New research by a Fordham psychologist shows that more than one-third of college students report being emotionally distressed by the pandemic and that LGBTQ+ students, students of color, and women experience higher levels of stress and anxiety.

The findings were published in a paper titled “Constant Stress Has Become the New Normal: Stress and Anxiety Inequalities Among U.S. College Students in the Time of COVID-19,” published in the Journal of Adolescent Health in December and co-authored by Fordham assistant professor of psychology Lindsay Till Hoyt, Ph.D. The first part of the paper’s title is a direct quote from one of the study participants.

The study incorporates quantitative and qualitative data that was collected from more than 700 college students who were recruited on Instagram. It began back in April with a baseline survey of 707 students from 374 colleges across the U.S., including Fordham. More than 500 students returned for a follow-up survey in July.

The very first question on the survey was direct: “Tell us how the pandemic is affecting you personally, just in your own words.” Without specific prompting, 27 participants responded to that question by citing specific mental health disorders, such as anxiety.

For the paper, researchers in Hoyt’s virtual lab, called the youth Development, Diversity, and Disparities (3D) Lab,  examined the stress symptoms reported as well as inequalities found across gender, sexual orientation, race/ethnicity, and income.  Young women, in particular, reported higher stress levels than young men, said Hoyt, a developmental psychologist whose work primarily focuses on how “macro-level stressors get under the skin and influence the health and well-being” of adolescents and young adults.

Difficult to Be Living Back Home 

Some of the survey responses illustrated the problem with specific examples.

“As a daughter of immigrants, moving home is treated as a vacation by my parents, so I am tasked with several home duties and taking care of my siblings,” said a respondent who identifies as a high-income cisgender Asian woman.

And while women were more likely to report symptoms of stress, Hoyt clarified that cisgender men could well be internalizing their pain in other ways, such as increased use of alcohol or other substances.

Gender-diverse students, she said, reported worse outcomes than their cisgender, heterosexual peers.

“Many of the gender diverse and transgender students talked about a lot of stress from not feeling accepted or comfortable at home.”

A respondent who identifies as a multiracial middle-income lesbian said that being back at home was difficult.  “As a member of the LGBT+ community, it was especially hard to leave all my support at school and come back to a homophobic household where I have to remain in the closet,” she wrote.

Hoyt noted that the pandemic had thrown many of these young people off track socially. Students often come into their own at college, she said, once they find a good support network and like-minded friends.

“With COVID all of a sudden that came crashing down and they were going back to their hometowns and their families,” she said. “I think most people would say the findings align with what you would expect, such as the gender difference, but what we also found, because we had longitudinal data at two time points, is that it does seem like that the inequalities in stress and anxiety are widening, with students from traditionally marginalized groups facing greater burdens.”

Researchers for the paper came from both coasts: Co-authors include Alison K. Cohen, Ph.D., an instructor of epidemiology and population health at Stanford University in California, as well as two Fordham psychology graduate students: master’s candidate Brandon Dull and Ph.D. candidate Neshat Yazdani. Doctoral candidate Elena Maker Castro contributed from the University of California Los Angeles.

Black and Multiracial Students Showed Increase in Anxiety from April to July

Hoyt said that after the death of George Floyd and the resulting national protests, the team integrated questions on the Black Lives Matter Movement for the follow-up questionnaire conducted in July. They asked how the movement affected their stress and their civic engagement. She noted that in the April survey that white students had the highest levels of perceived stress and anxiety. But early analysis of the July survey revealed that Black and multiracial students—from across sociodemographic groups—were the only students to show an increase in anxiety from April to July.

“I think the data is reaffirming things that we know about inequalities and this is just one of many studies that will underscore that, but I also think what we’re going to learn will be about their resilience, that’s definitely what we’re seeing in the qualitative responses,” said Hoyt.

Hoyt said she is also interested in how civic engagement can be a “protective factor.”

“When something really stressful is happening in your environment, civic engagement can be empowering,” she said.

Much of the follow-up data still needs to be analyzed, but Hoyt had to slow the pace of the work while she underwent treatment for a rare form of cancer. She generally disengaged from work and the news so as to concentrate on her care and her family, particularly her toddler. But she soon found outside forces too great to ignore.

“I went off social media when I first was undergoing all this, but then during the election, I couldn’t help myself and I had to go back on Twitter, and I’ve posted about the cancer there,” she said. “I’ve learned it’s good not to be ashamed of having any disease, including cancer. Lots of people are dealing with it during this pandemic, so I am completely comfortable sharing.”

Despite Hoyt being on leave during her illness, many of the master’s and doctoral candidates continued analyzing data for the study, which is ongoing. A third survey was conducted during the fall semester that also incorporated questions about the election.

Hoyt said she’s been moved by the students’ strength in the face of adversity. She’s been particularly impressed with the students who are research assistants on this project.

“I always tell them they’re the experts on this study and they give such great feedback because this is a study about them, their generation,” she said.

 

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Brandy Monk-Payton, professor in the department of communication and media studies and scholar of black cultural studies, said that there has been a cultural shift in the consciousness of the entertainment industry when it comes to recognizing anti-Black racism.

“I think that there’s been sort of increased attention to thinking about the ways the entertainment industry has reproduced structural racism, whether that be behind the scenes, behind the camera, as well as in front of the camera,” she said. “We see an increased urgency around that conversation in a way that sort of did not exist in the early days of the Black Lives Matter movement.”

The Industry Response

When Black Lives Matter first started in 2013, Monk-Payton said, people were still living under the illusion of a “post-racial” moment of the Obama administration. Television addressed racism in the country at the time through “very special episodes” in shows like Law & Order: SVU or Scandal.

