I felt I was watching an exercise in futility.
In an auditorium that seats about 400, 40 students were gathered, maybe 50, and a handful of faculty and staff. An open meeting had been called to discuss racial tension on campus. An associate dean for diversity affairs presided at a lectern somewhere way down at the bottom of the bowl, and students lined up at a microphone stand in one of the aisles to speak their hearts out.
Their speeches were articulate, emotional to the point of choking off their words, disrobing their hurt before each other in this mixed gathering of whites and students of color (mostly students of color), males and females (mostly female students). They enumerated graphically the personal violations that occurred every day, the “microaggressions” and the shunnings in dorms and eating halls.
A parent could not have endured this picture of their children in such pain had they been present. We adults in the room privately cringed and yet had to project an air of confidence that the community could remedy this travesty of 21st century academia. Ideas about obligatory orientation week workshops and major speakers series were lofted into the vacant ceiling.
The futility lay in the homogeneity of the audience–as students sadly complained, it was a gathering of the aggrieved. These who represented the source of the pain were not present. It was a case, as usual at such events, of speaking to the choir. Where were all those blithely ignorant of their missteps and those who stepped slyly on the fringes of black students’ aspirations? It was not diverse in the one particular way it needed to be.
How could the issue be posed to raise a truly diverse audience? The presumption of guilt kept the guilty away. A white participant, I felt guilty and couldn’t find my place to speak. As the Director of Religious Life, I might be expected to bring a message of hope, but I decided they didn’t need to hear from a representative (broadly speaking) of the problem. It was their night.
In fact, the students succeeded in ministering to each other. It was a solidarity event, therapeutic and cathartic. They left to face another day closer to each other than before. I left asking myself whether, for all my commitment to civil rights over the decades, it amounted to very much that night. It was time for me to fill in some blanks.
That was all before Michael Brown and Ferguson and Black Lives Matter. Now such campus meetings have much more attendance and effect. Race is a community issue today as it hadn’t been before. But I am looking for signs that the white part of campus is organizing to do our own homework on the subject of our privilege in this society, so that we can be present in the public discussions as more informed, willing, and courageous participants.
If there is any way to talk about race in a public forum, it could help if whites were to go back and (re)read, qs I just did this week, one of the first novels in America to record the black experience here, Native Son, a blockbuster by Richard Wright (1940), and to go on reading from there!
Where do such conversations stand on your campus? Are white students and faculty doing their homework, preparatory to joining in the national dialogue? What are you reading, and who are you reading it with?