After a historic year centered on racial justice, students from the Graduate School of Education spearheaded the virtual research conference “We’re Speaking: Giving Voice to Empirical Research on Anti-Racism and Social Justice” on April 21, where they presented their research findings and amplified the voices of their peers, especially students from the BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, people of color) community. 

“We thought that it was really important to present research from students’ perspectives, especially given everything that has been going on since the pandemic and more recently, with George Floyd, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the anti-Asian violence,” said Keshia Webb, a GSE doctoral student in counseling psychology and conference co-chair, who organized the conference with GSE student Nathaniel Pickering and faculty mentor Margo Jackson, Ph.D. 

The three-hour conference came at a timely moment, said Rafael A. Zapata, chief diversity officer, special assistant to the president for diversity, and associate vice president for academic affairs, in his welcoming remarks. 

“The work you’re doing has certainly been highlighted by the events of just yesterday—the verdict in the Derek Chauvin trial,” said Zapata, whose office co-sponsored the conference. “Our close look at systemic inequalities and racism needs to continue to be focused on.” 

‘I Needed More Than Coping’ 

Twelve students presented their research to more than 100 virtual audience members. Their research topics focused on pandemic-related issues, including racial discrimination against male Asian international college students and the transition to STEM online learning platforms for urban high school students. They also researched issues that existed long before the pandemic, including the racial identity of multiracial Latinx adults and the sexist culture that can develop among young male athletes. 

GSE student Kayla Wong explored how Black women understand their experiences with racial microaggressions and how they have found ways to heal from their trauma—a topic that hits home for Wong, a Black woman. 

“A lot of research on racism is often focused on exploring how we can educate white people about racism and also on how people of color cope with racial microaggressions, but personally, it didn’t feel like enough,” said Wong. “I think that we need to do more than coping. And I know, personally, I needed more than coping.” 

Sara Skluzacek investigated what happens when school staff attempt to reduce their implicit bias through “individuation,” or replacing stereotypes with personal characteristics, and “creating contact,” or directly interacting with people from different racial groups. She found that participants became more aware of their biases, but they had trouble facing them. 

“I’m still finding my role in this work as a researcher, as a white woman, as a teacher in a racist system, as a mother of a biracial Black boy, and simply as a human who believes in equity and justice,” said Skluzacek, a doctoral student in the contemporary learning and interdisciplinary research program. 

How Research Can Shape Law Enforcement Training

Anna Cait Wade examined how public charter school teachers perceive their role in interrupting the school-to-prison pipeline for girls of color. She found that cultural differences, especially a lack of understanding of the “complexities of race, trauma, and poverty in the classroom,” can result in poor discipline practices and strained relationships with Black female students, but sustained professional development for teachers could help. 

Audience member Lori Wolff, Ph.D., a professor in the Graduate School of Education, asked Wade how her study could inform law enforcement programming and training. Wade, a doctoral student in the school psychology program, said that general research consistently shows that it’s not effective for students, especially Black girls, to have a police officer inside schools. 

“The highly trained teachers or mental health professionals are the ones who understand the intersectionality that their students are experiencing and the unique challenges in their life, and actually having [police officers]there can escalate things quite a bit,” Wade said. “What would be better is to highlight some of the experts in the schools and their practices for sustaining relationships with students, and having that trust so that when a hot moment comes, you’re able to reach [them].”

‘We Shouldn’t Be Learning at the Cost of Clients of Color’

In the Q&A, audience member Juan Carlos Matos, assistant vice president for student affairs for diversity and inclusion, asked student presenters what topics they would like to see in their University coursework to better prepare them as educators. 

Stephanie L. Gutkin said her study participants told her they wanted trained professionals to guide them through the process of broaching race and racism with their clients in the classroom before working with clients.  

“It’s been stated that the first experiences that these [counseling and school psychology]students are having are in practicum sites with clients of color, which is exceptionally harmful as a learning experience, and we shouldn’t be learning at the cost of clients of color,” said Gutkin, who presented her project “Are White Counselor-Trainees Stuck in Theory?: Navigating Race and Racism in Therapy.” 

