Futuring Diversity 2005
Conference Outcomes
Participants’ Recommendations for the Center
Synthesis of Group Recommendations: Day One (PowerPoint file)
Cumulative Summary of Individual Written Feedback
Post—Conference Reflection Papers
Sonya Miller
Deirdre Raynor
Tiffany Willoughby-Herard
Bill Woodson
Futuring Diversity Working Conference
Student Journalism: Writing and Perseverance Beyond the Culture Wars, the End of History, the New World Order, and the Clash of Civilizations
In this essay, I discuss publishing and journalism as a means for critical engagement among students who are concerned about disrupting social inequality on college campuses. When I was an undergraduate at Cornell in the heady mid-1990s, everyday conversation seemed to be saturated with the logics of the culture wars. Seemingly simple decisions such as which Teaching Assistant you took for Introduction to Government felt certain to be decisive in one’s career because publications—which many graduate students participated in as editors, contributors, and Student Affairs staff—like the Cornell Review: The Conservative Voice at Cornell and Umoja Sasa: Voice of the Voiceless seemed to be warring over souls. And trying to figure out which camp was going to contribute to the liberatory sense of blackness that I was so desperate to cultivate was not hard at all. The former publication deployed a toxic yet campy anti-essentialism, which would have been humorous except that it often targeted specific campus activists for cultural denigration. That it often targeted what students of color and progressive and environmentalist students viewed as our hard-won institutions—residence halls that were also learning environs for multiculturalism and ethnic and gender studies academic departments—often seemed like simple ignorance and fair game. After all, we were trying to destabilize what counted as knowledge at one of the most prestigious institutions of higher learning in the United States. They would have been unworthy opponents if they had not actually published satirical commentaries on Dillard’s research on Black English during the Oakland Ebonics debate. That was just doing their homework and keeping up with what even Time magazine considered newsworthy. But, what was more harmful were the personal attacks that reflected intimate knowledge with the same identity development issues that concerned us, but eventually came to irritatingly and inevitably different findings on what it means to exist with DuBoisian double consciousness in America. I don’t mean to suggest that we could not handle the difference, or the ridicule, because, in fact, most of us as highschoolers were reflective of the kind of social justice leadership that was part of what Cornell was looking for in students in its own admissions documents. However, something about the smugness and sardonic tongue-in-cheekness of fellow students who simply saw college as a time to pick at the “liberal kids” seemed a waste of a very precious chance to keep watch over the opportunities that had been given to U.S. students by civil rights activists of the prior generation. In the April 17, 1997 Cornell Review, an article on the Africana Studies curriculum described ASRC 204, “History and Politics of Racism and Segregation,” taught by none other than Dr. Sandra Greene (who at the time was the head of the African Studies Association) in the following way: “Dis gotsta do wif racism an segregatin in America an Souf Africa. Is like d other classes, but we be goin into T-ry and tryin to justify separate livin units but da same drinkin fountains. What is, big momma?” (sic, 2). As an archivist of the apartheid era, such nuanced U.S. discourse is both familiar and disturbing.
For our own part, we endeavored to be what can only be described as hyper-productive scholars and professional activists. Umoja Sasa, for example, was peopled with a team of undergraduate student researchers who lived, ate, drank, and slept African Diaspora histories. And, we had our collaborators among womanist, (Wari House Cooperative’s Young Women Preparing for the World; and The Daughters of Kush’s Ululation) Latino (La Voz; El Circulo: News from the Latino Living Center at Cornell University; and La Lucha: The Voice of the Latino Struggle), Native American (Akwe:kon Press’s award-winning journal Native Americas), gay and lesbian student organizations (Outrageous), and progressive student organizations (The Cornell Perspective: The Progressive Voice on Campus) among others. In my own 1995 article for Umoja Sasa, “Meditations on the Contract with America,” I compare the Contract with America to the Fugitive Slave Acts in the following fashion, “When the fugitive slave acts were enacted, free Blacks formed vigilance committees which did more than watch…they engaged in mass actions, like stealing “slaves” from courthouses and jails, they made sure anyone so brave as to take back the right to ownership of their own body was protected and settled in a new life,” quite unlike this policies decision to discourage human beings from accessing national entitlements (vol. 7, no. 3). Thus, honing our grant writing, public presentation, and writing skills, we worked on newspapers and journals as if our very lives depended on it. Perhaps because we identified with what we believed was the tenuous hold of Africana Studies, and we identified—some of us, that is—with courses that actually offered analyses of higher death rates for Blacks and Black women from cancer, diabetes, and chronic diseases such as lupus. We seemed to understand that knowing what research had been done on community based-organizations’ ability to contribute to the revitalization of cities like Cambridge, Detroit, and Los Angeles was going to be critical to our survival. And for my own part, I took Africana Studies classes and Asian American Studies classes, and Native American Studies classes because I truly believed that for the most part my white classmates, professors, deans, and teaching assistants did in fact believe me to be apart of that growing mass of “ New Americans” doing their best to “brown America” and take away something to which only heterosexual white males were truly entitled.