Calls for reform are louder now though, she said. Shows and studios are apologizing for past mistakes, and aiming for a more inclusive future. For example, back in June several creators and actors began apologizing for depicting blackface in the past. In response, TV shows such as 30 Rock, Scrubs, the Office, and more, have removed these episodes from streaming platforms.

Monk-Payton said the elimination of blackface episodes is a show of solidarity, with an emphasis on “show.”

“What I find fascinating about the desire to delete these scenes and episodes with an offense is that it’s not actually examining what I think are more insidious logics of racial representation,” she added.

Instead of just removing offensive episodes, which can build up curiosity about them, Monk-Payton said it’s more important “to situate particular film and TV texts within their proper historical context, providing audiences with accurate information in the way that HBO Max decides to preface Gone With the Wind.” (HBO Max briefly pulled the film from their streaming platform in June, before restoring it with intro videos that include a disclaimer about its historical context and depictions of slavery.)

Reboots of white shows with all Black or people-of-color casts are becoming popularized lately, including a recent reenactment of an episode of Golden Girls starring Black actresses Regina King and Tracee Ellis Ross. However, Monk-Payton warned that these reboots need to be mindful of “what happens when you translate a text into a sort of Black space or the sort of minoritarian space and the cultural specificity becomes really important.”

It isn’t enough to just replace the cast members with Black actors. “If you don’t alter it, then you’re in this kind of colorblind sort of space,” she said.

Award Shows

Award shows have long been criticized for the lack of diversity in their nominees and winners. The Academy Awards recently released a new list of qualifications for nominees that emphasizes diversity and inclusion on and off screen, but Monk-Payton thinks there could be more teeth to the requirements. She noted that many past problematic films would actually meet these new requirements, including Green Book, Crash, and perversely, The Birth of a Nation.

What needs to be changed, she said, is the elite group of people within the Academy who can cast votes.

“Widening that aperture [of who can get nominated]doesn’t change or doesn’t sort of really reckon with the sort of people within the Academy who are still going to assign who’s a winner and who’s a loser,” she said, adding that that elitism “disadvantages people of color in the industry.”

While the Emmys haven’t yet released any new eligibility requirements, there were a record number of both nominations and wins for Black actors this year. Zendaya became the youngest and second-ever Black winner for Best Actress in a Drama. But Monk-Payton emphasized that the “fact that she is only the second means that we still have a very long way to go.”

The HBO series Watchmen, which stars Regina King as a Black female police officer, also won several big awards, including Best Limited Series. Monk-Payton was glad to see Watchmen creator Damon Lindelof dedicate his wins to the victims and survivors of the Tulsa Massacre of 1921 and emphasize that it wasn’t his story to tell.

“While I do not think that awards shows ever dictate future programming trends,” she added, “I do think that we need more creatives like Lindelof that understand his position of power if we are to have any hope in fundamentally changing the entertainment industry with respect to racial inclusion and equity.”

The Future of Entertainment

As for the future of entertainment, Monk-Payton thinks there has been a “very visceral shift in perspective and acknowledgement” of structural racism ingrained in the industry, but she is somewhat skeptical this change will last.

“A lot of times in diversity work, it’s just a label. You don’t actually create the long lasting change,” she said. “We have to have a more robust understanding of the problem as we’re diagnosing where the actual problem is.”

She added that in addition to on-screen representation, there needs to be more off-screen representation in labor roles like camera people, hair stylists, makeup artists and other behind-the-scenes staffers.

“That also contributes to what we see on screen and whether we see Black actors and performers and characters as dignified, and how we see Black people as human through invisible labor that goes on behind the scenes.”

Monk-Payton said that there have been some promising moments. Shows like Watchmen help us better understand race in America. Media makers like Ava DuVernay and others who care about social change are helping to “fight the good fight in terms of their content,” she said. The entertainment industry, she said, can do their part by supporting these artists.

“I think it’s about creating a pipeline. It’s about empowering these media makers and performers to really utilize their voice.”

That same year, he joined the faculty of the Gabelli School of Business as a lecturer in communications and media management, and in addition to teaching communications theory and corporate communications, he has worked as the college’s interim director of diversity, equity, and inclusion. We recently sat down—virtually, of course—with Ball, an award-winning competitive speaker, and speech coach, to talk about we can better understand each other during these turbulent times.

Listen below:

Full transcript below:

Clarence Ball III: I do not think that solving interpersonal racism, A, is possible within our lifetime. I also don’t think it’s necessary. We should really be trying to solve structural inequities or systemic racism because then we can attack the policies and not the people.

Patrick Verel: Of all the honors a business professor might snag, an Emmy would seem to be the least likely, but Clarence Ball III did just that in 2014 when he won one for the documentary, Looking Over Jordan: African Americans and the War. That same year, he joined the faculty of the Gabelli School of Business as a lecturer in communications and media management. And in addition to teaching communications theory and corporate communications, he has worked as the college’s interim director of diversity, equity and inclusion. We recently sat down, virtually of course, with Ball, an award-winning competitive speaker and speech coach, to talk about how we can better understand each other during these turbulent times. I’m Patrick Verel, and this is Fordham News.

In the wake of the murder of George Floyd and the worldwide protests that followed, people are having conversations about race issues in ways that they haven’t before. And I know many are struggling with how to proceed. How can we have productive conversations, especially since we can’t have them in person for the foreseeable future?

CB: That’s a really good question, Patrick. I think a lot of the allies at Fordham have been reaching out to me directly, some people that I know very well because we worked together a lot, and then other people that I’ve seen in passing, we work around the office together, just trying to stay connected. And what I’ve noticed from the allies is that there are some that are interested in other people seeing them doing the work, and there are some that are interested in doing the work privately. I don’t think either one is better or worse than the other, I think we just need to have the conversation.

