Category: Race & Equity

[The University of Delaware’s Center for the Study of Diversity holds an annual Distinguished Lecture on Diversity, delivered this year by President Cauce. Remarks as prepared for delivery.]

Good afternoon. It’s a pleasure and an honor to be here, or really, to be back here, at the University of Delaware, where I taught in the 1980s as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology. I want to thank Acting President Targett, Provost Grasso and Vice Provost for Diversity Henderson for welcoming me back to this wonderful institution, where you are daring to do great things for Delaware. And I want to offer a special thank you to Professor James Jones and the Center for the Study of Diversity who invited me here today.

I consider Professor Jones a mentor. Mentors are those people who you can turn to for guidance knowing that they will provide wise counsel AND that they will have your best interests in mind. Professor Jones always did just that. Director of the APA Minority Fellowship Program when I was a Fellow, he always went above and beyond to get to know us, even visiting the fellows at their home institutions. He’d call to see if all was well, connect me to opportunities for additional funding or tell me about a conference I should attend.

Even after I graduated we’d stay in touch. When he invited me to serve on the selection committee for MFP, I of course said yes. Being able to serve alongside him on this faculty, even if for a brief period of time, and winning an award that bears his name, were both amongst my proudest and most humbling experiences, so thank you Jim!

I want to start by acknowledging my own privilege. While some of you know my path hasn’t always been easy, I have certainly been given a hand or encouraged at certain points along the way that made a tremendous difference. I am grateful for that, and acknowledge that all of us begin this conversation from different places and points of view.

These past few years, up to and including the present moment, have been painful for those of us who view diversity and equity as core values; who believe in not only respecting, but also celebrating differences; who believe in justice and fairness; and who hold dear the idea that all men and women were created equal and should have equal opportunities to achieve their chosen goals and contribute to society.

We have witnessed violence and oppression aimed at people of color with little or no repercussions for the perpetrators. African-Americans, particularly young African-American men, have been gunned down in the street or stopped by police merely for walking while black. Once unimaginable xenophobic rhetoric is leveled at Muslims and immigrants in the public square. Women are still subjected to men in power discussing their bodies and their rights with scant recognition that they are autonomous beings.

In the span of just a few weeks last fall, Inside Higher Ed reported that more than a dozen college campuses were the targets of shooting and bomb threats, with many of them specifically threatening black students. We know that all too often, violence on campus is not merely a threat, but frighteningly real.

Some incidents have hit close to home. At my own institution, the University of Washington, last spring racial epithets were hurled at UW students who were marching in support of the basic truth that Black Lives Matter. The Pacific Northwest and the UW can fall into the trap of thinking of ourselves as progressive on these issues. But we are not immune, and we sometimes fall short of our ideals.

Here at the University of Delaware, as a community, you’ve experienced some of the same tensions and anguish that the UW and society at large are experiencing. A Black Lives Matter forum held here last fall was sparked by a decoration in a tree that turned out to be innocuous. Yet, for some members of the community, the sight brought to mind nooses and the specter of lynching. The peaceful rally and passionate testimony that followed were a powerful reminder that minority members of the community see the world through a lens of experience very different from the majority: implied threats and the iconography of violence are neither new to nor imagined by black and brown Americans. Your community took the opportunity to create a teaching and learning moment — a moment not just to ensure that community issues could be heard, but also to make sure we all were listening.

The terrible violence and threats of violence we have seen across the nation, on campus and off, have been disheartening. But we have also seen inspiring responses.

At the University of Missouri, we have seen how powerful student action can be as student leaders, activists, and athletes took a stand against a pervasive environment of racism and, importantly, systemic inattention to the problem. Institutions including Amherst, Princeton and Harvard Law are being asked to reconsider how – or if – modern values can be reconciled with the names and images of institutional benefactors with abhorrent histories of racial injustice. In Rhode Island, students from Brown University and Providence College joined forces in solidarity against racism, leading to a major investment in diversity by Brown.  And at the UW, we have launched what we’re calling the Race & Equity Initiative, a wide-ranging campaign to combat and eliminate racism and injustice on our campus and in our world.