I believed these things, maybe because I had attended a fancy Michigan boarding school from the age of 12 and was treated generally as an outcast until I learned that my community service and political activism could at least win me a measure of protection from daily harassment and a measure of self-worth to compensate for the conspicuous absences and dumbfounded looks when I or my non-white classmates asked questions about the Sandinistas or Steve Biko. We were not especially prescient but we did read Time and Newsweek even then, and it seemed, if nobody wanted to honor our questions, then maybe also deep down, or even closer to the not so deep down surface, they just weren’t that interested in us really.
But, let’s just say I hadn’t attended a fancy Michigan boarding school and hadn’t been recruited by my Nicaraguan-American classmate’s older sister, a student at Oberlin College, to be part of a reading circle in which we read Gloria Anzaldua and Cherrie Moraga’s This Bridge Called My Back in preparation for her Sunday night phone calls to quiz us on our assignment. Only a fool at Cornell in 1991 could have imagined that Dinesh D’Souza and others of the rapidly-proliferating, well-published young men and women of color being promoted by the conservative youth movement were on the same page as Ella Baker or Septima Clark or Nelson Mandela. Even basic Biblical and Koranic teachings, that a good majority of us has been raised with, rejected concepts like imperialism and racism; clearly, this was in the days when liberation theology had greatly taken hold in Northern urban U.S. Black Baptist churches and prior to the sensationalist expansion of televangelism and the radical religious right. So, believing that our education was a key to qualifying us for participation in a continuing social movement, many of us actually considered that what we wrote, what we read, what we watched for entertainment, and what we thought was more than mere youthful experimentation. Somehow, we had an obligation to excellence, which rarely included the self-indulgence of writing and publishing for the sake of blatant political pandering.
So Umoja Sasa and WATU: A Literary Journal were two venues for me to literally become a Black journalist in the long tradition of the Black press. If Black Studies programs had been founded by coalitions of young graduate students and community members at colleges and universities all over the country, we were not too young and not too impressionable to learn how to collect and disseminate stories about the international news of interest to African-descended people in the Americas. We were not too young as undergraduate students to think about and create annual conferences and educational programs on post-Enlightenment and post-modern philosophy. As long as we could read it, we could achieve it. We could spark debate, inform, challenge, and introduce the entire campus to a particular brand of Black nationalism that framed the “browning of America” in terms of the already four or five decades of brown demographics of places like New York City where the majority of our university students hailed from. We could fumble through the debates around AIDS and the link between AIDS and HIV long before President Thabo Mbeki made the horrible international blunder suggesting that these two were not linked in hopes of keeping attention on the context of sickness and health in the poor countries of the global South. We could experiment with new literary styles such as news reports written in patois and literary works peppered with drawings and short stories. We could be about the serious business of enacting what the Native American Student Programs had articulated as a pedagogical philosophy in the words of Ron LeFrance: “the full circle concept” defined as the goal of sending students back to their communities equipped with the skills and knowledge to return tangible public and private goods. We were not supposed to be upwardly mobile in the sense of some becoming fodder for the progress machine that would rationalize us into creatures unrecognizable to family members. We were supposed to notice that even though our families were pathologized for their “poverty” and lack of formal education by our very well-educated professors, our families still valued us for our common ties to ancestors. I took from Ron LeFrance’s philosophy that my journey was on the same footfalls that others, like acclaimed novelist Jessie Fauset, before me had taken and others after me would take. It just seemed sacred and too important an opportunity to be frivolous with. Or as my mother would put it far more economically: I did not go to school to make friends, instead I went to school because it was my job, my work, and it would enable me to do something for all those other people who looked like me and were far more talented than me, but would not get the chance to develop their talents through formal education. It was an incredible burden. But, it also made me an adept interlocutor when a Government professor in my senior year tried to silence my Department of Justice research-laden question about his lecture on innate black criminality. This burden was far lighter than the burden that James Meredith or Minnie Jean Brown-Trickey carried and would hopefully be lighter for the people who came after me because I would go on to do something meaningful, far more meaningful than simply inheriting my parents’ wealth, social contacts, and employment networks.