But the people that have reached out to me privately, we’ve been able to have some more robust discussions. So I think if you know people that might be experiencing trauma from these issues, you might reach out to them directly and have more in-depth conversations before you go public with your thoughts.

PV: One of the things that seems to be key to the conversations about race is this idea that you can take a hate the sin, not the sinner approach. Do you agree with that and can you expand a little bit upon that?

CB: Yeah, I absolutely do agree with that. I agree because racism was done to all of us, right? It’s not just the people of color that have been victimized by racism. There are people that really do believe in supremacy that are of all colors, and that’s detrimental to all people.

So seeing that racism is something that was done to us through a series of laws and policies, right? Some people walked away from those laws and policies believing that they were better than other people. Other people walked away from those laws and policies feeling like they were less than other people. I don’t think that any of it is true. We’re all human, right?

And so I think when you go into the history of it and you look at indentured servitude, as opposed to slavery, you will see that many of the immigrants, I think two-thirds of all of the immigrants, arrived to British America under indentures, and that did not have respect of race. And you didn’t see race distinction in indentured servitude until the 1600s. So there was a case, John Casor, I believe against Virginia. And it was decided that because he was Black, his indenture would be for life. And from that case on, you see race kind of having this difference in regard to policies and how they treat us.

PV: You mentioned this idea of having these conversations kind of one-on-one, personal conversations as being more productive. Suppose you’ve reached that point now where you know you want to have that conversation with somebody about it. Any thoughts on how to go about starting that conversation?

CB: Yeah. I really think that you should begin having a conversation like that with a person that is ready to have the conversation. I do not think it is wise to force really difficult topics like race, structural inequities. I don’t think you should force conversations like that on people, but rather wait until they’re ready to have them.

Two things I want to add to this. Most of the times when people are having these conversations, it’s really to combat interpersonal racism. Interpersonal racism is when you have two people and, interpersonally, they don’t relate to each other until you’ve got these microaggressions and so on and so forth. And for whatever reason, people, their feelings, their emotions, they kind of want to sift through these issues. I do not think that solving interpersonal racism, A, is possible within our lifetime. I also don’t think it’s necessary. We should really be trying to solve structural inequities or systemic racism because then we can attack the policies and not the people.

PV: Talk to me about these summer workshops that you’ve been involved with at the Gabelli School. I understand you’ve been working with both undergraduate and graduate-level students. Can you tell me why is it so important to have these conversations about how to be an anti-racist now and what’s involved in these workshops in particular?

CB: So the Gabelli school is doing a lot of trainings. We’re doing a lot of lunch and learns, panel sessions, like you said. The impetus, I’ll share a few of them with you. We had a talk with the chief diversity officer, Raphael Zapata, and myself about a few weeks ago. And then from that talk, we just unpacked the different police cases that have been in the news lately. We shared some thoughts about that. We talked about structural and systemic racism, and we talked about the problem of interpersonal racism versus structural racism.

Recently last week, we had a different session, and this was with Gabelli Forward, which is under the programmatic umbrella of the graduate school. So at the graduate school, it’s really for our prospective students, which, in that case, would be people that have 10 to 15 years of work experience under their belt before we get them as students. And so what we tried to do was to have a discussion about being anti-racist in the 21st century, but gear it toward not only what we do at the university, but what might you encounter in the workspace.

The last thing is we’ve got these initiatives with Gabelli Launch, which is also under the graduate school’s programmatic umbrella. And Launch, this is for students that have already been admitted. And we have two programs. We’ve got one for executive MBAs. Again, this is our population. They’ve got 10 to 15 years of work experience. And so we’re going to have a more corporate discussion with them. We’ll take them through conflict personas, so on and so forth.

The other is for our Master’s of Science programs, which, demographically, have more international students than domestic students in our Master’s of Science programs. So that’s a different conversation that we’d like to have with them because they will come into the classroom here without the context of what racism is, particularly coming from where they come from. So we kind of give them a crash course of what racism looks like in America and why people on both sides are so emotional.

PV: Any surprises come out of it so far?

CB: Surprises? I was really surprised… We had a psychologist on the Gabelli Forward panel, and her research interests are in trauma that is related to racism. And so, listening to some of her findings from her dissertation and some of her research work that she does with Fordham, I found out that I’ve been traumatized and that there’s trauma like living in different places in my body, and that we all have trauma. It’s why we get so emotional if things don’t quite go the way that they should, and it’s a constant struggle between history and the things that you were taught and the things that you’ve seen, and then juxtaposing that with the move that the world is going into.

It’s a really emotional thing to do and I learned a lot academically from her during that panel that I don’t think I would have learned because I’m not sitting on a couch as much as I should.

PV: Right now, we’re talking in particular about these workshops, but is there anything else that you’ve picked up along the way since all this began that it’s kind of resonated with you?

CB: Yeah. I have a friend and she’s a history professor at Columbia. And her research is kind of like antebellum, postbellum reconstruction. And I’ve just been learning from her that the history lessons that I was taught in K through 12 were borderline inaccurate, and then, at best, omissive. Like there’s just so much that’s not there. And it is also structured in such a way where it really promotes a supremacy.
I am now unlearning so much, which is important, and we all will have to do some of that work in the midst of all of this, but I’m unlearning a lot. And then I’m going to find actual research, scholarly articles, to kind of reinforce a lot of the things that I missed in K through 12. And it’s helping me to get to know myself better.

PV: I felt that way when I was in grad school and I learned about redlining for the first time. I felt like I should have known about that way earlier in my life, given that I grew up in the New York City area. Yeah. Yeah, that’s interesting, the idea of unlearning things.

CB: I agree.

PV: Yeah, never too late to unlearn stuff, right?

CB: Never too late to unlearn. This is related, but not related. We’ve got a summer program right now and the kids are doing a project on redlining. And they’re finding out that New York, although it’s one of the most diverse places in the country, is also one of the most segregated when people go home to their neighborhoods.

