racismreview.com

At Slate’s online site, Meghan O’Rourke, has a brief article reminding us that President-elect Obama has picked a prize-winning, provocative African American poet, Elizabeth Alexander, to read at his inauguration ceremony. He is one of few presidents ever to invite a poet for such a task.

O’Rourke notes that Yale Professor Alexander has four books,

the last, American Sublime, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. A professor of African-American studies at Yale (from which she also matriculated), Alexander writes poems that are metaphorically and linguistically dense, layered, and subtle. Her work speaks about black experience. . . .But she can’t be said to privilege identity politics over aesthetics; her poems work more at being complex than didactic. In this sense, she’s an analogue to Obama, who doesn’t privilege identity politics over his strategy of inclusiveness.

Among other important works, Alexander has written a powerful poem about the extreme oppression visited on the enslaved African woman, Saartjie Baartman (1789-1815), whom virulently racist European whites termed the “The Venus Hottentot.” She was a Khoikhoi woman enticed by promises of splitting her earnings by the brother of her Dutch slaveowner in Africa if she would go to Europe to be physically exhibited to whites. Put on as a sideshow exhibit in Britain and France, she was forced to exhibit naked. After she died of illness in Europe in 1815, her remains– skeleton, genitals, and brain–were displayed by and for European “scientists” like an animal’s remains in a prominent Paris museum–even until the mid-1970s! Yet another aspect of the “Western civilization” some of our leading pundits like to brag about.

In her poem Alexander attacks this extreme exploitation and its associated scientific racism more eloquently that we can ever put into prose. I recommend the portion of her poem posted on her website here. Her GrayWolf press collection, The Venus Hottentot is described here.

There are some interesting dates to note today, given that our first black president has a Kenyan father:

December 12, 1963 - The African colony of Kenya gains its independence from the colonial power, United Kingdom.

December 12, 1964 - Prime Minister Jomo Kenyatta becomes the first President of the Republic of Kenya.

Is it odd that the mass media has shown so little interest in the Kenyan background of our president-elect? Is Africa still the “dark continent” (the old racist, colonialist term), for the mainstream media? Will this change with our new president coming into office?

And, by the way, Barack Obama will be officially elected as president only as of next Monday when our highly undemocratic institution, the electoral college, which was bestowed on us mostly by white slaveholders in 1787, meets to vote.

In mid-July Jessie did a post on the AMA apology, but I would like to add a bit more on this issue, especially about how racism works in US medicine. One good result from anti-racism efforts in the last decade may be that we are getting more serious apologies from white organizations about slavery or Jim Crow segregation. Harriet Washington reports in a late July 2008 New York Times article on one of the most institutionally racist sectors of our society, U.S. medical care institutions. Highly (photo of AMA building: Steve and Sara) and blatantly segregated until the late 1960s, she notes, the American Medical Association has recently apologized the National Medical Association, the country’s leading black medical association:

An apology to the nation’s black physicians, citing a century of ”past wrongs.”

From the beginning, U.S. medicine’s institutions have been racially and gender segregated, but Jim Crow and gender segregation increased in the early 1900s with the implementation of private and government “reforms” designed to get rid medical practitioners who were not officially licensed—which usually meant they were not from the more elite (almost all white) medical schools and often practiced various kinds of folk medicine (including midwives). These reforms did raise U.S. medical standards, at least for allopathic mainstream medicine, yet also effectively excluded many white women and practitioners of color from their traditional medical practices. And Jim Crow segregation became very central to this newly reformed medical system:

. . . black patients and doctors were often relegated to subterranean ”colored” or charity wards or banned from hospitals altogether; they had responded with their own hospitals and medical schools, at least seven of which existed in 1909. By 1938, the situation had grown so dire that Dr. Louis T. Wright of Harlem Hospital declared, ”The A.M.A. has demonstrated as much interest in the health of the Negro as Hitler has in the health of the Jew.”

Washington notes that the American Medical Association continued to be a problem until the end of the civil rights movement era:

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed without active support from the A.M.A. Title VI of the act closed the Hill-Burton loophole: segregation within hospitals became illegal….But for African-American and other antisegregationist physicians, there remained a final bastion of racial exclusion to conquer: the A.M.A.

