Faculty offer suggestions for improving race relations at St. Joe's

To the Editor:

With the recent racist graffiti in a classroom in McShain, we are reminded, again, as a community, how much more work we need to do to tackle the problem of racism at Saint Joseph's University. While an incident of individual racism like the drawing is horrifying, it also points up the regular and systemic racism experienced by faculty, staff, and students of color on this campus. We would like to suggest the following ways that we as a community can work to "see" and address racism on our campus. In order to address systemic racism, we suggest the following actions.

Revisit the 2000 Race Task Force report at http://www.sju.edu/admin/diversity/presidents_taskforce/index.html and consider the recommendations that were provided there. Bench mark our racial progress against the 2000 task force data.

Develop a place and a method for reporting and responding to racism on campus. Create a simple online form for reporting racist events and reinstate the Racial Harassment Review Panel to look into such accusations. Empower the committee to sanction violators or provide opportunities for mediation between individuals/groups with conflicts. Place someone in charge of the reporting of racism on campus who can respond and investigate immediately. Modify the student and faculty handbooks to reflect any needed changes.

Reframe the conversation about race and racism as a discussion of power differences and the history of U.S. culture. Find ways to address white racism. Change the conversation to get beyond "diversity" which is a term that takes the power differences out of discussions of race/racism.

Provide small group anti-racist workshops and training for administrators, faculty, and staff. At the same time, train selected faculty and staff in anti-racist work so they can conduct other workshops for students, faculty, and staff in the spring (as well as integrate this work into the courses we teach).

Select an "SJU Reads" book for the fall of 2009 with broad input from the faculty that is particularly relevantissues of white racism and white racial identity development. For example, a book such as "Blood Done Sign My Name" by Timothy Tyson, which deals with how whites responded to a black lynching in North Carolina during the Civil Rights movement. Provide additional materials for faculty who want to talk about race and racism with their classes.

Reward faculty who attempt to learn more about teaching race and racism. Rather than evaluate what we've done in annual reports, create a space for faculty to report what they've learned and how they've changed as teachers.

Create courses that fulfill the diversity and globalization requirement that directly address systemic race and racism.

Create a community conversation about race and racism that includes ending systemic and cultural racism as well as personal racism. Think systemically, perhaps through the Racial Harassment Review Panel, about what it means to create an anti-racist campus climate that includes anti-racist work in the Jesuit mission for social justice.

Prepare a mission statement for ending racism on campus that is endorsed by the president and the board of trustees. Have IPC and others develop a 5-year plan for addressing racism on campus.

When a racist event takes place on our campus, many emotions surface-among them surprise, hurt, fear, and anger. We have developed the above list to push the conversation about race and racism on our campus forward, and to illustrate that many faculty and staff are deeply committed to acknowledging racism and working to dismantle it. We write to all students who are committed to social justice and anti-racism to say that we are with you. And we write because, as terrible as the drawing in McShain was, it reveals only a piece of the anti-racist work we must engage in. African-American legal scholar Patricia J. Williams writes, "For better or worse, our customs and laws, our culture and society are sustained by the myths we embrace, the stories we re-circulate to explain what we behold. I believe that racism's hardy persistence and immense adaptability are sustained by a habit of human imagination, deflective rhetoric, and hidden license. I believe no less that an optimistic course might be charted, if only we could imagine it." We hope that by engaging in some of the steps above, we can break habits of imagination, address systemic racism, and create change on our campus.

Melissa Goldthwaite, English Ann E. Green, English and Gender Studies Robert Moore, Sociology Althier M. Lazar, Africana Studies and Education Encarnacion Rodriguez, Education Usha Rao, Chemistry and Gender Studies