PV: I guess it gets the reputation because everybody gets mixed up in the subway-

CB: Yes.

PV: And then when they go to work. But yeah, when they go home, not so much.

CB: Not so much.

PV: Yeah. Well speaking of New York City, you’ve been involved for the past two years with a partnership with Cardinal Hayes High School and Aquinas High School where you mentor Hispanic and Black students. How’s that gone so far?

CB: The program at Hayes and Aquinas has been pretty awesome for the Gabelli School. I mean, it does two things for us. First, it is a pipeline program. Historically at Fordham, students of color have been underrepresented. Let’s put it that way, right? And they’ve been underrepresented in such a way where now the university is trying to recruit students, right, that have the academic ability to survive in an environment like Fordham. It is a recruitment program.

So we work with the honors program at Hayes. These are very high achieving high school students with good test scores and good GPAs. And they are already interested or have been in conversations with Ivys and other really large institutions, research 1 institutions within the US. And yet, they really weren’t considering Fordham before this program. And so we’ve been able to go to the school as the Gabelli School of Business, teach them things about business principles like finance and marketing and strategy and operations, and then give them a project that is very closely related to the capstone of the sophomore year at Gabelli. And they learn it. And then they do this pitch proposal competition.

And in the midst of all of that, we’ve got Fordham students, which is, this is the other side of the coin, it’s a recruitment pipeline, and it’s also a community gaze learning initiative for our college students. So they are the college mentors that are in the classroom with the high school students walking them through the college assignments. And it helps the high school students, but it really reinforces the learning for the Fordham students, so that when they come into the class, they have reinforced their learnings about finance and marketing strategy, so on and so forth.

From the program, I think we’ve admitted about 10 students between Fordham College, GSB, and the Fordham College Lincoln Center at Rose Hill. And now, yeah, we’re going into year three of the program and we are looking to add a third institution, depending on whether or not we can do so virtually.

PV: Given that your expertise is in communication. Is there anything that you’ve kind of taken note of in the last two months that’s really made you hopeful for things to come?

CB: At the business college, a lot of the professors’ researched interests in various fields has some cross-pollination with conflict resolution. Even in management, they’ve got these organizational dynamics things that they do. And so what I’ve learned in the midst of all of this, is that serious conversations about race and inequities really involved critical conflict resolution principles. First thing, you’ve got to be willing to resolve the conflict, right? A lot of people come to the table for this particular conversation interested in learning, but not necessarily interested in resolving anything.

So you’ve got to come to the table ready to resolve conflict. And then when you do, you’ve got to really use best practices around listening and making sure that the other person is understood, and not using a hot button language or terms, so on and so forth. So that’s what I learned from this. And I know that it’s something that a lot of other professors at the Gabelli School are dealing with.

PV: Anything else you want to add before I let you go?

CB: The only thing that I’m thinking about within the context of Fordham in this conversation is it’s time for us to put our Jesuit values to work.

Just a few days after Floyd, a Black man, died during an arrest in Minneapolis, with protests and calls for systemic change sweeping the country, Carter began texting with his longtime friend and fellow rapper, Franco Obour, about collaborating on a song to highlight their lived experiences as Black men and the personal and structural racism they’ve been exposed to throughout their lives. After three days of sharing lyrics and voice memos with each other and choosing an instrumental from producer eeryskies, Carter and Obour recorded their verses at a friend’s studio in Manville, New Jersey.

The resulting song, “What Do You See?” was released on June 12 on all major streaming platforms after initially being posted on Instagram and Facebook. Since then, Carter and Obour—a Rutgers dental student who performs under the name juneyouare and who grew up with Carter in Hillsborough, New Jersey—have received press from outlets including BroBible, Karen Civil, and Forbes. As part of its release, the two decided to donate all proceeds from the song’s iTunes purchases this year to Color of Change, a nonprofit civil rights organization that “leads campaigns that build real power for Black communities.”

https://www.instagram.com/p/CBVgECApRDX/

Over a laid-back, hypnotic beat that recalls the G-funk sound favored by West Coast rappers of the 1990s—like the often politically minded Ice Cube and 2Pac—Carter rhymes about both the frustrations of seeing articles and social media posts that downplay the racism experienced by Black people in America (“I do not come to a wake to debate what you been through”) and questions of ancestry and intergenerational trauma (“Look at my lineage/I’m a descendant of slaves/Somewhere in South Carolina/but I cannot find ’em/’cause they don’t have graves”).

“People seemed like they were losing track of the ultimate thing that happened, where this man lost his life and that could have been prevented,” Carter says. “It just felt very frustrating. It’s like, you don’t go to a funeral if someone’s relative passed and talk about, ‘Oh, well, we should be mourning my relative too.’ It’s like, hey, let’s focus together on what’s going on and try to fix it and find a solution.”

An Internship Becomes a Career

Carter’s interest in music dates back to sixth grade, when he performed with friends in a talent show, but he says he began to take things more seriously while at Fordham, where he majored in communication and media studies. After landing in the Bronx, where his father, Anthony—a 1976 Fordham College at Rose Hill graduate and current member of the University’s Board of Trustees—also studied, Carter set up recording equipment in his Loschert Hall dorm room (and later in O’Hare Hall and Campbell Hall) and earned a reputation as a musician on campus, getting invited to play at house parties, club events, and the University’s popular Spring Weekend concert.

While balancing his studies and music, in 2014, during his senior year, Carter also began an internship at the Robot Company, a sports and entertainment marketing firm founded by LeBron James and Maverick Carter. After completing his internship—the first one at the then-new company—Carter was offered a full-time position, and he has been with the firm ever since. In his current role as talent and influence manager, Carter works with brands, athletes, and influencers to find opportunities for collaboration.