Demands by African American physicians and some white allies that the association desegregate were ignored by its leadership until the late 1960s. From 1963 to 1968 the association had to endure public protests against its racist practices. In 1968 the association finally took action to end legal segregation in its constituent state societies.

Still, today, the percentage of U.S. physicians who are African American (2.2 percent) is still smaller than it was in 1910 (2.5 percent). And our medical care system is riddled with numerous kinds of institutional racism, as recent research reports (see various chapters here and chapter 7 here) frequently make clear. There are some very good scholarly bloggers like U. Dayton’s Prof. Vernellia Randall (see her great website here) who have given even more details on how such institutionalized racism works and how it is a violation of international human rights and anti-discrimination laws.

Note: I have given more than 100 invited lectures over the years on my research on racism at many schools and colleges within our top universities and liberal arts colleges across the country, and I have only had one invited lecture cancelled–ever. This was after two faculty members saw at the xerox machine the handout (it had quotes from whites making various racist comments, from my research interviews) that I was going to talk about. This was a Florida medical school, which had invited me and other researchers to talk about racial matters because they had had racist graffitti in their medical school classrooms. They reportedly still have problems today.

In the last few days, there has been a telling confluence of events related to racism in medicine. In the story that’s getting the most coverage from major news outlets and a few blogs, the American Medical Association (AMA) has issued an apology for more than a century of discriminatory policies toward black physicians, including those that effectively restricted membership in the AMA to whites only. The way the AMA did this in the 1890s was to restrict access so that the only physicians eligible for membership were those doctors who already belonged to a state or local medical society. The state and local medical societies were almost all racially restrictive, meaning only open to white membership. The AMA never took any action to challenge the racist practices of the state and local societies. So, the AMA could say they had a “race blind” policy, when in fact, they were complicit in the same racist exclusionary practices that ended in the same result: African-Americans were not allowed to become members in the AMA.

That’s the way they did it. The reason? Decrease competition for patients, and the revenue that patients represent. If you have any doubts about this, read Paul Starr’s compelling The Social Transformation of American Medicine (1982). And, an excellent companion to that book is Harriet Washington’s recent Medical Apartheid (2007).

And, the result? Quite simply, the racial discrimination by the AMA is part of:

“a litany of discriminatory practices that have had a devastating effect on the health of African-Americans,”

according to Dr. Nelson L. Adams, president of the National Medical Association (NMA). The NMA is an African-American physician group founded in 1895 when black physicians were excluded from the AMA. In his written statement, Dr. Adams goes on to commend the AMA for their “courageous step” and encourages us all to “seize this opportunity to move forward to correct these injustices.” It’s a noble move on Dr. Adams’ part, unfortunately, these injustices are do not exist exclusively in the distant past.

UPDATED (5:20pmEST): For example, in New Jersey just two days ago, three EMS workers were fired by the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey over a racist incident. The university’s president said that the three were terminated after cell phone camera images surfaced of paramedic trainees at University Hospital in Newark garbed in white sheets resembling Ku Klux Klan robes (photo from here).  On a local news report in the area, they interviewed a person on the street and got their reaction to this, and it reminded me of some of the accounts in Living with Racism (Feagin and Sykes, 1993).  The man, who was black (and yes that’s relevant to this story), said something along the lines of: “If this is what they got caught doing, you know that there’s other stuff going on that they didn’t get caught doing!” This is the kind of everyday racism that black people live with in this country (and elsewhere).  The harm here is not only in this incident, it’s also in the wondering about “what else” is happening in the back stage of white people’s behavior.   And, for their part, white people engage in this sort of behavior and then call black people “paranoid.”     What’s interesting too, here, is the language.  How is this ‘hazing” - a ritual following which someone is inducted into a group, club or state of being?  I don’t think that applies here.  The lead-in to the local news report I heard also referred to this incident as “horrifying for the memories it evokes of another time.”  It seems to me that such an analysis misses the harm of such acts in the present.    Of course, this kind of ongoing racism has serious health consequences for in the present tense; and, indeed, the white EMS workers in this incident are working and making emergency calls in a predominantly black and Latino neighborhood.  So much for our putatively “post-racial” society.