Each student presenter was awarded $200 in research funding from the Graduate School of Education. They were the first of their peers to present their work in a student-led conference at GSE, said Akane Zusho, Ph.D., interim dean of the Graduate School of Education.

“We really need more events like this—events that showcase the thoughtful, authentic, and rigorous work that our students are doing here at GSE around issues of justice and anti-racism,” Zusho said. “This past year, I really have come to appreciate even more how much better we all are when we center the voices of students.”  

Why establish the center at Fordham?
We thought it was important not only for a law school but for Fordham Law, which has a history of working on social justice issues, to try to create solutions for the race-related problems we’re seeing in our society. We have some of the most respected and well-published scholars on race in the country, and we wanted to bring our faculty to the table to advance the national conversation we’re having about race and inequality.

What is the role of the center?
The center focuses on the ways in which law not only can be a solution for racial inequality and discrimination but can also work to structure that very inequality. We get at that through scholarship, discourse, policy, and collaborations that look domestically but also globally at issues of race and inequality. We’re also trying to improve legal pedagogy, how we’re preparing students for the diverse society in which they live. And we’re interested in partnering with law firms, institutions, and leaders to address issues of access and opportunity within our profession.

How does the law contribute to discrimination?
We think of the law as something that resolves problems of discrimination. But it has historically worked to structure inequality as well. Think about anti-miscegenation laws, which served to create and reinforce racial categories and prohibited African Americans from marrying whites. Or think about housing and mass incarceration. The law has worked to structure inequality in ways that we often don’t appreciate.

How would you respond to the idea that we live in a post-racial society?
Many people take the fact that we’ve had an African-American president as evidence that race and racial inequality are artifacts of the past. But you need only look at our communities to see that race still matters. We remain heavily segregated as a nation. Indeed, many schools are as segregated as they were before Brown v. Board of Education.

What’s the focus of your scholarship?
I focus on issues of belonging, family, and inequality, and try to understand how race operates across multiple contexts and affects opportunities we experience within them.

You’ve also written about the value of race audits. What are they?
The race audit is an opportunity to involve community members and localities, in particular, in trying to identify and address the sources of racial inequality. We usually think about communities as the canary in the mine, like Flint and Ferguson, protesting and signaling that there’s a problem. But too often we don’t see them as problem solvers. The race audit tries to change that, to create communities of inquiry that involve everyday people working together in a common enterprise focused on racial change and understanding.

Are your students interested in the issues the center raises?
Fordham students are amazing. In my courses, that really comes across in their commitment to the materials and their openness to talking about race. I have students from all walks of life and all ideologies who deeply want to engage with what are some of the hardest issues of our time. I love that and admire them for it.

Edited and condensed from an interview with Stephen Eichinger

This year, Fordham University Press published Lewis’ memoir, Teaching While Black: A New Voice on Race and Education in New York City. The book is a deeply personal account of her 11 years of teaching in New York City, one of the most racially and economically segregated school systems in the country. Lewis details her frustrations in trying to reach her students while working within a system that did not value her own understanding—as a black woman—of what children of color need to succeed.

In the introduction, she writes about the effects of “double consciousness” on her and her students. The term, coined by civil rights activist and educator W.E.B. Du Bois, refers to the challenge African Americans face when they are forced to view themselves not only through their own eyes but also through the eyes of others around them. It’s something she’s felt both as a Fordham undergraduate and in her teaching career. She urges educators who are not of color to be mindful of the theory of double consciousness, and she challenges all educators to acknowledge the role race plays in their classrooms and, above all, “to not be color blind.”

Teaching While Black is filled with anecdotes of Lewis’ students—how they struggled, how they bonded with her over music, how she could relate to them and their families. It is Lewis’ hope that curricula in communities of color will continue to grow to better reflect their diverse student body, and that the city will attract more black and Latino teachers. A dearth of knowledge and education about one’s own culture, she said, contributes to low self-esteem and can lead students to struggle in and out of school.

“The lack of motivation and work ethic has a lot to do with how students feel about themselves and their self-worth. I feel like if they loved themselves and felt they were worthy of a better education, they would try harder,” said Lewis, who’s now working as a literacy coach in the Bronx. She added that “just having that presence of black leadership” in the classroom “makes you realize what your potential is a little more.”

