the liberal arts education. It was sheer pleasure not to be the sole “race” person on the campus. Our genuine respect and caring for each other and the projects that we engaged in virtually guaranteed our success. We believed surely that power existed in numbers and with our determination and expertise we would successfully identify and effectively take steps to resolve racial problems apparent on campus and begin to work on the deep racial divide that exists within the larger Winston Salem.
Shades of trouble emerged early in the semester when an African-American student requested that I and the English professor guide her through an African-American studies major. We agreed and encouraged the student to prepare a précis detailing her intended course of study and to provide an argument as to why this was important to her personally, to her own professional goals, and why it should be included in a liberal arts curriculum. Self-designed majors are subject to faculty approval and clearly because of his expertise and perhaps because of his race, “Robert” was asked to decide whether the registrar’s office should accept this major. While the student did not request “Robert” to be her advisor, she did frequently speak to him after meeting with the English professor and I. We were not worried because we accepted that we all shared the same dedication to racial education. Should any disagreements arise because of the major’s interdisciplinary approach, we could surely work through it. Early on it became apparent that something very different was taking place. Stephanie, the student, often went over the notes taken in “Jan” and my meetings and run it past “Robert.” This of course caused professional antagonism and raised the ever-prevalent question as to who should be teaching African-American history or literature. To further complicate “Robert,” a sociology professor, provided Stephanie with a list of several history texts that are considered Afro-centric and are often assigned at the graduate level where students might compare the different approaches. I was a bit taken aback that the professor had assigned books out of his field. This situation became even more problematic because it became clear that while Stephanie valued our expertise, she read “Robert’s” blackness as an indicator of superior knowledge on African-American topics and “Robert” did nothing to dissuade her of this fact. I wondered: did he have problems with my whiteness, my femaleness? Historically there has been tension between black men and white women, was this being played out in this situation? While I avoided challenging his questionable reading suggestions, I did express my concern over the clearly emerging conversation on legitimacy and authenticity. Throughout the year, Stephanie continued to do this and when confronted, she denied it. This caused immeasurable friction yet we were unable to stop this. Hoping to prevent this from progressing any further, I spoke to both professors and suggested that we meet, hash things out and set a plan of action to address legitimate concerns and prevent students from knowingly or unknowingly creating fissures in the faculty. I was deeply concerned that this path might fracture an already tenuous racial front and such activity would squarely remove our eyes from the main focus of racial reconciliation. Our collective professional anxieties inhibited our abilities to overcome the situation.
The next event occurred later that semester when the Sociology Department sponsored a lecture to be given by Daryl Hunt. Daryl Hunt served time in prison for over 17 years for a murder that he did not commit. He was eventually exonerated and has devoted his life to the Daryl Hunt Project—an organization dedicated to providing legal services and public awareness about African Americans wrongfully serving time in prison. This was a phenomenal coup. We are a small college, Daryl Hunt’s experience was nationally and internationally known and all of us thought this would draw important attention to the racism that exists within not only our institutional infrastructures but also within the larger Winston-Salem Community and its racist responses to young black men. Publicity posters went up. One of them was posted in the History Department hall and I was stunned by the quote that was attached to the publicity photo. The caption read “ He’s that black man the police framed because they couldn’t let the rape of a white woman go unpunished.” I was stunned by the choice of the quote. I played the sentence over in my mind, diagrammed it, and was disturbed by its message. In the converse it seemed to imply that one should trade on gender violence. We sit at a women’s college and I was bothered that the quote somehow insinuated, however unintentionally, that we should let female rape go unpunished. The quote was unsubstantiated and no author was attributed. Since it was sponsored by the Sociology Department, I contacted “Robert” and asked him if we might discuss the implications of this selected quote. This riled him and he suggested that I did not understand the historical complexities associated with the rape of white women by black men. As a historian of the south, I did understand the foundational position of protecting white women’s sexuality in setting up slavery, racist notions of African American men, Jim Crow laws, and countless lynchings that have taken place over the past two hundred years. I requested to sit down with him and he declined sure that somehow I was privileging my white womanhood or gender issues over racial issues. He turned on his heel and walked away. “Robert’s” primary focus was on racial issues, his approach to reconciliation did not consider gender. I hoped to make him understand that race and gender issues are mutually constitutive and simply can not be separated. I believed that we cannot condone a path to racial reconciliation that sanctions the oppression of another population. I understood that tempers flare so a day later, I followed that up with an email hoping to break bread with him, sure that we could achieve resolution. I was used to these disagreements and accepted that a good meal, dialogue and mutual respect guaranteed a success. The professor refused the invitation and I understood that feelings were hurt and decided that in continuing the project, our professional and personal relationship would right its off keel. The visit by Hunt was extremely well-attended but much to my dismay the audience was overwhelmingly African American, packed with community members and Salem’s African-American students. Clearly, the white students on this campus understood this event and site to be “blacks only.” This was a major red flag that there were deep divisions on campus. The disagreements between myself and “Robert” were not only professional but indicative of a wider campus phenomenon.