There’s a dust-up between two Hollywood directors that reveals some of the white racial frame in operation in American history and in popular culture representations of that history. Spike Lee observed at the Cannes Film Festival recently that there aren’t enough black actors in war films (photo credit: Babelgum). Lee said:

“Clint Eastwood made two films about Iwo Jima that ran for more than four hours total, and there was not one Negro actor on the screen… There’s no way I know why he did that. That was his vision, not mine. But I know it was pointed out to him and that he could have changed it. It’s not like he didn’t know.”

Clint Eastwood’s two recent films about Iwo Jima, “Letters from Iwo Jima” and “Flags of Our Fathers,” focus on the battle of Iwo Jima and the iconic flag-raising that happened on the American side of that battle. While lots of bloggers and pundits are quick to point out that Eastwood’s “Letters..” was told from a Japanese perspective on the battle and “and I’m pretty sure that they, at least, didn’t have a lot of black soldiers,” so obviously, Spike Lee is just a “controversy hog.” Hogwash. Spike Lee makes an insightful, valid point about how the white racial frame operates in Hollywood. Eastwood’s response was telling:

“Has he ever studied the history? They [African-American soldiers] didn’t raise the flag. The story is Flags of Our Fathers, the famous flag-raising picture, and they didn’t do that. If I go ahead and put an African-American actor in there, people’d go ‘This guy’s lost his mind.’ I mean, it’s not accurate. A guy like him should shut his face.”

This is a sort of classic response by an elite, white man who can only see history through a white racial lens that obscures the reality of African American soldiers’ contribution. The fact that Eastwood chooses to tell this particular story - the raising of the flag at Iwo Jima - is a response to the white perspective on which stories are honorable, valuable and worth telling (photo credit: Wild About Movies). Eastwood chooses to re-tell a story that is primarily about whiteness. (Indeed, the one character that is not white, played by Adam Beach, is a Native American soldier who is a tragic figure that is the personification of the stereotype of a “drunk Indian,” further valorizing the white soldiers who are his comrades.) The challenge that Spike Lee is putting to Clint Eastwood here is really: flags of whose fathers? It’s so beyond Eastwood’s grasp that African Americans might have been involved in a story-worth-telling strikes him as inconceivable and he becomes nearly hysterical in his response. In a rhetorical (white) power move Eastwood - perhaps drawing on his “Dirty Harry” persona - tells Lee to “shut his face.” One can only speculate on what Eastwood meant by his use of the phrase, “a guy like him.”

Being told off by white people is not new for Spike Lee one suspects, so he responded to Eastwood’s comments. In an interview with ABC News, Spike Lee said:

“First of all, the man is not my father and we’re not on a plantation either. He’s a great director. He makes his films, I make my films. The thing about it though, I didn’t personally attack him. And a comment like ‘a guy like that should shut his face’ — come on Clint, come on. He sounds like an angry old man right there.”

This line is really the key to this controversy, and to the white racial frame, it seems to me: “He makes his films, I make my films.” Every cultural product - whether it is a film, a book, a photograph or a poem - has an author that shapes that product. The difference in our culture is that Spike Lee’s films get widely interpreted as “black films” or “African American cinema,” whereas Clint Eastwood’s films are simply “American,” or “mainstream.” And, Eastwood gets a total pass on that by the press, by cultural critics, and by other filmmakers. You know, until Spike Lee spoke up. Spike’s on solid ground when he makes this proposal to Clint:

“If he wishes, I could assemble African-American men who fought at Iwo Jima and I’d like him to tell these guys that what they did was insignificant and they did not exist,” he said. “I’m not making this up. I know history. I’m a student of history. And I know the history of Hollywood and its omission of the one million African-American men and women who contributed to World War II.”

I hope that Eastwood takes Lee up on his offer. It’s time that white Hollywood directors (and producers) move beyond the white racial frame and start creating media that more accurately reflects the tremendous diversity that is the most interesting part of American culture.