What happens in academe is often a reflection of the larger world, and many of the ways in which inequality and the status quo are enforced and entrenched in the university are mirrored in the institutions and paradigms that make up western society. Explicit bigotry, racist taunts and overt discrimination are only the crudest and most visible products of a culture that is inside all of us, passed down over generations, in our cultures and histories, imbibed by new immigrants as they arrive on our shores. But it’s often subtle, sometimes out of our own consciousness.

That is why we have to actively struggle to get beyond it. We can’t just will it or ignore it away. We have to become culturally aware and self-aware.

So why, in 2016, is this the state of affairs? Why is progress so slow?

Fixing injustices means fixing broken systems, and to do that we must first understand and acknowledge that social, racial, economic and – timely, given that today is Earth Day – environmental justice all intersect. Political failure and racial segregation in Flint, Michigan created the conditions that allowed the city’s water supply to be poisoned with lead, and it’s the poor and the people of color in Flint who suffer the worst effects. It’s their children who will endure the legacy of that massive, systemic failure.

But all systems are run by people, and, our universities are populated with smart, caring, supposedly progressive, forward looking people – here in Delaware and at the UW, the youth and hope of our future. So why, then, do these problems persist on college campuses?

I was interested to read that the National Study of College Freshmen, conducted by UCLA, a study that’s been tracking the attitudes of college students nationwide, found that this generation of students views itself as committed to and comfortable with diversity.

More than 80 percent of this year’s college freshmen said that their ability to work with peers of different cultures and races was either “somewhat strong” or a “major strength.” This is a generation that clearly knows, and seems to embrace, that diversity is important to learning and preparing for success in the global marketplace.

It seems incongruous, then, that college campuses should be the setting for so much ugliness and racial tension.

Maybe part of the answer lies in another question from the UCLA study. Only about 45 percent of all freshmen believed their knowledge of other cultures or races was even somewhat strong.

This shouldn’t surprise us; our neighborhoods and schools have become more segregated since the ’70s. We don’t know much about difference because we live with people who are like us. This homogeneity is often based on class, but race and class in this country go hand in hand. College campuses like this one are generally the most diverse settings our students have ever been in. That makes it the right place to change the equation. But that also requires putting in the time to learn about others and to look inside ourselves, at our own upbringings, at what we heard our parents and neighbors whisper, at what we’ve sometimes thought or felt before we caught ourselves.

I think these two seemingly incompatible beliefs — embracing diversity but lacking knowledge of other cultures — emerges, side by side, in this data, because this generation was raised on the notion that we can be “color blind” or culture blind or gender blind. They were raised to believe these things no longer matter, or worse yet, that the way to fix whatever bias or prejudice that might still exist is to become willfully blind to it. You don’t need to know about differences to work across them, so the thinking goes, because differences just don’t matter.

But is this blindness really a good thing? And whose color, gender, faith or culture are we erasing when we go blind? What’s being “whitewashed,” so to speak?

I can remember being a brand-new assistant professor when I had just given a colloquium focusing on youth of color, when one of my colleagues commented positively about my talk and then said to me, “You know, I’ve never thought of you as a Latina. You don’t act like one.” And this was clearly supposed to be a compliment! A compliment to his enlightenment, and perhaps to the fact that I could “talk real good.”

I felt like screaming, “What’s the problem with acting like a Latina, whatever that means? That’s who I am! And why the heck should that be a problem?”

W.E.B. Dubois, the first black Harvard Ph.D., founder of the Niagara Movement that laid the foundation for the NAACP, and mentor to my mentor Jim Jones, put it best when he said in his book “The Souls of Black Folk”: “Being a problem is a strange experience — peculiar even for one who has never been anything else.”

Maybe it’s time to reset the equation and admit that, first, we are not color blind — nor should we be. And more importantly, that we cannot just escape our history and biases by pretending they don’t exist.

Instead, we must begin by facing up to them!