A week ago, we celebrated the 240th anniversary of the adoption and promulgation of the Declaration of Independence. As is always the case, we celebrated the Fourth of July in a particular American way. That is to say, we didn’t observe our nation’s birthday with military parades, but with barbecues, baseball games, long lazy days at the beach, and with fireworks displays accompanied by patriotic music. In other words, we celebrated in a way worthy of a peaceable nation of neighbors.

Sadly and tragically, however, the feel-good experience of the Fourth of July was followed by a series of incidents that made it clear that the experiment in creating a new nation that was conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men and women are equal heralded by our forebears was not working as they intended it to. Indeed, the tragic and senseless deaths of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, and of Philando Castile‎ in suburban Minneapolis, and of Officers Lorne Ahrens, Michael Krol, Michael J. Smith, Brent Thompson, and Patrick Zamarripa in Dallas revealed racial and socioeconomic fault lines that both divide us and threaten to create a permanent state of interracial distrust in our nation.

In the immediate aftermath of the deaths of Mr. Sterling and Mr. Castile, President Obama rightly pointed out that, “When incidents like this occur, there’s a big chunk of our fellow citizenry that feels as if because of the color of their ‎skin, they are not being treated the same. And that hurts. And that should trouble all of us. This is not just a black issue. It’s not just a Hispanic issue. This is an American issue that we should all care about. All fair-minded people should be concerned.”

I believe that there are contained within the President’s words both an honest admission of a troubling truth about American society (that we can wrongly and all too frequently think that racial issues are issues only for members of the African-American, or Hispanic, or Asian-American communities) and a challenge/invitation for all Americans to own and address the tensions that have boiled over so violently in the course of the past week (and in the course of the past year).

Before we could adequately process and respond to the President’s words, the Dallas shootings occurred. A nation that was already reeling from the deaths of Mr. Sterling and Mr. Castile was brought to its knees ‎by the deaths of the five officers. Faced with the unspeakable horror of this latest event, President Obama spoke out once again, and once again his words were as honest as they were eloquent, and once more they contained both a challenge and an invitation: “There is sorrow, there is anger, there is confusion about next steps. But there’s unity in recognizing that this is not how we want our communities to operate. This is not who we want to be as Americans.”

As you might imagine, I reflected (indeed meditated) on the President’s words all weekend. As I did so, I asked how the Fordham family could and should respond to the challenges that the events of past week have presented to us. Of course, we will pray for the repose of the souls of those who died last week in Baton Rouge, Minneapolis, and Dallas. We will also pray for those whose lives were forever changed by their deaths, especially their wives and life partners, their children, and their parents. Moreover, in company with other colleges and universities, we will also recommit ourselves to the work that is proper to us as an academic community. That is to say, we will recommit ourselves to the work of educating for justice and to doing all we can to figure out how our beloved nation, to paraphrase President Lincoln, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all are created equal, has allowed itself to stray from the ideals upon which it was founded (and which we celebrated with such heartfelt pride just a week ago).

As I have told you before, I believe that the issues that divide and challenge our nation are not merely political or social issues. Rather, at heart they are moral issues. Therefore, I believe that precisely because we are a Jesuit institution, we have a special responsibility to reflect on the events of the past week and on the challenges that they have created for our nation in particular moral terms. Since I am a Jesuit, you will both understand and forgive me if I say that I think that the Fordham community is invited in a special way to reflect on these issues in the light of the Gospel. ‎My conviction was strengthened when I read the Gospel that Christians throughout the world heard proclaimed Sunday in their worship services: the parable of the Good Samaritan. A much-loved parable, the story hinges on a simple question put to Jesus by one of his opponents: “And just who is my neighbor?”