Recent intercommunal conflicts in Chad, Cote d’Ivoire, DR Congo, Kenya, Liberia, Nigeria, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan and Zimbabwe bring to mind the role of a certain ethnocentrism or tribalism in conflicts in sub-Saharan Africa. In Rwanda, the genocide that took place because of enmity between Hutus and Tutsis has become our contemporary example of tribalism gone wild and uncontrolled. Similar conflicts in Kenya between the Luos and Kikuyus, in Liberia between the Americo-Liberians and the native Africans, in Nigeria between Northern Hausa/Fulani and the Southern Ibos and/or Yorubas have been equally violent and tragic (map image from here).


What we are yet to uncover is a mapping of how ethnic differences become prominent; in the narrative reports from the recent conflicts in Kenya, there were incidents of long-time neighbors turning against each other; we find the same narratives from Rwanda and Liberia where neighbors and friends become enemies overnight. How do ethnic differences turn into tragic violence between groups? Are some African countries better able to prevent ethnic differences from turning into violent communal conflicts? When and how do ethnic differences trump peaceful and fruitful social interactions over time between two groups? How remarkable is it that the 11 countries listed above constitute a third of all the countries in that region? These are questions that speak to the extent of social distance among ethnic groups.


Most importantly, does this tribalism or ethnocentrism in sub-Saharan Africa bear any resemblance to white racism in America and Europe? I think so, when we consider the outcomes of it – ethnic or racial patronage, economic rewards that accrue to citizens based on tribal or ethnic and racial affiliations, and the violence that one race/ethnic group/tribe visits on the other.


In Africa, after independence, the emergent nation-states shunned tribal-based or ethnic-based political parties – the so-called ‘tribal unions’ were not consonant with the ideals of the new nationalism based on a progressive ideal of a community of diverse ethnic groups. Even there, some of the political parties evolved along tribal or ethnic lines. The strain between the traditional structures (chiefs, kings and their privileged groups) and the nationalists was palpable and, I argue, has not completely subsided.


Another important factor is the sinister role Europeans played in heightening inter-ethnic tensions and conflicts, as noted by historical accounts (compare, for instance volumes 7 & 8 of the General History of Africa, published by United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, UNESCO). To what extent can we ascribe the current post-independence ethnic or tribal torment to the distal insidious machinations of colonizers who clearly favored one ethnic over others? For instance, we need to map the historical distal role the British played in instigating the Biafra War in Nigeria; and the historical distal role the Belgians played in the genocide in Rwanda and the current political and economic morass in the Democratic Republic of Congo.


In Liberia, we would need to map the historical distal role of racism in fomenting and justifying the domination of the Americo-Liberians over the ethnic groups of the interior including the Kru and the Mano. We know that the tension between these groups eventually led to a brutal civil war in the country.


We need to study these two phenomena – racism and tribalism – together more closely. Africans from south of the Sahara who cry ‘woe’ when they encounter racism in America, must search themselves for ideas of ethnic or tribal superiority as well and how these tribal ideas configure social relations in their countries of birth.


In reality, ethnic or tribal stereotypes persist in Africa. Recently (May 2008), I received from a friend an email spewing stereotypes (some negative) about four ethnic groups in Ghana [compare a similar posting here]; at first, I laughed at the rambling message; but the subtext was troubling; the email was spreading stereotypes I had heard growing up some 40 years ago in Ghana. I wondered: how can the repetition of these stereotypes help social interaction among groups? Such an email regurgitating stereotypes about racial groups in America would be racist and crass and it is no less when it is about groups in Africa. The consequences of lingering racial, ethnic and tribal stereotypes can be tragic – in the US and sub Saharan Africa. Ultimately, these stereotypes suggest a certain level of social distance – spatially and metaphorically.


I think we must instigate a global analysis of tribal, ethnic, racist thinking to see where they overlap and how we can combat them. We should survey African immigrants about their attitudes on ethnicity, and to what effect their perceptions of tribal or ethnic superiority interact with their experiences of racism.


But I think there is a broader research agenda here as well; how does white racism abet ideas or perceptions of ethnic group superiority in other continents and countries?


