For Meenasarani Linde Murugan, Ph.D., the period is a gold mine for her primary research interest: representations of performances of race and gender on television.

Murugan, an assistant professor in communication and media studies, is working on a book that looks at the interactions between performers of color and the white program hosts on variety shows during that period. She’s interested in the ways racial issues were discussed, both explicitly and in more subtle ways.

Although much research has been done on the transition from radio to early television and how that affected representations of ethnicity and masculinity, Murugan maintains there’s more to be learned. Her research casts a critical eye at shows such as the Tonight Show, and program hosts such as Dinah Shore, Flip Wilson, and Carol Burnett.

“Variety shows articulated a kind of cosmopolitanism that served to expand existing constructions of gender and race in the postwar period,” she said.

In addition to viewing old TV clips, Murugan examines archived memos to learn how television producers, hosts, and executives were talking at the time about different guests. While hosts were overwhelmingly white, persons of color were often featured as guests especially for musical performances.

For a brief period, she said, there was a rivalry between Steve Allen, one of the first hosts of the Tonight Show, and television variety show legend Ed Sullivan. Allen considered himself to be more hip than Sullivan; he played jazz piano on the show and he invited many African Americans as guests.

“[It was] one of the ways in which Allen thought he was more sophisticated,” she said. “It was a very interesting use of those performers’ names to give himself credibility.”

“I think that [posture]is a tension we all still see today, when people say things like ‘but some of my best friends are black.’ On the one hand, he is giving these performers a platform in a very segregated entertainment sphere. But at the same time, it lends credibility to his show.”

Murugan’s research also explores tensions inherent in the fact that variety shows were filmed in New York or Los Angeles, where white audience members and performers of color often mixed, but were broadcast nationally. Regions such as the South were less accepting of such fraternization.

“The variety shows had the opportunity to break down those walls, and at the same time, a lot of times when they did that, hosts got hate mail,” she said.

It wasn’t just about the viewers, however. “It was really about advertisers,” she said. “If they were going to sponsor the show, then they didn’t want to lose a possible customer market.”

Murugan said she found revealing instances of solidarity, beyond hosts simply hosting performers of color. Allen, for instance, once devoted an entire show to a conversation with African-American comedian Dick Gregory about what it means to be a black man in the United States.

“Most of the time it’s just the two smoking cigarettes and having a very candid conversation,” she said. “And then they come back from a commercial break, and Steve Allen addresses the studio audience and the camera. He basically says ‘You know, some of you might be upset by what we’re talking about, but I don’t care.’

“There’s something about the candidness of that interview that I appreciated; Allen knowing that people might feel uncomfortable with what they’re talking about but realizing it’s still important to have the conversation.”

Ultimately Murugan said she hopes to better understand the terrain in which such instances of solidarity took place. While it requires one person to sacrifice a certain amount of privilege, does that have to happen in every episode aired on television?

She said that there are a lot of questions about how today’s political changes will affect popular culture. But when she began working on the book in August 2015, the rhetoric of inclusion was strong.

This embrace is sometimes seen as a recent development, but as examples from variety shows illustrate, the truth is more complicated. Television has been diverse, Murugan said, it just hasn’t been equal.

“It’s not just about having people of all colors on a show. We still want more diversity and want it on a very surface level.”

“But then we’re not really interrogating what’s the nature of that interaction. I think we also need to talk about issues of power,” she said.   

Public school teacher Aixa Rodriguez, FCRH ‘00, GSE ’05, attended a panel discussion devoted to the topic in Manhattan last fall and came away “incredibly frustrated” by the fact that the Bronx was absent from the discussion.

So Rodriguez, an ESL teacher at Fannie Lou Hamer High School in the Bronx, organized her own discussion, “Race and Public Education in NYC: A Town Hall.”

The event will take place Tuesday, Feb. 21 from 7 – 9 p.m. in the Flom Auditorium, William D. Walsh Family Library, on the Rose Hill campus. It will be moderated by Mark Naison, Ph.D., professor of history and African American studies. The panel will feature:

Fabienne Doucet, Ph.D., associate professor of early childhood education at New York University;

Pamela Lewis, FCRH ’03, author of Teaching While Black: A New Voice on Race and Education in New York City (Fordham University Press, 2016);

Luis E. Torres, principal of P.S. 55 in Claremont Village in the Bronx;

Sean Ahern, New York City public school teacher;

Kaliris Salas-Ramirez, Ph.D., assistant medical professor at the City University of New York, mother, and activist;

Arthur Goldstein, ESL teacher and United Federation of Teachers chapter leader at Francis Lewis High School in Queens;

Ruth Rodriguez, former teacher, mother, and administrator for United Opt Out National; and

Daniel Katz, teacher, member of Community Education Council 3’s zoning committee.