So what about “Futuring Diversity” is the critical lesson from my story—because the story is not about the burden or the heavy personal load of trying to remain professional in the face of youthful immaturity, albeit loaded down with nationally-raised dollars from the nascent post-Bakke conservative revolution? The story reflects the significance of creating the opportunities for students to write and to experiment as thinkers in print, in digital formats, through making documentaries, through designing programs and advertising them, but, most importantly, through writing. I had a hard time going on to graduate school. The transition to studying comparative politics about South Africa seemed quite different from having grown up hearing anti-apartheid sermons and lectures in Detroit on a weekly basis and writing in college in anticipation of the end of apartheid. Something about moving across country from Detroit to California and learning to read books in a different way witnessed the rapid deflation of my hard-won confidence. But, having written for those college publications gave me something of the brashness necessary to survive graduate school. The writing always seemed to bring me back to myself and to remind me that it was fine for me to be accused of being a bearer of retrogressive identity politics exactly because I thought that Audre Lorde had as much to offer political philosophy as Irving Berlin.
In conclusion, I would urge the Futuring Diversity planners to think seriously about supporting and institutionalizing student newspapers and literary journals to give students structural and institutional means for expressing comment and analysis about pressing social issues, often times a decade before national leaders are willing to do so. Journalist and documentarian Bill Moyers in a June 2005 interview with Amy Goodman compared the contemporary level of print media monopoly to the yellow journalism of an earlier age. Clearly, when even mainstream journalists have been decried as unpatriotic, there is a pressing need for a free and diverse print press. For me, the experience of being a student journalist ranks among the most memorable and meaningful times in my career, not only because my target was not conservatism, but discrimination itself. More than sit-ins, rallies, and marches, the things I wrote then still trigger the most earnest and true stakes of why I suffered under harsh rule to write a doctoral dissertation and go on to become a professor. As passionate as Keith Boykin or Vandana Shiva, writing and publishing under the fine tutelage of Ken Glover and Andrea Case, both staff members and alum of Cornell, spoke to my desire to produce knowledge, to be recognized as an intellectual and a thinker in a place that I naively imagined was particularly gauged for cultivating thinkers and not simply for keeping the money in the family, or, shall I say, in the class.
With the devastation wrought by these self-same culture wars, recent articles on the supposedly inevitable downfall of Black Studies, in particular, go unresponded to in illustrious journals like the Chronicle of Higher Education. There is a reason for this. Too few of us are writing, not just about the historiography of the particular politics of the moments we study, but writing about the cost and consequences of human misery that we are making in this particular moment.
To use the vernacular: it didn’t used to be like this. And, the new Center for Institutional Diversity can be proactive in shifting the tide in what counts as debate on diversity. There is too much empirical data on how institutional discrimination as phenomena works, and too many scholars who have devoted entire lives to researching it for us to avoid the simple work that my mentor’s mentor, Mary Lewis of Oakland, California encouraged us to do speaking in November 2004 at a conference to commemorate my mentor, Cedric Robinson, to write in a way that translates and engages with the critical texts of the black radical movement so that the conversation can be expanded and people left out of the conversation can be recognized for what they already contribute. Give students the chance to write in deep, reflective, and productive ways on contemporary debates while undergraduates. Incorporate such writing into the classroom, into the practices of educational programming on campus, and into the work of student affairs and you will profoundly affect the level and type of social justice students invest in. From time to time, I share these publications with my own students and colleagues today to remind them that despite all the predictions of the end of history, we did not disappear. Those of us of goodwill, seeking social justice did not just fade away into someone else’s fantasy/nightmare of the present. We are here and we have the documents to prove it.