~ Yoku Shaw-Taylor PhD
National Opinion Research Center
University of Chicago

As I have been reading a lot about “race” matters and U.S. elections, including the views and discussions of Dr. Wright and Senator Obama, I have also been working on a book on the white racial frame and its long history. This makes me think a lot about the roots and foundations underlying today’s issues of racism. For this project, I have been doing a lot of research on the history of slavery and legal segregation. Clearly, these are the foundation of this country, with huge continuing significance.

One reason that the bloody realities of slavery, and later the near slavery of legal segregation, have shaped this society so fundamentally is because from their first decades they were legitimated by a dominant racial framing, firmly imbedded in private and state bureaucracies, and firmly legalized under North American laws. The development of the systemic oppression of Africans and indigenous peoples was made possible by the increasing organizational power of bureaucratized European and colonial companies and states. The norms of such military and other state and private bureaucracies accented stability, discipline, calculability of results, and impersonality. Mass killings and attacks were possible without bureaucracy, but recurring wars on Indians and a large-scale system of African American enslavement were not. Then, as in more recent times, extensive oppression requires complex organization and organizational agents and actors. Central to this bureaucratization and legitimation of slavery was the English and North American legal system. The legal system was, and still is, much more than just laws for by means of judges and other government actors, it enshrines and protects the elite-controlled hierarchical structure of society. In the North American case the legal system enshrined the views and values of the governing elite and, thus, a highly inegalitarian social structure for the new society.

The foundation of this legal and government-bureaucratic system is the U.S. Constitution. In 1787, in Philadelphia, fifty-five white men met and created a constitution for what has been called the “first democratic nation.” They were of European origin, mostly well-off for their day, and or had been slaveowners. Many others profited as merchants, shippers, lawyers, bankers from the trade in slaves, commerce in slave-produced agricultural products, or supplying provisions to slaveholders and slave-traders. In the preamble the founders cite “We the People,” but this did encompass those enslaved–one fifth of the population. As I show in Racist America, slavery was central to the making of this U.S. Constitution. At least seven sections of the Constitution protected the 140-year-old system of slavery: (1) Article 1, Section 2 counts slaves as three fifths of a person; (2) Article 1, Sections 2 and 9 apportion taxes using the three-fifths formula; (3) Article 1, Section 8 gives Congress authority to suppress slave insurrections; (4) Article 1, Section 9 prevents abolishing the slave trade before 1808; (5) Article 1, Sections 9 and 10 exempt slave-made goods from export duties; (6) Article 4, Section 2 requires the return of fugitive slaves; and (7) Article 4, Section 4 stipulates that the federal government must help states put down domestic violence, including slave uprisings. This is the same Constitution (and the same founders like GW) that so many people today say we should treasure and look back to as our model for equality, liberty, and justice as we deal with racism and other troubling issues today (?).

The bureaucratization and legalization of the oppression of Indians and African Americans made it easier for the European colonists and their descendants to rationalize that oppression. Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner (The Way We Think) have noted how in the human mind the bloody killing of groups of people–such as Native Americans, or later, European Jews—sometimes gets blended with “ordinary bureaucratic frames to produce a blended concept of genocide as an everyday organizational operation. Because the projection to the blend is only partial, certain people who could not bring themselves to operate in the frame of genocide may find themselves operating comfortably in the blend.” For the most part, systems of oppression like Native American genocide and African American slavery are not carried out by human “monsters” with extreme psychological disorders. Most European Americans, including the majority who did not hold people in slavery, supported the “normal” slavery system with their indifference or various forms of collaboration, such as buying and selling slave-produced products in markets. As Zygmunt Bauman (Modernity and the Holocaust, 1989) has argued in analyzing the recent oppression of European Jews, “Evil can do its dirty work, hoping that most people most of the time will refrain from doing rash, reckless things – and resisting evil is rash and reckless. Evil needs neither enthusiastic followers nor an applauding audience – the instinct of self-preservation will do.

