Saturday, January 21, 2006
Educating for the 21st Century: Putting Diversity Front & Center
This seems to be my week for facing the reality of white privilege and racism in our country, and indeed in my own backyard--not that this is an issue that's going to go away at the end of the week. Last week Frances Kendall, a nationally recognized "diversity consultant," came back to Simon's Rock College, where I teach, to report on the "Diversity Climate Assessment Study" she conducted at the school nearly a year ago. She painted a pretty sobering picture of race and gender relations at the college.
I wrote about it at length on PB&J, the student blog at Simon's Rock that I launched last year in a class on alternative media. The post has generated a lively conversation, mostly among students, though I know the faculty and staff have been quietly checking it out as well. Some think Simon's Rock spent the money on this consultant unwisely, especially since she didn't tell students of color anything they didn't already know.
Maybe so, but as Kendall herself replied to this complaint, "you can't be a prophet in your own land," meaning it can be helpful to have an outsider come in and give you the straight story, especially an outsider with the experience and authority that she has acquired in her many years of anti-racist activism and diversity consulting on college campuses.
It's true that the people who care about diversity issues at Simon's Rock already knew that "faculty of color are in pain and feel psychologically damaged" by their time at the college, and that "women faculty feel stifled," and that faculty of both these groups feel overburdened by an excessive mentoring load on top of the regular courseload that they share with the white male faculty. But it's one thing for us to know this, and another thing for the administration to hear it from the lips of an impartial outside expert.
Frances Kendall made it quite clear in her presentation that she was only reflecting back to us what she had been told in the focus groups and interviews she'd conducted on campus last year. So of course we knew it already. But she's packaged it for us complete with recommendations for improvement, and now if the administration does not follow through on making changes, we will have that much more ammunition for our complaints.
The fact that her visit to campus has started us talking and thinking in terms of immediate change is in itself valuable, as far as I'm concerned. Tonight I was at the library after my UNIFEM Book Club meeting, and the head librarian struck up a conversation with me about the matter, suggesting that the library could host some "teas" in which diversity would be the topic of structured discussion.
As I said in my post on PB&J, I think we should integrate a discussion of racism and white privilege (along with straight privilege and male privilege, at the very least) into the First Year Seminar that is an A.A. graduation requirement for all students. If Simon's Rock is serious about improving the "diversity climate" on campus, then the college needs to mandate that students engage with these issues on a sustained and regular basis, not just in a two-hour workshop during orientation week.
In Grassroots: A Field Guide to Feminist Activism, Jen Baumgardner and Amy Richards talk about the importance of "mandatory preventative education" for students. In this case, they're referring to sex ed, "teaching students about affirmative consent, making them understand and abide by rules of conduct that respect their fellow students" (69), but the idea is just as valid for diversity. Young people should be as informed as possible about the realities of racism and white privilege (and, again, straight and male privilege), so they can navigate social and professional relationships gracefully, avoiding ignorant and painful mistakes. And maybe they'll even be fired up enough about what they learn of racism to become anti-racist activists themselves, in their own circles and communities.
As Kendall said in her presentation at Simon's Rock, we should educate students about racism and white privilege "not out of a sense of guilt, but out of the desire to educate them fully for the multicultural world they will encounter in the 21st century." Segregation is still alive and well in America, and it's possible to get to the ripe old age of 16 (entering age for Simon's Rock freshman) without having had a meaningful encounter with a person of another race. In college, even though whites still predominate, people of color are mixed in much more than they are in the lower grades.
Why should we expect that young people will automatically know how to relate to each other across the lines of various differences? It's our responsibility as educators to frame that encounter respectfully, and facilitate discussions on what it means to be white or black or inbetween in this country today. We shirk this responsibility at our own peril.
I wrote about it at length on PB&J, the student blog at Simon's Rock that I launched last year in a class on alternative media. The post has generated a lively conversation, mostly among students, though I know the faculty and staff have been quietly checking it out as well. Some think Simon's Rock spent the money on this consultant unwisely, especially since she didn't tell students of color anything they didn't already know.
Maybe so, but as Kendall herself replied to this complaint, "you can't be a prophet in your own land," meaning it can be helpful to have an outsider come in and give you the straight story, especially an outsider with the experience and authority that she has acquired in her many years of anti-racist activism and diversity consulting on college campuses.
It's true that the people who care about diversity issues at Simon's Rock already knew that "faculty of color are in pain and feel psychologically damaged" by their time at the college, and that "women faculty feel stifled," and that faculty of both these groups feel overburdened by an excessive mentoring load on top of the regular courseload that they share with the white male faculty. But it's one thing for us to know this, and another thing for the administration to hear it from the lips of an impartial outside expert.
Frances Kendall made it quite clear in her presentation that she was only reflecting back to us what she had been told in the focus groups and interviews she'd conducted on campus last year. So of course we knew it already. But she's packaged it for us complete with recommendations for improvement, and now if the administration does not follow through on making changes, we will have that much more ammunition for our complaints.
The fact that her visit to campus has started us talking and thinking in terms of immediate change is in itself valuable, as far as I'm concerned. Tonight I was at the library after my UNIFEM Book Club meeting, and the head librarian struck up a conversation with me about the matter, suggesting that the library could host some "teas" in which diversity would be the topic of structured discussion.
As I said in my post on PB&J, I think we should integrate a discussion of racism and white privilege (along with straight privilege and male privilege, at the very least) into the First Year Seminar that is an A.A. graduation requirement for all students. If Simon's Rock is serious about improving the "diversity climate" on campus, then the college needs to mandate that students engage with these issues on a sustained and regular basis, not just in a two-hour workshop during orientation week.
In Grassroots: A Field Guide to Feminist Activism, Jen Baumgardner and Amy Richards talk about the importance of "mandatory preventative education" for students. In this case, they're referring to sex ed, "teaching students about affirmative consent, making them understand and abide by rules of conduct that respect their fellow students" (69), but the idea is just as valid for diversity. Young people should be as informed as possible about the realities of racism and white privilege (and, again, straight and male privilege), so they can navigate social and professional relationships gracefully, avoiding ignorant and painful mistakes. And maybe they'll even be fired up enough about what they learn of racism to become anti-racist activists themselves, in their own circles and communities.
As Kendall said in her presentation at Simon's Rock, we should educate students about racism and white privilege "not out of a sense of guilt, but out of the desire to educate them fully for the multicultural world they will encounter in the 21st century." Segregation is still alive and well in America, and it's possible to get to the ripe old age of 16 (entering age for Simon's Rock freshman) without having had a meaningful encounter with a person of another race. In college, even though whites still predominate, people of color are mixed in much more than they are in the lower grades.
Why should we expect that young people will automatically know how to relate to each other across the lines of various differences? It's our responsibility as educators to frame that encounter respectfully, and facilitate discussions on what it means to be white or black or inbetween in this country today. We shirk this responsibility at our own peril.