A Growing Musical Platform, from NBA 2K to Australia

Meanwhile, Carter’s music career has continued to flourish. In May 2018, he independently released his debut album, Roadtrip, which has garnered more than 300,000 streams across major platforms. And this past December, two of the songs off Roadtrip, “G.N.S.L.” and “Pull Up,” were chosen to appear on the soundtrack for the hugely popular NBA 2K20 video game, appearing alongside both up-and-coming artists and established stars like Drake, Travis Scott, Cardi B, and Carter’s current favorite rapper, J. Cole.

“I grew up playing the game, and it’s still exciting every time [I] turn it on and hear my song come on shuffle in the background,” he says. “I would say almost every day, there’s someone new who DMs me like, ‘Yo, I heard your song on 2K. I live in London,’ or ‘I live in Australia,’ all these different places. So it’s cool to see that aspect.”

Looking ahead, after already releasing three new singles this year—“Made Men,” “Gassed Up,” and “What Do You See?”—Carter says he wants to continue to put out a new song every six to eight weeks. With what he calls “a vault” of unreleased music he’s been sitting on—and the marketing skills he’s acquired through his education at Fordham and his work at the Robot Company—he foresees having a promotional plan for each new song in order to gain continued traction with listeners. Having the ability to create his own media kits and knowing how to promote his music, Carter says, has made being an independent artist a viable path.

In writing and releasing “What Do You See?” Carter says he and Obour “had complete control of how we wanted to do it, where we wanted to put it out,” including the decision to donate proceeds to Color of Change.

With that kind of artistic control and freedom, Carter hopes that he can continue to inspire productive dialogue, saying that by releasing the song, he and Obour wanted to “make a statement and hopefully ignite a conversation.”

“It was just sending a message,” he says, “something I would talk about with close friends or keep to myself and trying to amplify that, knowing that there’s a platform that I have—and people, I think, would want to hear it.”

“[George Floyd’s death] really puts us in position to look at something else that rears its ugly head all too often—not just in a macro sense, but in a micro sense at Fordham University, [in]  corporate America—and it’s called racism,” said Carter, who retired as vice president for global diversity & inclusion and chief diversity officer for Johnson & Johnson in 2015. “We have to call it what it is, and we have to understand we all are affected and afflicted by this sin called racism. And we have to come together collectively to do something about it.” 

A frequent lecturer and writer on the topics of diversity, inclusion, and social justice, Carter was a member of Fordham’s Diversity Task Force in 2015 and supports the University’s CSTEP program. He grew up in the South Bronx in a family of 10 children. His son Dayne is a 2015 Fordham graduate.

In part of the June 18 interview, Carter reflected on how his Fordham baseball cap helps protect him from people who may misjudge his identity and “take a cheap shot” at him. 

“Outside of what we do, we still have to find ways to protect who we are,” Carter said. “I often use [this]  example. I have a white cap, and it has a beautiful Fordham emblem on the front of it, and on the back of it, it says Board of Trustees. And I put that hat on like every other trustee with a sense of pride … But I also put that hat on for protection. I put that hat on because I don’t want anybody to misjudge who I am and take a cheap shot at me. Because absent that hat, I could be set up in circumstances that are unfortunate simply because of the color of my skin.” 

In his role at Fordham, Zapata focuses on the support and strategic development of practices that promote racial justice, gender equity, disability access, and full participation in the life of the University among all members of the community. He’s a native New Yorker of Puerto Rican descent who grew up in the Chelsea public housing projects and attended Rice High School in Harlem. 

Along with Carter, Zapata spoke about how Fordham is working on addressing racism within its ranks. 

“At Fordham, we have … one of the oldest and widely respected African and African American history programs in the country … But not everybody’s going to be an African and African American studies major,” said Zapata. “What we’re trying to do at Fordham is [figure out]how do we integrate substantively and authentically issues of race throughout the curriculum in introductory classes? It can’t be an extra class, a one-credit class, or a zero-credit class. It has to be integrated into the curriculum.”

Achieving meaningful change is a process, said Zapata. 

“What people think are the solutions are usually just the beginnings, and that includes hiring a chief diversity officer. That includes even getting a diverse student body, which we have not achieved yet. We’re still working on diversifying the faculty and administration and staff, which we’re working on. It’s a slower process. But we can’t pat ourselves on the back,” said Zapata. “We’re not there yet. And we have a long way to go.”

Watch Carter and Zapata’s full conversation in the video above. 

The articles, films, academic papers, podcasts, and interviews listed below are for anyone interested in learning about the Black Lives Matter Movement, racial inequality and racialized violence, and communal responses toward action and healing.

Self-Care

How Black Americans can practice self-care… And how everyone else can help, Elizabeth Wellington, 2020
4 Self-Care Resources for Days When the World is Terrible, Miriam Zoila Pérez, 2020

Demonstrating Care for Black People

Your Black Colleagues May Look Like They’re Okay — Chances Are They’re Not, Danielle Cadet, Refinery 29, 2020
Before You Check In On Your Black Friend, Read This, Elizabeth Gulino, Refinery 29, 2020

