Race has long been a topic of paramount importance to the Tufts community when addressing student relations, diversity on campus, and curriculum offerings. It has penetrated the curricula of many departments and wracked the brains of students and professors alike. It has been a cause for celebration and a catalyst for protest. In light of this, members of various departments have again organized a series - this year entitled "Disciplining Race" - where this issue will be challenged and discussed.
Last Thursday night, a diverse crowd including members of this year's EPIIC symposium, department representatives, and interested students filed into Cabot Auditorium for the first of many seminars. Many who attended knew that the evening's intellectual discourse on this difficult subject would nicely compliment their course of study.
"I'm a Women's Studies major and that's pushed me in the direction of being interested in differences and oppression and how society deals or doesn't deal with that," senior Kim Levinson said.
The topic that the three speakers - Professor Patricia Williams of Columbia Law School, Professor Ellen Driscoll of the Rhode Island School of Design, and Professor Lorand Matory, an anthropology professor at Harvard - addressed certainly targeted Levinson's interest in society and its dealings with race.
With such diverse backgrounds, some audience members were interested to see how the forum would flow. "I thought they were an interesting group to bring together at one table because they were all about different things," said Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, an assistant professor of History of Art and Architecture and Afro-American studies at Harvard. She is slated to speak at an October forum.
Despite obvious differences in backgrounds, the speakers' varied perspectives complimented one another quite well, according to numerous attendees. Perhaps this was because the talks struck a chord with so many audience members.
Williams' eloquent discourse immediately sparked the interest of the crowd. Framing her speech with a classroom anecdote that hinted at the timely societal debate on genetic engineering, she launched into a discourse about society's enduring inclination to deem white as the superior race.
Williams' initial support for this underlying assertion came in a reference she made to a female student who harvested her eggs to finance her Columbia Law education. With a payment of $50,000 per harvest, this white student - chosen because she was white and had high test scores - was able to make her law school payments.
"But life is filled with strange and ironic twists," Williams said when she revealed the story's epilogue. The white woman's best friend, a black woman, was not able to sell her eggs despite her test scores - which were even higher. She was left instead, to grapple with financial aid.
Williams later told a story about a slave, Kate, whose master deemed her "crazy and stupid" because of her maniacal actions. As Williams noted, however, Kate's actions were hardly maniacal - especially in light of the conditions that she was forced to endure. "I'm convinced that most of the things that make you crazy and stupid are the things that make you smart," she said.
Since the color of her skin was an indication of her insanity, Kate never had a chance. "Kate could not have been seen as smart," Williams added.
"Blacks are always put in different, inferior terms," she said, clearly stating one dilemma of race. However, implicit in her final words was hope for an effective dialogue, which would eventually work towards a solution. "There is a certain kind of urgency to discuss these topics," she said.
"There's a discipline that will be used to bring us all together," she added, making reference to the "Disciplining Race" forum.
Elaborating on the artist's dilemma on the depiction of race, Driscoll's talk added to Williams' discourse. "There are now and have always been severe pressures on artists to represent race in certain ways," she said. Despite this pressure, according to Driscoll, many white artists have chosen to avoid the topic because they cannot understand the black experience.
"There has been pressure on black artists to address race and pressure on white artists to ignore race," she said.
Despite these unfortunate norms, Driscoll, who is white, has chosen to focus on the black experience. One of her works, she noted, spawned from reading Harriet Jacobs' slave narrative. Jacobs, Driscoll said, hid in a small space for seven years to avoid the miserable existence that awaited her in slavery. Driscoll chose to recreate this confining space, using what others would call trash. "I literally made this out of dumpsters," she said.
Much of her artwork, which has been housed in local spaces such as the Whitney Museum as well as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, has touched on this issue of race. Though Driscoll's work has and will continue to afford her many accolades, she recalled a time when many warned her that doing this type of work would be detrimental to her career as an artist. "They told me I was committing career suicide. I shouldn't touch this with a ten-foot pole," she said.
In contrast to the negativity Driscoll encountered, Matory revealed that his work has brought him nothing but praise. Matory's speech drew from his academic roots in anthropology. Citing his research endeavors in other parts of the world, including Africa and Brazil, Matory pointed out that the characteristics that constitute being "black" are not universal. The concept of being black is something that doesn't even exist in some other cultures, he said.
Adopting a temporary British accent, Matory, a black man, shared a story about his time in England. There, he said, he was not even considered black; he was just another person who stemmed from the "McDonald's" culture - a term the British use to describe the American way of life.
In other parts of the world, he noted that he never heard the word black. "The word black never came up. I wasn't any different than white Americans," he said, summarizing his point. "The more I lived with Nigerians and Brazilians, the more I realized how foreign race was."
Bringing the topic back home, Matory noted the significance of a racial discussion. "Hearing the dogma over and over that race doesn't matter has brought us back and [showed us] in the US that race does matter," he said.
Students and faculty agreed with the speaker's sentiments and were overwhelmed by many of their thoughts.
"I found several of the speakers remarkably insightful and very positively provocative," said Sherman Teichman, Director of the EPIIC symposium.
Director of the International Relations Program and Political Science department member Pearl Robinson agreed with Teichman. "I though this was fabulous because it framed racial questions in challenging new ways that add to the issues of the day," she said.
