Continuing the Community Conversation: Confronting Reality & Doing What What Matters to Get Things Right

On December 2, 2014, we gathered for the first Community Conversation: Confronting Reality & Doing What What Matters to Get Things Right.  Dr. Tanya Williams and Dr. Kathy O’Bear brought us together in a webinar format. 

I want to thank Dr. Williams and Dr. O’Bear for giving their time to this on-going work of ACPA to liberate all of us from internalized and structural racism. I also want to thank Heather Lou for initiating the first call immediately following the non-indictment in Ferguson.  

The next two calls are on Sunday, December 7 at 4 EST and Tuesday, December 9 at 4:30 PM. Additional call in information can be found here. 

The first Confronting Reality call was joined by 64 people from around the United States including members of the community at large in various cities, advocacy organizations like the Museum of Tolerance, and ACPA member students, faculty and administrators.  

Many expressed their feelings and described the impact on them as individuals as well as providing national/historical and campus context.

ACPA has an open space on our web site home page “Tell Us” where people can continue to post feelings, reactions and suggestions for this work together. In addition, we want to ask people to contribute resources that can help people with community and campus based interventions and support on this Google doc form.

You are also welcome to write me directly at clove@acpa.nche.edu.  

I want you to know that we are constructing a much broader national conversation opportunity on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, January 19, 2015. You are invited to bring your classes, colleagues, friends and family to that dialogue via our new ACPA broadcasting platform.  The links will be distributed via e-mail to all members and posted on our website and Facebook. We have invited individuals who have been working directly on St. Louis and Ferguson campuses and as community organizers and leaders so you can hear what has been working, what has been learned and what they believe needs to happen to get things right. 

We don’t want to just bind up the wounds in Ferguson and wait for the next Ferguson to erupt.  We do not want to become so numb to events like Ferguson that we indeed expect the next one and simply wait for it to recede. Practitioners of non-violent resistance tell us that our resistance to injustice must be relentless to succeed.  As student affairs practitioners and educators, our resistance to injustice must also include our relentless willingness to self-evaluate, to learn anew and to change.

We do not want to just soften the blow or reduce the harm of racism.  We want to end racism once and for all. We fully understand that the end may not come in our lifetimes and we want to be active and intentional participants in the process and path to that end.

We have an opportunity to create the template for these conversations throughout the United States. And, we have a chance to disprove the notion that a national conversation on race cannot “go anywhere” even though we hold many different perspectives about racism.  

Here are a few that I have been reading in preparation for our next Community Conversation.

For most, racism no longer wears a hood, but it causes unsuspecting people to see the world through a racially biased lens. It's what one Duke University sociologist, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva calls "racism without racists." He says it's a new way of maintaining white domination in places like Ferguson and that “the main problem nowadays is not the folks with the hoods, but the folks dressed in suits.” As people talk about what the grand jury's decision in Ferguson and in New York mean, Bonilla-Silva and others say it's time for Americans to update their language on racism to reflect what it has become and not what it used to be.

As Nicholas Kristof recently pointed out in The New York Times, the U.S. has a greater wealth gap between whites and blacks than South Africa had during apartheid. Racial inequities might seem invisible partly because segregated housing patterns mean that many middle and upper-class whites live far from economically impoverished blacks.  

In advance of the ACPA nationwide conversation on January 19, we are spending two days at one of these intersections in St. Louis/Ferguson.  This crossroad is not unique. The same one exists in Cleveland and Detroit, New Orleans and Baltimore. You know where they are in your city.  As white people of privilege, we have sanctioned the ‘new racism’ that Bonilla-Silva describes.  It is ‘subtle, institutionalized and seemingly nonracial,’ but just as destructive and deadly.

A recent study that was published in the American Journal of Sociology showed that newly released white felons experience better job hunting success than young black men with no criminal record, A  famous experiment shows how racial bias can shape a person's economic prospects. Professors at the University of Chicago and MIT sent 5,000 fictitious resumes in response to 1,300 help wanted ads. Each resume listed identical qualifications except for one variation - some applicants had “Anglo-sounding names” such as "Brendan," while others had “black-sounding names” such as "Jamal." Applicants with Anglo-sounding names were 50% more likely to get calls for interviews than their black-sounding counterparts.

Most of the people who didn't call "Jamal" were probably unaware that their decision was motivated by racial bias, says Daniel L. Ames, a UCLA researcher who has studied and written about bias. "If you ask someone on the hiring committee, none of them are going to say they're racially biased," Ames says. "They're not lying. They're just wrong."

Ames says such biases are dangerous because they're often unseen. "Racial biases can in some ways be more destructive than overt racism because they're harder to spot, and therefore harder to combat," he says. Still, some people are suspicious of focusing on the word bias. They prefer invoking the term racism because they say it leaves bruises. People claiming bias can admit they may have acted in racially insensitive ways but were unaware of their subconscious motivations.

"The idea of calling it racial bias lessens the blow," says Crystal Moten, a history professor at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. We need to ask ourselves if we want to be let off the hook when “violence against people of color is the national status quo."

At the end of each ACPA Community Conversation, we are asking the participants to contribute resources and the best ideas and practices that really make a difference in their working environments on campuses and within communities throughout the United States.  These are all being published on the ACPA website.  We will continue these conversations and invite those individuals and groups who are doing work that really matters to report those positive results to present on our national broadcasts so everyone can benefit.  We will also highlight what does not work so we do not repeat those mistakes.

If you want to join this conversation in advance, here are a few questions that I a have been thinking about and asking myself.  You are welcome to “think out loud” with me at Tell Us regarding these and others you have.

• “How have the events of Ferguson changed your life/feelings/perspective/understanding going forward?”
• “Do you believe that the harmful effects, indeed racism itself, can be eradicated?”
• “What is one thing you would do to help you, your family, your friends, your religious community, your campus community, the broader community to stop bias behaviors based on race?  To end racism?”
• “What are the larger structural, institutional frameworks or scaffolding that hold racism in place?”  How can we break these up?  
• “What is your earliest memory of racism in your life?  How were you a participant in it?”

On college campuses, all leaders do not actively guide their communities to eliminate bias or racism. In fact, many perpetuate bias and racism against people of color, people of differing abilities and incomes, people of differing sexual orientations, gender expressions and identities, people who are successful athletes and those who are not.  What is the role and responsibility of an authentic and transformational leader on a college campus today?  

Would you send your child to a college campus that was ranked as having significant evidence of racial bias?  How would you measure this bias?  How would you ask us to measure it?  How would you ask our government to measure it?  And, then report it?

Thank you for your many contributions, support, encouragement and critique.

Respectfully,

Cindi Love

Image source.