Articles

Around the world, the U.S. has long been a symbol of anti-Black racism, Nana Osei-Opare, The Washington Post, 2020
NYPD at the Crossroads: Some Background History, Mark Naison, The Gotham Center for New York City History, 2020
Racism Won’t be Solved by Yet Another Blue Ribbon-Report, Adam Harris, The Atlantic, 2020
The assumptions of white privilege and what we can do about it, Bryan N. Massingale, National Catholic Reporter, 2020
The NFL Is Suddenly Worried About Black Lives, Jemele Hill, The Atlantic, 2020
Performative Allyship is Deadly (Here’s What to Do Instead), Holiday Phillips, Forge – Medium, 2020
A Look Back At Trayvon Martin’s Death, And the Movement it Inspired, Karen Grigsby Bates, Code Switch – NPR, 2018
Blackness as Disability? Kimani Paul-Emile, Fordham Law Archive of Scholarship and History, 2018
The Intersection of Policing and Race, Danyelle Soloman, American Progress, 2016
The Cost of Balancing Academia and Racism, Adrienne Green, The Atlantic, 2016
The Politics of ‘Looting’ and ‘Violence’, Eric Draitser, CounterPunch, 2015
“The White Space,” Elijah Anderson, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, 1(1), 10-21

Books

How to Be an Antiracist, Ibram X. Kendi, (One World/Ballantine, 2019)
Multiracials and Civil Rights: Mixed-Race Stories of Discrimination, Tanya K Hernández, (NYU Press, 2018)
So You Want to Talk About Race, Ijeoma Oluo, (Seal Press, 2018)
When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir, Patrisse Khan-Cullors, (Canongate Books, 2018)
The Sin of White Supremacy: Christianity, Racism, & Religious Diversity in America, Jeannine Hill-Fletcher, (Orbis Books, 2017)
Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color, Andrea Ritchie, (Beacon Press, 2017)
Nobody: Casualties of America’s War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond, Marc Lamont Hill and Todd Brewster, (Simon and Schuster, 2016)
Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates, (Spiegel & Grau, 2015)
Racial Justice and the Catholic Church, Bryan Massingale, (Orbis Books, 2014)
Citizen: an American Lyric, Claudia Rankine, (Graywolf Press, 2014)
Savage Portrayals: Race, Media, and the Central Park Jogger Story, Natalie Byfield, (Temple University Press, 2014)
Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do, Claude Steele, (WW Norton & Company, 2011)
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander, (The New Press, 2010)
Everyday Antiracism: Getting Real About Race in School, Mika Pollock, (The New Press, 2008)
Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006)

Multimedia: Documentaries and Conversations

The Bronx COVID-19 Oral History Project Fordham University. Carlos Rico, Veronica Quiroga, and Bethany Fernandez.
13th (2016) [Film]. Netflix. Duvernay, A. (Streaming for free)
Just Mercy (2019) [Film]. Warner Bros. Cretton, D. D. (Streaming for free)
Black vs. White: Protesting & Riots (2020) [Interview] Christina Greer & Jason Johnson
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor on How Racism & Racial Terrorism Fueled Nationwide Anger (2020)[Interview] DemocracyNow!
Decade of Fire (2019) [Film]. GoodDocs. Hilderbran, G., Vazquez, V.
When They See Us (2019) [TV Mini-series]. Netflix. Duvernay, A.
Angela Davis – “Freedom is a Constant Struggle” (2019) [Lecture] The University of New England
Dr. Robin DiAngelo discusses ‘White Fragility’ (2018) [Book Talk] Seattle Central Library
The Urgency of Intersectionality (2016) Kimberlé Crenshaw, TED
The Black Power Mixtape (2011) [Film] PBS Independent Lens. Göran Olsson
Color Blind or Color Brave (2014) Mellody Hobson, TED.
The Power of Vulnerability (2010) Brené Brown, TED.
Intersectionality Matters [Podcast] Kimberlé Crenshaw
Code Switch [Podcast] NPR
Pod Save the People [Podcast] Deray McKesson

Get Involved

The Bronx Freedom Fund
#8cantwait
8toAbolition

Additional Resources

Jesuit Resources on Racism: Ignatian Solidarity Network – Racial Justice

Khan, who goes by the pronouns they, their, and them, began their Jan. 23 talk by telling a travel story that illustrates how embedded racism and bias can impact day-to-day interactions.

“I am late for a connecting flight, and I’m rushing through the airport and I get there and I just happen to be in first [class]this time,” Khan, who is now based in Los Angeles, said to a standing-room-only crowd of students, faculty, and community members in a Fordham Law lecture room. The event was part of Fordham’s week of programming in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

“And right above my head the overhead space is full. So I look behind and there’s one, there’s an empty space, and I’m late enough where everyone is settled in. And as I’m about to, in a very practiced way, swing my bag up there, an older man pops up and he goes, ‘Uh, I’m sorry, ’scuse me, do you belong here?'”

Khan said that they paused for a few seconds and stared back at the man who they said didn’t have “a malicious bone” in his body.

“You know it’s funny … I’ve read all the books, I’ve had all the conversations, I’ve been on the frontlines … I have had all the debates that you could possibly imagine, and still there’s never a way to respond to these things,” Khan said. “There’s no set way to know how to unpack this exchange that’s happening between us in 10, 15, 30 seconds, and so I just stare at him.”

Khan said that they saw something happen on the man’s face and he quickly apologized, lifted the carry-on onto the rack, and retrieved it after the plane landed.

“I tell this story because the word ‘belonging’ is something that keeps coming up for me and in this work,” they said.

Khan was the keynote speaker for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. week, which aimed to honor King’s legacy and explore the impact of his work—and that of the civil rights movement—on today’s civil and human rights agenda.

They said that they told the story from the plane because it embodies their work on pushing for equality and justice for people of color, those who are LGBTQ+, those who some consider “outsiders.”

“It was in that moment that so many other things make sense—a black kid selling lemonade on the corner who gets the police called on them, a black man walking down the street who has the police called on him, a cookout with a group of black people and they have the police called on them,” they said. “We come up with these amazing memes and they’re so funny—BBQ Becky and all that—but ultimately there is a reason why these people feel like they need to regulate space. When you are taught to believe that you have more ownership of a space, of a society, of a country, of an institution, whatever it is, then it becomes your job to keep those who don’t belong out.”