Because the parable is so widely known and the Good Samaritan has achieved status as a remarkable example of compassion in action, the challenging part of the parable is sometimes lost. In order to get a handle on just how challenging the parable is, we have to remember that the Samaritans were a despised group for the people to whom Jesus was speaking. Not to put too fine a point on it, they were seen as both ethnic outsiders and heretics. Therefore, the lawyer who posed the question to Jesus would have been deeply offended by Jesus’ very positive presentation of the figure we have come to know as “The Good Samaritan.” And then there’s the poor man who fell among robbers. He, too, would have been challenged by the fact that he was abandoned by the priest and Levite, the holy men of his own tradition, but saved, consoled, and cared for by a hated outsider. Both cases (the case of the lawyer posing the question and the victim assisted by the Samaritan) are used by Jesus to challenge His hearers to an examination of consciousness and a conversion of heart. In both cases, Jesus invites his audience to see people through God’s eyes and to respond to those who suffer with God’s heart.

And so we have in Sunday’s Gospel a strong hint as to what we, as a Jesuit university community, can and should bring to the national conversation on the events of the past week. What do I mean? Just this: We can remind our students (and ourselves) that ‎the situation in which the nation now finds itself is one that requires us to engage in an honest examination of conscience and consciousness so that we can be what God wants us to be, and what President Obama calls us to become once again: “who we want to be as Americans.” If we are willing to engage in this examination of consciousness, we will be able to take the first step toward the conversion of heart that will free us from the bondage of anger, frustration, and suspicion that holds us back.

Before concluding, I would like to share with you some of the reflections on the parable of the Good Samaritan delivered by Pope Francis (that champion of the poor and marginalized) Sunday as part of his Angelus address in St. Peter’s Square. Although he was not directly addressing our nation’s condition, I believe that his words offer us a way forward. May God our Lord bless our efforts as we seek peace, justice, and healing for America and all of its citizens.

Sincerely,

Joseph M. McShane, SJ

‎Pope Francis on The Good Samaritan

We too can ask ourselves this question: Who is my neighbor? Whom do I love as myself? My relatives? My friends? My fellow countrymen? Those of the same religion?…Who is my neighbor?

It is not up to us to try to categorize people, to see if they count as our neighbors. Rather, the decision to be, or not be a neighbor, depends on us. It depends on me. It depends on me to be or not be a neighbor to the person I meet who has need of my help, even if he’s a stranger, or even hostile. And Jesus concludes: “Go and do likewise ‘(v. 37). It’s a great lesson! And He says to each of us: “Go and do likewise,” especially to the brother or sister you see in trouble. “Go and do likewise.’” Do good works, do not just say words that go to the wind. A song comes to mind: “Words, words, words.” No. Please, do. Act. And by the good works that we do with love and joy for others, our faith grows and bears fruit. Let us ask ourselves – each of us responding in our heart – let us ask ourselves: Is our faith fruitful? Does our faith produce good works? Or it is rather sterile, and therefore more dead than alive? Am I ‘the neighbor’ or do I simply just pass along? Or am I among those who select people according to their own pleasure? It’s good to ask ourselves these questions and often because, in the end, we will be judged on the works of mercy. The Lord will say to us: ‘But you, you remember that time on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho? That man was me half dead. Do you remember? That hungry child was me. Do you remember? The migrant who many want to drive out it was me. Those grandparents alone, abandoned in nursing homes, it was me. That sick person alone in the hospital, that no one goes to see, was me.’

To Melissa Aziz, a junior at Fordham College at Lincoln Center, it’s a potent symbol of her family’s 2,500-mile journey from Guyana to New York City.

Aziz’ grandfather brought it with him when he moved to South Ozone Park, Queens in the 1980s. When she was asked to share the story of one object related to her family’s immigration for the class Race and Ethnic Politics, she decided to learn more about it.

“I didn’t realize the significance of the coconut palm tree before this assignment,” said Aziz, a political science major. “My dad went into how the entire tree is used not just for a broom, but also for the oil, and how they never ever threw away any part of the tree.”

Aziz and 33 fellow students each submitted a picture of an object and short write-up to the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. The museum published the works on its website as part of its “Your Story, Our Stories” archive.

Christina Greer, PhD, associate professor of political science, said the collaborative project allows students to share something about themselves and, in doing so, to challenge their assumptions about one another. The items submitted were varied—a tomato from one student whose grandfather moved from Mexico; a wooden chair that had been carried on a covered wagon from Virginia to Missouri in the 1860s by a student’s great-great-grandfather.