When I was teaching about intelligence testing in our clinical graduate program, one of my mentees, an African-American young woman, very proudly told the class that the sequencing of the human genome showed that the genetic overlap between races was 99.9 percent. A young man in the class followed her comment by sharing that the overlap between humans and chimpanzees is 96 percent (this is true; indeed, the overlap with mice is 85 percent, but that was not the point).

I knew the young man; he was pretty clueless about what he’d just said — about how he’d indirectly made the comparison between African-Americans and apes, a comparison with a long and difficult and tortured history, a history that still stings and still has power. The young woman’s face had fallen.

He hadn’t meant it that way, of course, but the pain and insult was still real.

Cluelessness is no excuse.

Lack of knowledge about the histories and cultures of those different than ourselves, coupled with confidence that we can work with others from different races and cultures, are the perfect ingredients for a Molotov cocktail, ready to explode at any minute. So, we shouldn’t be that surprised when it does.

So what can we do — what must we do — as the University of Washington, as the University of Delaware, as students and educators, as Americans and as humans? After all, this is what universities are all about. Universities are places of discovery, of civil discourse, of difficult conversations that sometimes make us uncomfortable — places where we learn new ways of looking at and acting in the world. So how can we use make use of these crucibles?

First, we can speak up and reject jokes or language that makes biased assumptions about people of color, or women, or the undocumented, or about those in wheelchairs, or, or…. They are not only untrue, but damaging.

It can be hard to go against the flow, but it’s important to say clearly that racist jokes aren’t funny, that offensive speech offends us, that we won’t be a party to it and to be prepared to walk away.

This is especially important for the people in power, the “mainstream” or “the majority” — we cannot just shift the burden to speak out onto the aggrieved party. It’s not their problem, and when they say something, it is often viewed as defensive.

When someone has the courage to say that a remark or an assumption was hurtful or insensitive, we can’t reflexively respond with “I didn’t mean it.” It’s not about what was meant, it’s about what is experienced by other people. Let’s start by saying “I’m sorry, that was insensitive. I won’t do it again.” And then not do it again.

Second, we must learn about others who are different than us, not just through human contact, but also through reading and education.

It’s the responsibility of the powerful, the people included by default, to put in the time and energy to analyze and problem-solve. It’s not the job of the aggrieved party to educate us. (And it’s usually not that hard to figure out.)

With broader knowledge, experience and awareness of other people and cultures, we’ll all be less likely to make offensive comments in the first place.

Third, let’s take the time for self-examination and reflection. Look into our hearts and heads and analyze what’s there. Be fearless. Whether you’re black or white or brown, Native American or Asian, straight or gay, we all have racial, or gender, or other stereotypes and biases and prejudices — it is impossible to grow up in this society without them. But we can learn to catch ourselves, to change our ingrained impulses, until that becomes second nature.

With time and effort, habits and thought patterns can and do change. We can get past our biases and connect — and make our world bigger and truly boundless. To my fellow educators, you have a precious opportunity to model this behavior and pass on these values to the young people who look to you for guidance and direction.

But it’s not just what we do individually, it’s what we do collectively — and as an institution.

Several years ago, the New York Times wrote about a neuroscientist investigating the roots of prejudice and noted that we have been conditioned to wear seatbelts, recycle, and eat more vegetables, but “What has not come so easily is persuading us to identify with — or even tolerate — people we perceive as outsiders…. [T]he killing of a single unarmed black teenager might prompt thousands to protest in the streets. But social policies that address the problems behind individual fates — programs to combat poverty or racial bias in policing — remain as polarizing as ever.”

Universities have not only the opportunity but also the obligation to do the work of persuading, to powerfully and consistently signal to students, through our words and actions, that inclusion, equity and fairness don’t have to be “polarizing.”

At the UW, are that work is happening all over the university and through the Race & Equity Initiative I mentioned. That initiative is a work in progress, and we’re still figuring out, and working on, what this Initiative will look like and what the different steps will be. But, in many ways it has already started — we’re following the lead of our students who said loud and clear that Black Lives Matter, and of our faculty who immediately organized a teach-in, and of the staff members in the Office of Minority Affairs & Diversity who have already been working on a new Diversity Blueprint, and have initiated a series of Community Conversations to learn how to better support the communities we serve.