The second event came on the heels of the death of Ms. Rosa Parks. We were on a short holiday and over email, members of the faculty suggested that during the first lunch after break we conduct a memorial service and solicited participants. As a scholar who specialized in African-American history, it was suggested that I write an obituary--an homage to Ms. Parks’ contributions to the Civil Rights Movement. I decided to frame my discussion of Ms. Parks under the theme of “I will not stand” and in addition to detailing the racist laws and thinking that Ms. Parks refused to stand for, I asked the audience to consider those things that they would not stand for. A communications professor, who is white and female, created a montage of major Civil Rights images. Finally, the campus gospel choir sang two songs. During my comments, “Robert,” dismayed at what he perceived as a hastily put together and therefore disrespectful program and one that did not represent campus minority voices, very publicly walked out. In a later editorial, “Robert” expressed that because Ms. Parks was an African American, the program should have included more minority representation. Let me remind the audience that this was a purely voluntary program, those who wanted to participate were asked in a campus-wide email. When challenged on this, “Robert” insisted that black faculty should have been individually invited. It was clear that “Robert” believed that on black issues, African-Americans should hold primary positions of education and activism. Whites should participate but blacks should be driving the program. I strongly disagreed with this approach, not only because I found it offensive but also counterproductive. Race is everyone’s issue. In the words of Lillian Smith in Killer’s of a Dream, race hurts everybody and thus everybody should actively be working on the project to eliminate racist thinking in our world. It seemed to me that “Robert” increasingly espoused a “Black Panther-like” approach to racial reconciliation—that blacks had to assume not only a primary role in ending racism but the only role. His comment to students on his ideas about racial reconciliation, while espousing racial inclusiveness, seemed to marginalize or exclude whites’ participation. On this small campus, “Robert’s” policy was not about racial reconciliation between the races but more likely black empowerment in spite of whites This was a major impasse: the three professors dedicated to racial education and reconciliation subscribed to philosophies that directly contradicted each other thereby threatening to stymie reconciliation. I simply did not know what to do other than dialogue with him to mutual understanding. I wanted to explain to him that on this racially diverse campus this approach might be counterproductive, that a separatist approach was a poor one, that in a world in which few pay attention to race unless it directly affects them, surely we should not exclude those people interested in fostering racial reconciliation. I suggested that we meet. Again he refused citing that my own lack of recognition of my own privilege inhibited even the most basic of conversations on race. Shocked, I responded that in fact I understood my privilege as a female, a white person, a Jew, a middle class individual but that he too possessed privilege in his maleness, his desirable Afro-Jamaican heritage, (people who met him coded his Jamaicanness as a different and more desirable blackness). I also suggested that by his own logic which assumed that because of my skin color and thus could not speak from a position of authority, his own Afro-Jamaican roots prevented him from speaking on behalf of American blacks. It was here that the conversation clearly descended. We had moved off the project of racial reconciliation and onto pointless discussions about who had the “right” to address race. For the rest of the semester this was the issue that neither myself nor the other two professors could abandon. Like many conversations on race, this became personal and our own anxieties about racism, and our own abilities to effectively advance racial reconciliation centered on who was more authentic. In subsequent conversation myself and “Jan” relied on our vitas detailing our professional training and our social activism and he relied on his blackness and slammed our “privilege” to either accentuate or de-accentuate our expertise. We knew the discussion would lead to nothing yet we simply could not step off that plane of conflict. The campus divided and the other faculty remained silent, unwilling to enter this very difficulty conversation.