“From this point on, you know a little bit more about your classmates through their great-grandparents, their grandparents, or their parents,” Greer said. “You now know if someone sitting you next to you for the last few weeks in class is actually a first-generation American—and you thought they were just some regular guy from Queens.”

Annie Polland, PhD, vice president of programs and education at the museum, said the website, which currently has about 600 stories, is a way to share the stories of artifacts that are not confined to the physical space of the museum. By opening the site up to anyone, it’s easy to see the common threads that run through the experiences of all immigrants. It’s possible, for instance, to search the archive for all entries about religious objects.

“When you read the stories that people submitted, you see how these religious objects served a similar function in the families, whether it’s comfort because they’ve been separated from their family or a help to get them get beyond the stresses of the day,” she said.

Polland said sewing machines are the most commonly submitted object. She attributes this to the large number of immigrants who worked in the garment industry. Dictionaries are numerous as well.

“These were submitted by students who came over as young children or were born here, but who had young immigrant parents who were trying to learn the language while they were working and raising kids,” Polland said. “They remember [their parents]carrying around dictionaries to go to interviews or interact with the world.”

For Hunter Blas, a junior majoring in political science and English, choosing an item was a more sentimental exercise than a story of immigration. The native of Guam is not an immigrant because the island is a U.S. territory and members of her family still reside there, having moved between the mainland and the island.

She opted to share a photo of the altar her Roman Catholic grandmother used to maintain, paying homage to family members, including her father’s service in the U.S. Navy.

But she said she really enjoyed hearing her classmates’ stories of migration, especially one classmate’s story about a grandfather that emigrated from China to Mexico and whose grandchildren are now Americans.

“It just shows there’s way more under the surface than I ever would have thought about,” said Blas. “It makes Fordham feel a little more diverse than it seems to be at face value.”

“Who are we not to take this on?” Lenhardt would ask rhetorically in response, pointing to the University’s commitment to social justice and the Law School’s deep and diverse constellation of race scholars.

On February 29, Lenhardt and Fordham Law School formally launched the Center on Race, Law and Justice, publicly announcing its presence as a leader on issues of race and the law in New York City, the United States, and abroad. The event featured presentations from five Fordham University professors involved in the center, including associate directors Tanya Hernandez and Kimani Paul-Emile, and a keynote address from preeminent civil rights lawyer Debo Adegbile, now a partner at WilmerHale in New York and the former acting president and director counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

Law School Dean Matthew Diller called the center’s launch “a huge red-letter day for Fordham Law School and Fordham University.” He lauded the collaboration, mutual support, and excitement present in the 26 faculty members associated with the center’s focus.

Joseph M. McShane, SJ, president of Fordham University, placed the center’s launch in historic context, noting it came more than 150 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, the death of Abraham Lincoln, and the end of the Civil War, and around 50 years after the Civil Rights Movement and the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Further change, he said, would come from conversion of hearts and a movement in which “Fordham is engaged.”

“I see great hope here,” McShane told the audience.

Both Diller and McShane praised Lenhardt’s vision, for transforming a decade-long dream into a reality.

Diller celebrated Lenhardt as “a superb colleague, teacher, and friend who adds insight, value, poise, and grace to everything she touches.”

Father McShane, meanwhile, highlighted Lenhardt’s persistent and persuasive arguments in championing her visionary concept.

“In every way that counts, you are the person who brought this to fruition,” Father McShane said to Lenhardt, noting her meticulous nature and gift for hard work convinced him this would be not a center on paper but a center in action.

The center will function as an incubator and a platform for cutting-edge interdisciplinary scholarship on race, structural inequality, and racial justice tools grounded in critical analyses, comparative inquiry, and innovative methodologies, its leaders said.

The center will not only explore the deployment of the law as a solution for racial inequity but also seek to address through original research and analysis how it simultaneously functions as the architect of such inequality in ways that strip minorities of opportunity, dignity, and belonging, Lenhardt explained.

The center’s mission, she continued, is to explore issues of race and inequality in both the domestic and global contexts and to promote conversations about access, opportunity, and discrimination at Fordham University and in the legal profession more broadly.