Rodriguez said a gathering of local stakeholders is especially important now because 32 of the of the 62 schools that the State of New York is considering closing are located in the Bronx. The panelists also have direct connections to schools (a “dog in the fight,” she said) either as administrators, parents, or teachers.

“None of us have really had a chance to explore this up until now, because a lot of these programs have put limits on time to speak, or there weren’t a wide variety of opinions, or the audience wasn’t involved,” she said.

One of her biggest critiques of the current conversations about school segregation is that it’s often a binary one, pitting the needs of black students against white students. Latino students are considered after the fact, and Asian students are left out of the picture altogether, she said. The face of bilingual education is going to have to change.

The biggest hurdle, however, is simply “getting people to accept that segregation is real,”and that it’s exacerbated by the fact that housing and schools are deeply intertwined. Because New Yorkers have to pay more to live in neighborhoods with good schools, they’re resistant to any changes that might alter the demographics of those schools.

“People want to feel good about themselves so they tell themselves a myth, and they don’t want to admit that they have preconceived notions. The legacy of redlining is one cause for segregation, but attaching the quality of a local school to the cost of local housing is another reason,” she said. “It just reinforces who wants to live where.”

For more information or to RSVP visit the event’s Facebook page.

Related Story: Bronx High School Students Join Fordham Class for a Day

For Lise Schreier, Ph.D., there is much to be learned from an especially heinous practice that thrived in Europe from the mid-15th century to the early 19th century: child-gifting, the act of bringing dark-skinned children from Ghana, Senegal, and India to Europe, and offering them as presents to high society women.

In “Toying with Blackness,” a talk she presented on Jan. 19 at Fordham Law’s Center on Race, Law & Justice, Schreier, an associate professor of French, shared some of the research that she’s been conducting as part of a National Endowment for the Humanities grant toward publication of a book, Playthings of Empire: Child-Gifting and the Politics of French Femininity.

In the story, a black girl named Raïssa is “rescued” from a black abuser and given to a white French girl named Mady. Raïssa is portrayed as grateful for being rescued from her abuser, and Mady is thrilled to have a new “toy.”

“But the story doesn’t end here, because as you know, there is no such thing as a free gift. In exchange for her new plaything, the French girl is expected to behave in very specific ways. More to the point, the black ‘toy’ is what turns her into a proper, obedient French citizen,” Schreier said.

One of the things Schreier finds interesting here is the fact that Mady was not the only little girl to get a gift. Her young readers also got a gift: the magazine itself.

“We all know how it works: if you behave, you get a toy. If you don’t, no present for you. It’s important to realize that the story of the black child being gifted to the white child was itself a present to good little French girls.”

One baffling aspect of Blanche et Noire was that it was ostensibly set in the 1920s, even though slavery was abolished in France by then, said Schreier. And Saint-Domingue, where Raïssa was supposed to come from, had become independent and was already renamed Haiti by then. Schreier said this deliberate amnesia about the past is further proof that blacks’ lives didn’t really matter in France—even in the early 20th century.

“The idea that you can have a fictional character [in the 1920s]and decide that she’s a slave, and then have another character buy her and offer her as a toy, is depicted as completely normal,” she said.

“Add the fact that the black character is not only an object but is also ahistorical. That tells us a lot about the ways in which blacks were objectified at various levels and for a very specific purpose, which is educating French girls.”

Little of this history is known in the United States, Schreier said. The conversation among attendees following her Jan. 19 presentation therefore focused on the different ways in which slavery was practiced on the two continents. As such, the images from Lisette are often unsettling to American audiences.

“When you talk about children’s literature—which is connected with tenderness, presents, family, and domesticity—you don’t necessarily think about racial subjection.

“And yet these are very powerful hidden mechanisms,” she said, “so it’s even more important to understand them.”

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.