The initiative includes the review and implementation of recommendations from the Bias Response Task Force, which has been asked to examine how we can improve the UW’s ability to receive and respond to incidents of bias and discrimination. And it will involve work we do on faculty search committees to make sure members know about implicit bias and how it can hinder a meritocratic hiring process.

There is much work to be done, but the UW is deeply committed to doing it, and doing it well.

Here at the University of Delaware, good, important work is also underway – through the Center for the Study of Diversity, through the Center for Global and Area Studies and through the work of Vice Provost for Diversity Carol Henderson, who said recently, “Diversity is not just my office or me, but it’s the ways in which we engage with each other every day of the year and we need students to be part of that discussion and part of that practice.”

I applaud the work being done at UD, including the creation of a diversity action plan, founded on the recognition and appreciation of all human differences. By all accounts, the development of that plan, — conceived as an extension of the Delaware Will Shine strategic plan — has been and continues to be a truly inclusive and thoughtful process.

Important research and scholarship on these issues is also happening here. The CSD’s model of Diversity Competency, the “DC6” holds great promise as a tool to apply greater rigor and meaning to the university’s multicultural course requirement. By requiring that courses meet consistent and substantive criteria to qualify for the requirement, not only will student learning and awareness of diversity increase, but the institution as a whole is sending a clear signal that diversity MATTERS, that inclusion and cross-cultural understanding are not just rubber stamps or lip service.

Dr. Stephanie Fryberg of the UW conducted research with Dr. Rebecca Covarrubias of this institution, which they actually presented here last year as part of the CSD’s Symposium for Student Success. Fryberg and Covarrubias conducted an intervention with American Indian middle-schoolers in which they reframed education in terms of cultural and familial concepts of American Indian groups rather than white, middle-class European concepts. The Indian students’ motivation increased and their performance on national tests improved, and no wonder – getting a taste of the cultural validation that the majority experiences every day promotes an appetite for learning.

In a similar vein, the CSD is doing interesting and valuable research on the subject of microaggressions. These kinds of routine, almost invisible (to the aggressor at least) exchanges that reinforce a person’s membership in a minority group are real and persistent and they add up. They can also be inflicted by those of us who consider ourselves to be above such things, including me, meaning I’ve got more to learn, too. And let’s be clear: it’s not the job of the aggrieved to “grow a thicker skin” or shake it off; it is the job the majority to think, listen, learn and ultimately, do better.

I want to return, for a moment, to a few of the characteristics that the Diversity Competency Model identifies as core to interacting respectfully and productively with different kinds of people, particularly the concepts of “diversity self-awareness” and “personal and social responsibility.”

I was born in Cuba — and in Cuba, like most Caribbean countries, racism has its own distinct look and feel. Words that would sound racist in this country, like “mi negrita” (my black one), are terms of endearment. But, that doesn’t mean that a color line doesn’t exist, although it may be placed in a different part of the color spectrum.

I learned from my parents that I was lucky to be light-skinned — my religious aunt, who went to Mass every day and who taught me compassion and charity, also taught me that white skin was a gift from God, so we should be extra kind to those who were darker.

How incredibly condescending and “white” of her.

They were good people, whom I admire and love to this day — but they held beliefs that I won’t sugarcoat by calling them anything other than racist. And they weren’t so great about gender equity either. They laughed at men who were “effeminate,” and, by the way, they also thought Anglos had loose morals.

Because they had no real power, at least not in this country, the effects of their biases didn’t extend far.

But knowing what I know about families and familial influence, not to mention all I know about the larger societal context and how it affects us, in my most honest moments I have to ask: How can these biases, these prejudices, this racism not be part of who I am? And because I am in a position of power, it can matter, so I must be self-aware and I must be personally and socially responsible.

Achieving self-awareness is much harder than it sounds! The powerful and those in the majority must do the difficult work of learning and acknowledging that a lack of awareness inevitably leads to the – often inadvertent – creation of a hostile climate for those in the minority.