Hernandez will lead the center’s global and comparative law programs and initiatives. Paul-Emile, meanwhile, will lead the center’s domestic programs and initiatives. Law Professor Olivier Sylvain, Political Science Professor Christina Greer, and Sociology Professor Clara Rodriguez also detailed their scholarship on race and racial justice during the 90-minute event.

Lenhardt also highlighted the presence of Gay McDougall, a MacArthur Foundation “Genius,” distinguished scholar-in-residence at the Leitner Center for International Law and Justice, and the wife of the late John Payton, former head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the architect of the legal strategy that led to the Michigan affirmative action cases decided by the Supreme Court, on which Lenhardt worked.

Payton’s LDF protégé, Adegbile, shared his mentor’s impact on his career in a speech that combined insight into how civil rights progress is not unilateral but ebbs and flows and that often the cases that matter most directly affect the lives of young people.

At present, Adegbile represents Harvard College in a lawsuit that challenges the constitutionality of its admissions program, one that raises the same kinds of issues presented by the Michigan cases and the Bakke case before them. Adegbile shared his view that such challenges present the questions “who are we and who do we want to be.”

Progress happens as a result not of one person’s efforts but of an intergenerational fight for change, Adegbile said, noting he viewed the center’s launch and future work as a continuation of this idea.

“Whether you’re Thurgood Marshall or Constance Baker Motley, it doesn’t matter,” Adegbile said, referring to the first African-American Supreme Court justice and first woman to serve as Manhattan borough president. “There will always be another fight. There will always be something for the next generation to do.”

—Ray Legendre

The grant will allow Lise Schreier, PhD, an associate professor of French, to devote the 2016-17 academic year to completing research on her forthcoming book, The Playthings of Empire: Child-Gifting and the Politics of French Femininity.

“A grant such as this is significant for the Department of Modern Languages and Literature because it makes us visible as strong researchers,” said Schreier, whose specializations include 19th-century French literature, French colonialism, and race and racism.

“We are a research-oriented department with a variety of courses. Teaching language is a pathway to understanding various cultures.”

Schreier, a native of Saint-Étienne, France, is studying the 18th-century phenomenon of child-gifting, the practice of purchasing or kidnapping dark-skinned children in Senegal, Algeria, India, and the Ottoman Empire as travel souvenirs and fashion accessories for upper-class French women.

Archival material about child-gifting is scant, and few scholars have undertaken research on the practice. Schreier’s own investigation has required some creative thinking as she shifted from letters to literature to artwork searching for clues of these children’s existence.

Some evidence came from mentions of the children in letters between wealthy French women. “Other information comes up in places like letters to tailors, which shows how these children were dressed, where they lived in the castles, how much money was spent on them,” she said.

Schreier is also interested in later references to child-gifting that appear in books assigned to French schoolchildren, which often involved a young character who was given a dark-skinned child as a gift. She argues that even after the abolition of slavery in France, when the actual practice of child-gifting ended, these stories served to inculcate colonial ideals in young French citizens.

The message of the books, Schreier said, was that “the French had to raise their children in such a way as to make them good, strong colonial citizens. This started in schools—particularly with girls, who were used to reading books about dolls, reading how to interact with a doll, raise a doll, educate a doll.

“These young readers, already used to being responsible for a doll, would be given a book in which an African boy was gifted to a French child in place of a doll. The inference they were expected to make was that it was normal to take care of a black child, just like a doll. When they’re older, it was hoped, they’d already be used to thinking of colonial subjects as their responsibility.”

This also points to the significant role that women played in advancing French colonialism, Schreier contends.

“From paintings of Old Regime noblewomen adorned with flattering attestations to their wealth, to 1870s moralistic novels featuring women advancing the Third Republic’s ‘civilizing mission’ with the loyal help of their dark-skinned charges, the child-gift motif articulated evolving models of femininity in a trans-national France,” she wrote in the grant narrative.

The NEH is an independent federal agency created as a result of the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965. Of the more than 1,200 applications each year, less than 7 percent of applicants receive one of the coveted grants.