The next major event that escalated the conversation was a panel that was planned for black history month. Students from the BADU, an African –American activist campus group, were setting up two panels. They requested that I along with two other white faculty members participate on a panel that discussed racial education. It was clear from their email that a second panel with all black professors on a different topic was planned. Fearing a repeat of the Rosa Parks event, I called the president of BADU and stated that I would not participate in the panel discussion unless there were people of race on the panel. Now let me say this, I do not believe that skin color conveys expertise and I do not believe that one must wait for people of color to lead or drive conversations on race. This encourages inertia. Based on the Rosa Parks event, I, however, understood that skin color conveyed legitimacy and I believed that in the interest of campus racial reconciliation, the panel needed to be more racially balanced, regardless of the expertise of the participants. BADU failed to follow up and I refused to participate. This action resulted in tremendous hostility from the black student population. It seemed that I had committed an egregious error. In the next edition of the student newspaper, the editor of the Salemite lambasted us for not participating. Speaking of us she charged “for some black people being ostracized for their skin color will happen for the rest of their lives. If black people can take the heat everyday, why couldn’t you for this one time?” She continued “their absence at certain events not only hurt me but also hurt students who were looking forward to your presence and knowledge and that the professors who did not attend did not do so due to lack of courage.”
Such an editorial provoked an incredible response from the students some in support of the editorial and some against. The disturbing pattern of support along racial lines continued. White students chalked the campus with famous quotes by prominent African-American civil rights activists. I was quite moved but was worried that this conversation was descending into a popularity contest that was clearly marked by race. I was correct. The next issue of the campus newspaper the “Salemite” was inundated with letters from students challenging the editor’s comments. Many editorials focused on assigning blame, celebrating the professors’ teaching and mentoring contributions--both particularly unproductive approaches. These letters in support of Jan’s and my actions were written by white students. Those supporting “Robert” were written predominantly by black students. Even more disturbing was that except for a few of these brave students, most of Salem’s students completely backed off from the conversation. These were personally and generally very dangerous and uncomfortable and many decided to respond anonymously and in private.
Constant bantering in subsequent Salemites prompted a phone call from “Robert” demanding to know whether I had invoked his name when I refused to participate. I stated that I had because I understood that he believed that African Americans should drive racial reconciliation conversation and that skin color conveyed expertise. I was trying to respect the campus tenor and endeavored to create a setting that encouraged him and other black students to participate. He responded angrily that I had constructed him as a scapegoat and that if I did not wish to participate because there was not enough black representation that was one thing but to rest my reasoning at his feet was unprofessional. I responded that I believed that in panels such as these expertise is crucial and to merely place blacks on a panel because of their skin color consisted of “tokenism” and thus reinscribed what I found to be a particularly insidious form of racism. He again suggested that my privilege which he assumed was an axiom in this conversation prevented me from effectively engaging in this conversation. This statement again forced me to assess whether my privilege had influenced my responses to racial reconciliation. I continued to question how I might avoid having my privilege inhibit the project of racial reconciliation which led to a very perplexing question is this a dead end? Can we separate ourselves from the benefits of privilege or can we merely be made aware of that privilege? While having this internal dialogue we bantered about our different approaches, resorted to calling each other unprofessional and finally he ended the conversation when he hung up the phone.
I gave much thought to his comments and endeavored to see his position. I was desperate to find a resolution and fearful that this campus was going to explode racially or even worse bury the conversation. During this same time, I had invited the folks from the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation to screen their documentary on the youthful population that led many of the grassroots organizations involved in the sixties Civil Rights Movement. I was especially interested in the fact that a predominantly all-white documentary team chose to illuminate the activities of mostly young black activists. I hoped that the panel would engage the students in the many ways of approaching Civil Rights and that in addition to black power directives, non-African Americans should be encouraged to not only be the foot soldiers but also help to decide and drive objectives and achieve goals. Harboring a desire to encourage cross-campus participation regardless of race, campus status or ethnicity, I offered to provide interested faculty members with a copy of the documentary. I solicited the advice of all faculty members as to how best approach this event. I received no response from the sociology professor.