This is a room full of leaders and future leaders and what you believe, how you act, will matter.

This change will not happen overnight, much to the dismay of some of the student activists I engage with – and to my disappointment too. And, let’s be candid, there is and probably always will be a tension between what students activists are calling for and what can actually be achieved. As an administrator, the challenge is keeping the dialogue and engagement productive even when we can’t always come to complete agreement.

There’s no question that student activism plays an important role in driving change and progress in universities, and at many moments in history, well beyond the campus. I mentioned earlier the University of Missouri protests that resulted in the president stepping down, but other examples that come to mind include the Columbia Apartheid protests that led to that university’s divestiture from companies that did business with that regime, and ongoing fossil fuel divestment protests at colleges and universities around the country. As result of that movement, over 470 institutions have divested $2.6 trillion in fossil fuel investments.

But student activism also plays a part in educating students about the reaches – and limits – of their power, and about how (and how not) to engage productively in debate with the decision makers. Sometimes student demands cannot be met; they may be logistically, legally or financially impossible, or they may curtail others’ right to speak. That UCLA national study that I mentioned earlier also found that about 71 percent of freshmen surveyed said that “colleges should prohibit racist or sexist speech on campus,” which is the highest percentage of positive responses to that question on record. Support for banning “extreme speakers” from campus has also increased. It’s clear that the line between inclusivity and the muzzling of disparate viewpoints has never been thinner or harder to walk.

As an administrator, being the subject of protests has taken some getting used to, mostly because historically, I’m more used to being on the side of the protesters.

Several years ago, when I was appointed Chair of American Ethnic Studies at UW, I knew I was dealing with a fraught and politicized situation, but I was not prepared for the onslaught; my first day on the job, I found the hallway outside my office papered with a picture of me with cross-hairs superimposed on my face and emblazoned with the headline “Under Fire.” Students protested my appointment with a sit-in that shut down the administration building during a Regents meeting. I had to dig deep within myself to find my center.

When you grow up wielding power from the margins, the move to the center can be very jarring. But I think that experience has been valuable to me in that it has allowed me to assume positive intent on the part of student activists, even when the rhetoric gets rough and sometimes personal. As educators and administrators, part of the job is remembering that students really are in it for the right reasons, and, if we can remember that we share a vision of a better world, we can keep moving forward toward it.

At the University of Washington, we are guided by the words “Be Boundless,” and inequality is anathema to that ideal. Being boundless does not mean pretending that we are or even should be color blind; rest assured, black and brown people can’t forget they are black and brown in a white-dominated society. And lesbian, gay and trans people can’t ignore the ignorant and often hateful things that are said and even legislated at their expense. Women can’t disregard the reality of the gender wage gap that pays them 79 cents for every dollar their male counterpart receives. Being boundless means not just accepting but welcoming and making space for diversity in ways that enhance the entire community’s experience and understanding.

While I’ve talked about some of my personal experiences and the responsibility of the individual, as president of an institution that in many ways shapes the city of Seattle and the whole Pacific Northwest region, I am perhaps most concerned about the effects of systemic or institutional racism, the biases and barriers that diminish our capacity as a society, or in this case, as a university, to truly fulfill our public promise of both access and excellence, indeed of access to excellence.

I believe that conversations like this one, initiatives like the Diversity Action Plan and investment in institutions like the Center for the Study of Diversity the Center for Global and Area Studies are how we start to grow our own awareness, learn to hold ourselves accountable, and finally, to stop being the problem, through change and action.

After all that I’ve said here today, the message I want to leave you with is this: I am hopeful. I’m immensely hopeful, because these conversations are happening and young people are engaged on the issues that matter. Yes, we continue to see racism, and misogyny and transphobia and homophobia, but it’s worth noting that we ARE seeing it, and speaking up about it and doing something to end it. However painful it is to be faced with these problems, it will be far more painful, maybe even fatal in the long run, if we don’t face them. We do that by linking arms and working together, by talking and, more importantly, listening. There is work to be done, and I know we can do it.

Thank you.