Khan called on those in the audience to actively seek to build bridges to others who are different, as a way to combat supremacy.

“If you don’t seek me out, and I don’t seek you, we have accepted the terms of white supremacy in this country,” they said. “We have accepted its conditions. We have accepted its parameters. When you decide that my life is of lesser value than yours, when we do not take personally the things that are happening to the populations of other people, understanding that if they’re coming for me tonight, they most assuredly will be coming for you tomorrow morning, if we aren’t beginning to take these things personally, we aren’t going to win.”

The office of Rafael Zapata, Fordham’s chief diversity officer, sponsored the lecture and the rest of the week’s Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. events. Zapata said that Khan “embodied this spirit” of King, which included pushing back on “norms” that are wrong and fighting for social justice and equality.

“When the movement went from the Deep South, and the unambiguous repudiation of racist acts and hatred, to systemic racism in the North and segregation, he lost many friends and I think that courage and that evolution is lost,” he said.

Zapata said that activists like Khan have helped to keep the movement alive and the work ongoing. “When I read some of the writings of Janaya Khan, I think of Black Lives Matter in that longer trajectory of slave rebellions, of abolitionist movements, of post-reconstruction communities, of literary movements—W.E.B. DuBois, Ella Baker, Audre Lorde, and so many nameless others—and we’re thankful that they’re here today.”

Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham, said that Khan’s speech, which also included a call for economic justice, as well as social justice, encouraged those in attendance to examine their own selves and work for change they want to see in the world.

“It’s an invitation rather than a lecture,” Father McShane said. “You took us through one of the difficult conversations, which is a necessary conversation, and it’s necessary because it’s a prophetic conversation and you did it in a masterful way. I can’t tell you how moved I was by what you did.”

Although the collages are striking, the sites themselves seem unremarkable: A hair salon, a burger joint, street corners, churches, and other locales bear little to no trace of their fraught past. Some of the titles, however, underscore Ruble’s concern with the “ways we remember—and forget—the charged events of our country’s turbulent history of race relations,” she writes. A Jersey City sidewalk scene, for instance, is called Everyone here is aware of what has happened but they also want to forget as quickly as possible.

Ruble, who has taught in Fordham’s visual arts department since 2001, created the collages over the past few years. She first showed them last fall at the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey and again this past winter at the Foley Gallery on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. She spoke with FORDHAM magazine via email in April.

As you researched these sites, did you learn anything that surprised you or ran counter to your sense of New Jersey’s place in U.S. history?

Oh my gosh, yes! I’d always known that the North’s relationship to slavery was a complicated one, but one thing that really surprised me was that New Jersey was known as the “slave state of the North.” In 1846, it enacted an abolition law that freed all black children born after its passage but designated the state’s remaining slaves as “apprentices for life.” Eighteen of these “apprentices” still remained in 1860, making New Jersey the last Northern state to enslave people. I was also surprised by just how few white Northerners supported the Underground Railroad.

Did you have a hard time finding and getting access to safe-house locations?

It’s ironic—in its day, the Underground Railroad was a highly unpopular movement among Northern whites, and also highly illegal, of course. Participants had to operate in secrecy. Today, on the other hand, it’s held up as evidence of our country’s inherent morality, and everyone with a trap door or passageway in the basement likes to speculate that their home was part of the effort to help fugitives escape. I didn’t have a hard time finding or getting access to the safe-house locations—what was harder was actually confirming that they were genuine. 

Which riot locations did you depict in the series?

The state had five major race riots—in Jersey City, Paterson, Newark, Plainfield, and Asbury Park. They all happened in the 1960s, except for Asbury Park, which took place on Independence Day, 1970. When I first began this series, I’d planned to depict the place where the riots “started.” But that quickly grew complicated as I got further into my research. Was the “start” of the riot the street corner where the first brick or Molotov cocktail was thrown? Or was it where the precipitating event occurred—for instance, where the Newark police arrested and brutally beat a black cab driver who’d done nothing more than pass a double-parked squad car? Identifying where something supposedly began is freighted with judgments about guilt and responsibility. Looking at the longer arc of history, you can easily make the case that all of the riots actually began with the original violence of slavery—there’s a direct line from slavery to Jim Crow to the uprisings of the civil rights era, which were a response to centuries of horrific brutality.

Tell me about Everyone here is aware of what has happened but they also want to forget as quickly as possible. Why did you choose that title for the piece?

All of the pieces that depict riot sites are titled with sentences taken from contemporaneous newspaper reports of the incidents. That particular sentence struck me not only as having an obvious connection to the feelings of the time but also as symbolizing how many have come to view the uprisings of the 1960s, 50 years later—as shameful events better left out of the history books because they threaten the dominant narrative of our country as a land of opportunity and freedom. 

Why are the safe-house locations called Untitled with the name of the town in parentheses?

I left the Underground Railroad sites untitled to allude to the secrecy that shrouded them in their day. I thought a lot about the idea of silence while making this series, and how silence has many different connotations. In the context of the Underground Railroad, silence was used as a tool of protection. But there’s also silence—or more accurately, silencing—that occurs in the context of oppression. Martin Luther King referred to the riots of the civil rights era as “the language of the unheard.” And finally there’s the silence of the landscape itself, which swallows the secrets of its past with every big-box store and parking lot that’s laid down on historically significant ground.

You took the title of your series from the 1965 Flannery O’Connor short story “Everything That Rises Must Converge.” Why did you use those words to unite the collages you created?

These places, both the Underground Railroad sites and the race riot sites, were about rising—rising up, rising against—and about convergence, in both cooperation and conflict. [O’Connor’s story is] about an altercation between a white woman and black woman riding a bus in the South shortly after the desegregation of the transportation system. The fact that the story is about race relations—and about the complicated relationship between forward and backward movement—just underscored the fact that it was the right title for my series. 