These ideas of Fauconnier, Turner, and Bauman do help make sense out of how “normal,” bureaucratic, and everyday the foundational system of racism has become. Evils, like the highly racist attacks (the white racial framing, again) on Senator Obama and Dr. Wright, now in the several millions on the Internet, or the highly sexist attacks on Senator Clinton, only require most people to stand by passively on the sidelines. And these attacks and the racial/gender framing behind them will help account for the likely loss of either of them to McCain in November. Our centuries- long racist and sexist history makes this quite clear.

I welcome your thoughts and comments on this train of thought.

Xicanopwr.com has a nice summary of the flap over an Absolut Vodka ad (image from here), one made by a major European company. The ad:

shows a historical map of the Mexico before Texas’ Independence and the Mexico-US War of 1846-48 had occurred. The offending map showed when the American Southwest - Texas, California, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, and part of Wyoming - as we know it, belonged to Mexico. It was not until the signing of “Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo” that not only ended the war, but also defined our present-day borders. The ad was created by TBWA’s Mexican advertising firm Teran/TBWA. A year ago, Absolut vodka’s embarked in a new campaign strategy, breaking away from the old bottle series. The new Absolut World campaign invites the consumers to imagine their idea of a perfect world; a world that possibly wouldn’t take place but only “in an Absolut World.” The ad was solely geared toward the Mexican market.

This ad has stirred up a hornet’s nest on the anti-immigration sites and among nativist groups, as xicanopwr continues:

This all began when conservative columnist Michelle Malkin decided to use the ad to whip up anti-Mexican sentiment by dubbing the ad “Absolut Reconquista.” Soon after, the US media outlets noticed the ad. The outrage by the nativist over this ad has caused inspired an anti-immigrantion, FIRE Coalition, to start anti-Absolut website called AbsolutlyNot.com. The group also created a new web ad depicting an “Absolut World” as today’s borders with a giant fence between the US and Mexico. The nativist group is also asking people to boycott Absolut Vodka and is demanded that person who approved an ad be fired.

There is considerable anti-immigrant nativism here, as well as an ignorance about US history and how our imperialistic map got that way. The fact that most (especially white) Americans do not know, or prefer to forget, their brutal and imperialistic history in regard to Mexico makes it easier to rationalize these nativist attacks on an ad with an accurate map of what was once northern Mexico.


In April 1846 President James Polk, seeking to gain “all Mexico” (as he and other U.S. imperialists said), sent U.S. troops into an area (“Texas”) recently taken by force from Mexico, and then on into an area of the borderlands he knew Mexicans had long treated as sovereign territory. Polk intentionally provoked a border clash between U.S. and Mexican troops, an incident that enabled him to claim, falsely, that Mexico had started a war. Later historians have linked this trumped-up war to the imperialist and racist notion that the U.S. had a right to move into Mexican territory as part of its “manifest destiny” to rule over “lesser” peoples.


This imperialist notion rationalized the desire of many European American invaders for unjust enrichment in the form of land. Indeed, the border area where the first skirmish took place soon became the home for very large Anglo cattle ranches. In 1845 jingoistic journalist John O’Sullivan coined the “manifest destiny” phrase, when he wrote in the United States Magazine and Democratic Review that:

“Our manifest destiny is to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.”

Together with many other European Americans, O’Sullivan argued that the U.S. government had a mandate to take the U.S. way of life to “backward” peoples such as Mexicans and Native Americans.


However, ironically, during and after the Mexican-American war some white southerners were concerned that too many of these mixed-race people might be brought into the United States. During congressional debates over annexing Mexican territory, prominent Senator John C. Calhoun argued that the U.S. had never:

“incorporated into the Union any but the Caucasian race. . . . Ours is a government of the white man. . . . in the whole history of man . . . there is no instance whatever of any civilized colored race, of any shade, being found equal to the establishment and maintenance of free government.”

In his view, as well as well as that of other whites, the “colored and mixed-breed” Mexicans were unacceptable in the “free” United States. Thus, the first Mexican residents of the United States did not immigrate, but were brought into the new nation by violent conquest during the Mexican-American War of the 1840s. With the end of the Mexican-American war came the incorporation of more than a hundred thousand Mexicans. They were forcibly absorbed into the expanding U.S. empire, which now encompassed a large portion of what was northern Mexico. White politicians and economic entrepreneurs sought to dominate the entire continent. In this they were very successful. Indeed, it is the European Americans who today are “aliens”–the descendants of invading “aliens” who took over northern Mexico by force. (For references on much of this history, see, among numerous places, here.)

