In “Race Issues and Education in America,” a discussion hosted on Thursday, Feb. 11 by the Institute on Religion, Law and Lawyer’s Work with the support of Interfaith Youth Core, a group of experts harkened to past for guidance. Just as faith-led demonstrations and interfaith leaders came together to advocate against racial segregation and oppression during the Civil Rights era, they noted, so too can faith leaders play a role in making sure essential materials needed for teaching and learning still reach minority families and communities.

The discussion, which was moderated by John Mensah, LAW ’19, featured Debbie Almontaser, Ed.D., GSE ’16, CEO of Bridging Cultures Group Inc, and the author of, Leading While Muslim: The Experiences of American Muslim Principals After 9/11 (Roman & Littlefield, 2018); Terrance Sullivan, executive director of the Kentucky Commission on Human Rights; and Sarah Diem, Ph.D., professor of educational leadership & policy analysis at the University of Missouri.

It was co-sponsored Center on Race, Law and Justice, the Feerick Center for Social Justice, Fordham Black Law Students Association, Fordham Latin American Students Association.

Watch below:

At a Nov. 11 virtual event sponsored by Fordham and The Bronx Is Reading, which puts on the annual Bronx Book Festival, Rankine spoke about her new book Just Us: An American Conversation with Laurie Lambert, Ph.D., Fordham associate professor of African and African American Studies. 

Through Just Us, Rankine narrates her personal experiences related to race and racism with white friends and acquaintances—and, in some cases, their own rebuttal to her stories.

“The book’s intention was to slow down these interactions so that we could live in them and see that we are just in fact interacting with another person, and that there are ways to maneuver these moments and to take them apart—to stand up for ourselves, to understand the dynamic as a repeating dynamic for many Black people, white people, Latinx people, and Asian people,” said Rankine, a Jamaica native who grew up in the Bronx. 

Rankine has authored several books, plays, and anthologies, including Citizen: An American Lyric, which won the 2016 Rebekah Johnson National Prize for Poetry. Her other awards and honors include the 2016 MacArthur Fellowship, 2014 Jackson Poetry Prize, and fellowships from the Lannan Foundation and the National Endowment of the Arts. She currently serves as a chancellor for the Academy of American Poets and a professor at Yale University. 

A Portal to Reflect on Your Own Life

At the evening event, Rankine said she wants her readers to use her as a portal to reflect on their own experiences and assess them, rather than simply live them. Reading Rankine’s stories can also serve as a restorative experience for some readers, particularly Black women, said Lambert. 

“As a reader, I felt like I was being guided through these situations by a narrator I could trust—a narrator who understood a lot of my experiences as a Black person,” Lambert said to Rankine.

Naming ‘Whiteness’

The acknowledgement of a person’s “whiteness” can be perceived as threatening because it sounds similar to white nationalism and the violence associated with it, said Rankine. But “whiteness” is a necessary term when talking about race. 

“The kind of clever thing that was done by white culture is the naming of white people as people. They are allowed to hide behind the generality of that statement. They are people and we are African Americans, Caribbean Americans, Latinx Americans, Native Americans,” Rankine said. “That’s how white people have negotiated their lives: We are just neutral people living our lives, and you all are people of color.” 

This centralization of whiteness still stands in many places today, Rankine said. She cited the example of students and other people telling her they have received recruitment calls from white people who say they have perfect jobs for them, but they’re being “forced” to hire Black people to diversify their departments. This strategy to create equity is being falsely framed as something that takes something away from white people, said Rankine, who spoke at Fordham in 2016. 

‘It Gives Me Hope’

Rankine acknowledged that it’s hard to confront covert racism. She’s had to train herself not to let things go—to stop saying she’s tired, that it will stop the conversation, that somebody else in the room should say something instead of her. It’s essential, she said, to hold people accountable because they make critical decisions with long-term effects on places like juries, boardrooms, tenure committees, and dissertation evaluation committees. 