Shortly thereafter, the campus managed to secure feminist activist bell hooks as our major speaker in the Fall and, I in my capacity as a member of the cultural events committee, was asked to facilitate campus discussion in preparation for her visit. I sent “Robert” a personal email asking for his input so that we might mend professional and personal fences to join intellectual and creative forces to make race a forceful and productive conversation on the campus. He responded with an email stating that he felt scapegoated and that his comments endangered his professional position. His email suggested that I was a liberal racist, that I, along with people like bell hooks, reproduced white hegemony and that the only way for racial reconciliation to succeed was to deconstruct existing power structures. As an identity scholar, I was well acquainted with power theory and its impact across historical space and time. His email underscored his belief that those he perceived were in power needed to cede power to others he felt were powerless. Where we disagreed was that I did not subscribe to the notion that certain people held all the power while others possess none. I believed in French theorist Michel Foucault’s ideas of power in which power is held, while not equally, by all people. But “Robert” and I were no longer at a point where we could discuss these things. I understood that in order to continue the conversation on race, perhaps we needed to travel our own paths to reconciliation--fully hoping that at the end we would meet the same objective. I carefully analyzed his comments to see what could be fixed. I believed that as educators and activists we need to be vigilant in recognizing our attempts to misuse our power. We need to continuously reexamine how our own selfish motives, our own lens of race and power might be hurting the project.
In addition to analyzing where I faltered in this conversation, colleagues suggested that “Robert” might suffer from the very things that he accused me of. They queried, might he in fact be looking through his own racist and sexist lens in assessing my approach, my privilege and my power? What also drove me to these thoughts were reports from his classes that he was steadily alienating white students from black students. Students began reporting that they felt uncomfortable because of their whiteness. Now I agree measured discomfort regarding one’s privilege based on skin color is an important step to racial reconciliation, however, when these discourses are taken too far, they often serve to marginalize white students who not only become disinterested in conversations on race but actually seem to grow increasingly hostile and disenchanted with racial reconciliation..
Still furious with me, “Robert” composed a long letter to the editor in the Salemite. Echoing his sentiments during our phone conversation, he further suggested that I did not care to see how my actions hurt the very people that I claimed to care for. Finally he called me a “downpressor” and questioned my legitimacy as a professor. He claimed for himself marginalization and omission. In this editorial, I felt that he misled the campus into thinking that he had been excluded when after each event I requested that we meet and figure out how best to deal with racial conversations. Furious at his allegations of my legitimacy and my intentions I approached the administration and asked that while we may differ in our methodologies, I would not stand for a fellow faculty member to sabotage my credibility as an educator on the campus. In such a small campus, to lose my authenticity would leave me dead in the water as an teacher and a campus facilitator. To the college dean, I reasoned that over the past year, I attempted to reconcile the conflict on my own and but that on a professional level, I would file a faculty grievance to stop what I perceived were slanderous statements. The administration asked to handle it. I am not sure what transpired during the conversation but I learned that at the end of the week, “Robert” resigned his tenure-track position. This devastated me. This professor decided to walk and, I felt, abandoned the conversation. One cannot continue racial reconciliation conversations with only one person. I agonized over my responsibility for his departure. How had I contributed to this? I was even more fearful of how Salem students understood this situation. Would they read that when the conversations get rough, its best to end the conversation. This was clearly not either of our goals. The conversation had stalled and died.
Or had it? In my mind it occurred to me that the interactions between the faculty, the students and the administration in fact were still conversations on race. Though these were not typical conversations on race, because most begin with concrete problems to be solved, that is eliminating racism, promoting diversity and cross cultural and racial understanding and reconciliation. But in assessing my experiences, I thought about the varied racial reconciliation projects that I had engaged in or read about. I recalled that in many substantial racial reconciliation endeavors time had to be devoted to defining racial terms, objectives, languages, methodologies, and assigning responsibilities. To effectively do so required complex conversations and often involves conflict. Temporary consensus may be arrived at to achieve goals but in fact in many historical and in my experiences, in fact differences encouraged us to divide and work towards our similar objectives individually or with like-minded people. While I am dismayed at the loss of “Robert’s” contributions, I am somewhat comforted by the knowledge that he will continue his project on race education according to his different ideologically-based approach and will move the conversation forward. I learned a great deal from this experience. I was reminded of the need to listen carefully, to check personal anxieties and motivations, to explore the lens of race, racial reconciliation, and notions of privilege and power through eyes other than my own. Finally, strangely I learned that I am energized by this experience, that conflict serves to in positive ways alter or tighten one’s focus on the protean nature of race and racial conversations.
At this point, I would like to thank you for your attention and time and would welcome any questions that you may have for me or perhaps open the conversation to the audience to share any experience or offer guidance from lessons learned from their own racial reconciliation or racial education projects.