The title isn’t original to O’Connor. She took it from the Jesuit scientist and philosopher Teilhard de Chardin, who wrote about spiritual evolution. Do you feel you’ve transformed the title in some way with your work?

I haven’t studied Teilhard in as much depth as I’d like to, but my understanding is that he believed that creation was not a singular event but rather an ongoing development—that evolution was a spiritual and moral progression toward a point associated with Christ. I think O’Connor recognized that we are only partway through that progression toward convergence with Christ, and I think her story is about the messiness of that trajectory. My adopting of her title 50 years later is not so much a transformation of its meaning as it is an accounting of our progress. How much closer are we to Teilhard’s convergence? Perhaps not as close as we should be. But I don’t see this strictly as a condemning fact. I see it as a call to rise to everything we as a nation have claimed to believe in. As a call to keep struggling toward grace.

You’ve written that the collages depict a “present that’s unmoored from its past but never perfectly free from it.” Is that a good thing? Should we be free from the past? Or have you tried to bring about a kind of artistic convergence of past and present?

I’m tempted to say, yes, that’s exactly what I’m trying to do. But actually I think the collages do just the opposite—they talk about our disconnect from the past. Or maybe they do both. In the course of making this series, I’ve thought a lot about remembering and forgetting, and when each is “better.” Let’s for a second assume that the entire nation could completely forget our history. That we all woke up tomorrow with amnesia. We would presumably recognize difference in skin tone, but what would we make of it? It would be an interesting experiment—maybe we’d all get along better, maybe not.

As a white woman, I’ve also thought a lot about the implications of looking so closely at white-initiated violence against black communities and individuals. Does this focus just ossify modes of oppression and perception that still exist? Does it suppress stories about black achievement and triumph? Or is it a critically needed acknowledgment of the white community’s wrongdoing? An attempt to take responsibility for the past and move forward, in whatever way that may mean?

Has the Black Lives Matter movement influenced your work or your thinking about this project?

I started this series a year before the events in Ferguson, well before the Black Lives Matter movement. Although I came to the series through my earlier interest in conflict in general, the project obviously immediately became one about past and contemporary race relations. It was a subject that wasn’t dominating the national conversation in the same way it is now, and the series was my own small attempt to open up that conversation. The Black Lives Matter movement has moved the conversation forward in much more effective, widespread ways, of course. Last year I participated in a march in New York City for Eric Garner. Along with about a hundred other people, I laid down in a street near Penn Station. After two years of visiting past riot sites on my own, in a very solitary way, it was an incredibly moving experience to be among hundreds with a collective voice strong enough to bring the city to a screeching halt. It felt like stopping the heart of the city and pushing the blood in a new direction, toward extremities that hadn’t been receiving enough of it. 

New York Times art critic Ken Johnson described your collages as being “deadpan cool” but conceptually “loaded” and “painfully hot.” Is that hot and cool combo something you wanted to convey?

Definitely. Conceptually, this is a very loaded topic to address. And I’m an artist, not a scholar, on these subjects—it’s not my place to offer any kind of “authoritative” statement. The only way I personally feel comfortable addressing race relations is by looking in a very objective, “deadpan cool” way at how these sites of historical significance have changed over the years. What gets lost? What gets remembered? To what end? The answers to these questions help give us a sense of where we are today and what we need to work toward.  

What would you like viewers to take away from the project?

I’d love for viewers to come away from it looking more closely at everything that surrounds them—being curious about hidden narratives. Areas that are economically depressed are rendered anonymous—or worse, as “dangerous” or “blighted.” Disconnecting communities from their history in this way is a powerful means of perpetuating their oppression. Regardless of where you live, that place has a history. Maybe a Walmart sits on it. Maybe it’s just an empty lot. The present often obliterates the past. But knowing the past may give you a sense of agency you might not have had otherwise. 

Interview conducted, edited, and condensed by Ryan Stellabotte.

“Migration has been part of the story of New York City for centuries, and it’s also a powerful image for what is both rich and conflictual about the city,” said Beaudoin, an associate professor of religion in the Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education.

“We’ll be looking at all kinds of migration—forced and chosen migrations across borders, migrations through the prison system, migration into and out of religions, migrations through the journey of faith and spirituality—and asking how we are contributing to life in places where migration is happening. There are many ways to relate to this topic, but what’s most important is that people’s lives and livelihoods are at the center of it.”

The lived experience of real people is the central concern of practical theology, said Beaudoin. Rather than focusing exclusively on ideas and concepts, practical theologians study how religions and theologies directly and indirectly influence people’s actions, experiences, and practices.

“We see theology as interventionist,” Beaudoin said. “We do theology because we want to facilitate life and facilitate deeper or renewed practices in different environments.”

Many of the conference sessions will explore the intersection of practical theology with critical contemporary issues, such the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. A plenary session on this topic will feature a panel of speakers that includes BLM activist Darnell Moore and Rev. John Vaughan, executive vice president of Auburn Theological Seminary and a leader in the BLM movement.

“The idea is to ask how the effects of your theology honor the lived witness of the BLM movement,” Beaudoin said. “Whether you’re doing religious education for second graders or systematic theology for the university, how is your theology helping to realize these goods?”

Conference participants will also have the opportunity to head across Fordham Road to Tuff City Styles, where alumna Tamara Henry, PhD, GRE ’14, will discuss urban art, religious education, and practical theology. In conjunction with Henry’s talk, graphic artists at Tuff City will be revamping the APT logo in the style of graffiti art.

“This is a way to connect the study of religion at Fordham and the neighborhood we’re in,” Beaudoin said. “That’s very important to me.”

Registration for the biennial conference is open now through March 10. Visit the conference website to learn more and to register.