In honor of black history month, I thought it only right to share one of the most positive contributions of the Historically Black College on black students. While conducting research over the past two years at an HBC in Texas, I have been inspired by the attention and aspiration of faculty to delve into the history and significance of the university and inspire students with an environment rich in history. Because of this, the university fosters a positive self and community identity. For instance, before conducting this research, I had my own experiences attending a university in which I was the only student of color in my classes for a significant portion of my academic career. In this respect I coupled my personal experiences with some existing research on black student experiences at predominantly white colleges and sought to uncover how universities can help or hinder a positive black identity. Although my experience was one in which I was constantly aware and reminded of my difference, I am very fortunate to conduct research at an institution that makes it a point to ensure black students have an avenue to an education sans racist and differential attitudes. This is where the much needed HBC comes in.   The students in my research take considerable pride in seeing others around them who are successful, thriving, supportive, and nurturing. One student shared:

“it feels so good to see black professors, engineers, and administrators that care about us and our future. It lets me see that it can be done.”

Along this path, several students shared this sentiment, but extended this aspect to include the relationship they have with faculty, as in this quote from my research:

“Faculty members here are like family. If you need something; anything, they try to help. I can remember when my family was displaced because of hurricane Rita, one of my professors found them a place to stay.”

This is to say, the HBC provides black students with more than an academic setting; it provides them a safe haven from the outside world and a reality in which they feel devalued. Students recognize the significance of the university setting as a place where they can learn and feel comfortable and confident about who they are and what they are attempting to be. Put best by one of my female participants:

“I never have to think about the fact that I am black when I am here. I am comfortable and when I look around, I see others that are like me trying to do similar things. It is really awesome to see.”

So, when it comes to helping black students obtain their dream of success through education, it is important that we remember the significance of the Historically Black College.

Abraham Lincoln is often considered the greatest American (male) of the 19th century, but I think the evidence for that designation better fits another person, the brilliant Frederick Douglass.   In this first week of Black History Month, it is time for us to recognize just how brilliant, courageous, and far-seeing Frederick Douglass was.  Self-taught, learned, and extraordinarily eloquent Douglass became, once he had fled his violent enslavement at the hands of border state whites, a formidable opponent of racial slavery and later segregation. A leading abolitionist (and advocate for women’s suffrage), over his life Douglass made 2,000 speeches and wrote thousands of editorials, articles, and letters, mostly analyzing systemic racism he experienced. One of the greatest U.S. orators and intellectuals ever, outspoken critic of Lincoln’s war policies, Douglass played a major role in bringing down centuries-old U.S. slavery, including leading the effort to get many thousands of Black men accepted in the U.S. army, soldiers who made a critical difference in Union victories in the South’s “war of rebellion.”

In his speeches and writings Douglass offers deep insights that have yet to make their way into mainstream social science and popular media analyses, even today. He was ahead of his and our time. In one probing speech Douglass noted the great white obsession:

“Go where you will, you will meet with him [the black American]. He is alike present in the study of the [white] learned and thoughtful, and in the play house of the gay and thoughtless. We see him pictured at our street corners, and hear him in the songs of our market places. The low and the vulgar curse him, the snob and the flunky affect to despise him, the mean and the cowardly assault him, because they know . . . that they can abuse him with impunity. . . . To the statesman and philosopher he is an object of intense curiosity. . . . Of the books, pamphlets, and speeches concerning him, there is literally, no end. He is the one inexhaustible topic of conversation at our firesides and in our public halls. ” From: Frederick Douglass, “The United States Cannot Remain Half-Slave and Half-Free,” in (Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings, edited by P. S. Foner and Y. Taylor Chicago: Lawrence Hall Books, 1999).

In our time this white obsession persists, and most scholars today miss his point, Continue Reading »