“We have been socialized so much towards silence and stability and not speaking up. And that’s what’s so amazing about the young people now—this new generation of high school students and college students,” Rankine said. “They are speaking up before things even get said. It gives me hope.”

Listen to the full conversation here. 

Reynolds was one of the keynote speakers at the Bronx Book Festival produced by The Bronx Is Reading, and co-sponsored by Fordham’s Office of the Chief Diversity Officer. The festival normally takes place on Fordham Plaza across the street from Fordham’s Rose Hill campus, but this year it was held virtually on June 5 due to the pandemic.

For Reynolds’ session, he was in conversation with author Ibram X. Kendi, Ph.D., professor of history and international relations and the founding director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University. Bronx native Lovia Gyarkye, associate editor at New York Times Magazine Labs, moderated.

Kendi’s National Book Award-winning Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (Bold Type Books, 2016) examines how racism shaped five historical figures—from abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison to activist Angela Davis. The book portrays its subjects in the harsh light of truth, rather than a heroic glow.

In response to the need for middle school history books that address how racism shapes lives, Kendi tapped Reynolds to help in a retelling of his book for young people. The result was Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, 2020), which is described as a “remix and NOT a history book,” so as to not scare off young readers who might otherwise turn their nose up at a history lesson.

The adult book sets out to define the terms of where people land on the racism spectrum. There are three archetypes, writes Kendi: the segregationists, the assimilationists, and the anti-racists. In the young adult book, Reynolds calls them the haters, the likers, and the lovers.

“Everybody knows a hater,” said Reynolds. “But here, [the hater]is a racist that is overtly separatist due to the color of your skin. The likers are people who walk with you as long as you act like them. And the [lovers are]anti-racist people who believe that all people are equal, a basic level of equality for all humanity; these are the people who love us. This was the architecture to frame the discussion.”

Both authors said that they did not have the most engaging experiences as young people in history classes, in part because the text assumed that young people would be inherently interested, rather than doing the hard work of pulling the reader into the story.

“Jason liberated himself and the young readers by saying this is not a history book,” said Kendi.

Unvarnished Heroes

Both the adult and young adult versions also avoid a common trope in historic biographies by exposing the subjects’ human complexities.

“One of the things we do with ourselves and people we admire is we deny that we did wrong or our heroes did wrong,” said Kendi.

As it would turn out, some abolitionists could have been mere “likers.”

“We wanted to define terms of racism and looked for people who defined those terms, and even if it was someone who we admired, we were going to hold fast to that definition,” he said.

Humans, he said, have good qualities and not-so-good qualities.

“If we honor their legacy in its totality we have to look at the whole picture,” said Reynolds, “not just what they were doing then, but in our present history as citizens.”

Demonstrations and Examining the White Self

The authors then took the same approach when they discussed white people participating in present-day protests sparked by the death of George Floyd at the hands of police.

“There’s something going on with white folks; I don’t pretend to know what it is, because I’m not white,” said Reynolds, stressing that conversations need to be had around self-interest. He said an underlying motivator for white demonstrators could well be the need to relieve shame and guilt.

He also stressed the need for white people to do the work and educate themselves about racism.

“You have to work for it,” Reynolds said, adding that the process should not be rushed. “Pace yourself, because if you want to do less harm, slow down. Don’t go trying to save the world. Slow down and save your family. Work on yourself and what’s happening in your household. Read with your spouses and your parents. Figure out how to have different conversations.”

Kendi added that through the demonstrations, white people were being radicalized by seeing first-hand the unchecked police aggression.

“They never had to feel what it is to be Black in this country, which is to be constantly terrorized by police violence, but white people went out there to demonstrate against police violence and they suffered police violence, so they came face-to-face with precisely what they were demonstrating against and then their parents came face-to-face with that, their friends came face-to-face with that, their whole community came face-to-face with that,” he said.