Last night we had well over 120 faculty, staff and students attend the Teach-In on Race including President Waldron and various administrators throughout Baruch. It was a provocative conversation on the way in which one individual, Senator Barack Obama, has transformed the conversation of race. Professor Johanna Fernandez said, to paraphrase, his March 18, 2008 address on race will be studied as literature long after this moment. The issue of identity politics was a source of concern for many students who shared themselves in the dialogue half of the event. Faculty and some students urged for an even broader framework around the politics of race not only in the US but also around issues of racial purity, economic racism, and demographic considerations impacted by the U.S.'s past armed conflicts with other nations, for example. There was much more to be said and it was agreed we'd continue these conversations in the fall at Baruch.
As the principal organizer I want to thank each and every person who attended, all the faculty who contributed to framing the discussion, and to those of you who couldn't make it but expressed your interest in attending, THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU.
We took names for a mailing list and we will be adding names to a mailing list for future events on diversity at Baruch as well as global issues of race, underrepresentation, and difference. If you're interested the best thing to do is visit our blog and we will soon create a pathway for you to get on a mailing list for future Teach-Ins. Thanks again to everyone who attended and contributed to make this event a powerful, inspiring, and thought-provoking event.
Remember - agree to be offended (you will be offended in such a diverse converation of values and opinions), but stay in the conversation anyhow!
Tolstoy once wrote "Every one wants to change the world. No one wants to change himself." Stay in the conversation. Change gon' come. Best, Professor Kyra Gaunt kyra_gaunt@baruch.cuny.edu
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2 comments:
First off, thank you and everyone involved for putting this event together, it was great to see so many young people come out for an event such as this. Since one of the principals of the event was "agree to be offended," I hope no one will mind if I as a Baruch student speak somewhat harshly about the Professor's who spoke at the event.
The event was billed as a “conversation” that was to reflect on Senator Obama’s “A More Perfect Union” address. However, after each professor gave a perfunctory acknowledgment to how great it was to be able to have this “conversation” and how they would keep their remarks brief so we could proceed into the “conversation,” almost every Professor speaking went on for around two to three times their allotted time. As a result, approximately two hours of the two and a half hour event was spent on lectures by the Professor’s (with a few students sprinkled in who managed to keep their pledge to be brief), with the small remainder of the time spent having an actual conversation. At the point that the conversation actually began, at the very least half of the students, in what was originally an overflow room had left, leaving a much smaller and older (it seemed as if a good amount of people who trickled in as the event went on were Professor’s or other staff) room. Indeed I could hear many of the students around me grumbling about the lack of conversation as they trickled out of the room throughout the event.
What was just as, if not more disappointing than the Professor’s monopolization of the time, was how irrelevant many of their comments were. In my view, it certainly seemed that the several students given the opportunity to speak, in their brief comments were far more incisive in their analysis of the speech and the meaning of Obama’s candidacy, than any of the Professor’s. It seemed as if the Professor’s- with few if any exceptions-completely missed the point and originality of the speech, and gave comments that not only could have just as easily been uttered before Obama’s speech or candidacy, but probably several decades ago. This could have been foreshadowed in the choice of the segment of the speech that was selected to be played.
The selection showed Sen. Obama expounding on the history of racial injustice that has taken place in this nation and its continuous effect on the socioeconomic status of African Americans. Sen. Obama spoke no doubt quite accurately, and no discussion of race in this country could be complete without it. However this recital of injustice was not the main thrust of the speech, nor what made it such a unique document. Indeed, I would assume most of students who were present, and had not seen the speech had heard someone say something similar to this portion of it in the past.
The point of the speech and what makes it so special, is it’s discussion of how the horrible history of race becomes tangled in everyone’s-black, white, and other’s- frustrations and insecurity, how this complex entanglement leads people away from honest contemplation and dialogue, and how without this, the poison of race will continue to seep through our politics and society and keep us from addressing our problems. This could have been illustrated by showing the selections that were really the centerpiece of the speech; his comparison between Rev. Wright and his white Grandmother, his discussion of the difference between the black experience in America, and that of the immigrant experience of the white ethnic- and how these differences lead to miscommunication, his view of the pettiness of our discourse (especially in the media) inhibiting us from making real progress.
However, instead a fairly generic portion of the speech was played, to be proceeded by a fairly generic “discussion” of race. Instead of expounding on the points made in Sen. Obama’s groundbreaking speech, we had a procession of predictable and quite frankly boring diatribes. The white liberal Professor who spent 10-15 minutes proving (I think to himself mostly) that there is no biological basis for race, although I’m quite sure that if he had simply asked by a show of hands if anybody actually had the slightest belief in such things, there would be no takers, and we could have had the time saved for conversation. We had another Professor, who after going well over her time discussing how apparently Obama’s candidacy came out of the New Left movements (just don’t tell Obama that, since he sees his main purpose as a candidate getting past the sort of identity politics endemic to this), decided to spend another 10 minutes rallying against post 9/11 U.S. militarism, and Israeli treatment of Palestinians, both no doubt topics worthy of conversation in their own time and place, but again another 10 minutes less for conversation. I won’t bother going through each discourse one by one, but other highlights include several minutes of somewhat conspiratorial rambling about not being able to get Jesse Jackson convention speeches on the internet (by the way here ya go, http://video.aol.com/video-detail/jesse-jackson-addresses-the-democratic-national-convention/1934006445, took me all of 5 seconds to find), and of course probably near a half an hour on ethnic changes in the census over the course of U.S. history, which is again a fine topic for an academic convention, but probably not worth the time during “conversation” reflecting on Obama’s speech and race.
Again the true tragedy of it is that it seemed that the students –if allowed to speak-actually had something to say. They, unlike the Professor’s, seemed to understand what was so important about the speech, and reflected on it thoughtfully in their brief comments. The brief conversation, focused on what it meant to be a hyphenated American, had far more relevance to race in contemporary America than anything the Professor’s spoke on. Anyway I’m still glad you held the event, and it is a start, however hopefully in the future, it can be stressed that a conversation is back and fourth between the group, not an excuse to draw people into a room on the basis of an important current topic, and then use the time for small portion of the group's self indulgence.
Thanks aabls for opening up the online forum and for sharing so honestly and generously.
What you comments raise is that I failed to fully articulate how the event would run. It ran by design throughout. People always go over time, as Provost McCarthy noted, at Teach-ins and as I suggested we want ideas about what you'd like to have in the future. Please let us know if you'd like to organize an event next fall. We'd love to support a student-led event and you were absolutely right about the students' voices--they were remarkable. Faculty were not there to necessarily create a linear conversation about race and...we didn't did we. Everything worked by design but I failed to fill everyone in on the overall picture at the top.
We pulled this off in one week with an amazing response. The response says we should continue. How? That's up to you, each and everyone one of you and us. Let's be committed to continuing the converstion and agreeing to be offended and straight about it all. Thanks for starting us off.
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