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THE CRISIS OF RACE IN HIGHER EDUCATION: A DAY OF DISCOVERY AND DIALOGUE

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DIVERSITY IN HIGHER EDUCATION

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DIVERSITY IN HIGHER EDUCATION VOLUME 19

THE CRISIS OF RACE IN HIGHER EDUCATION: A DAY OF DISCOVERY AND DIALOGUE

EDITED BY

WILLIAM F. TATE IV

Washington University in St Louis, MO, USA

NANCY STAUDT

Washington University in St Louis, MO, USA

ASHLEY MACRANDER

Washington University in St Louis, MO, USA

United Kingdom – North America – Japan India – Malaysia – China

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ISSN: 1479-3644 (Series)

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Acknowledgments

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Image: Illustration, Race & Ethnicity: A Day of Discovery and Dialogue – 2015.

This book exists as a result of the support of many people. As series editor Dean Henry T. Frierson embraced the book’s vision. We extend our thanks to the authors of this volume. We express our thanks to Edna J. Cash for copy editing the chapters with great care and attention to detail. In addition, we appreciate the support from Emerald Press.

Many of the authors in this book presented their ideas during two groundbreaking University-wide events held at Washington University in St. Louis: The 2015 Race & Ethnicity: A Day of Discovery and Dialogue and the 2016 Day of Discovery & Dialogue: A Focus on Inclusion. Colleagues and students from the Danforth and Medical School Campuses demonstrated amazing support by participating in these events. The planning teams of both events represented the very best in collegiality. As editors, we served with these champions of excellence. We offer thanks to the other members of the planning teams – LaTanya N. Buck, Adrienne Davis, Denise DeCou, Linling Gao-Miles, Julia Macias, Jordon Mendoza, Jennifer Smith, and Lori White. Jill Friedman served on both planning committees. Jill’s support and that of her colleagues in the Office of Public Affairs created the capacity to make these events possible. They set the stage for bringing together campus thought leaders.

The thought leaders included the following colleagues: Gerald Early, Larry Shapiro, Richard Wilson, Victoria Fraser, Cynthia Rogers, Adrienne Davis, Vetta L. Sanders Thompson, Bob Hansman, Maryam Kashani, Sonia Song-Ha Lee, Robert Sussman, Rebecca Wanzo, Denise Ward-Brown, Linling Gao-Miles, Christian Gordon, Sean Joe, Juliette McClendon-Iocovina, Adina Sterling, Kimberly J. Norwood, Shyam Akula, LaTanya N. Buck, Alan Lambert, Molly W. Metzger, Carrie Pettus-Davis, Amee Azad, Dedric Carter, Edward Lawlor, Ashley Macrander, Will Ross, Rose Windmiller, Sophia Hayes, Patrick Easley, Katharine Pei, Maria Hinojosa, Lawrence Benjamin, Dana Robertson, Amarachi Onyema, Jeremy Vu, Rhonda Coursey-Pratt, Joe Masters, David Cunningham, Christine Dolan, Wolf Smith, John Inazu, Savannah Martin, Mimi Borders, and Joe Madison. Black Anthology, Kathryn M. Buder Center for American Indian Studies, University Libraries, and WU-Slam shared and educated as well.

The campus events and this book benefit from the artistic contributions of many individuals including: Maketa Wilborn, D. B. Dowd, Leslie Ding, Brandon Progrob, Ria Han, Maya Theus, Eden Lewis, Sophia Brown, and Dave Gray.

We express our gratitude that Professor Robert Sussman made a determined effort to complete his chapter. Professor Sussman’s death during the editing of this volume was both a shock and a loss. In amazing fashion, his wife, Linda Sussman stepped in to ensure the completion of the document. We extend our grateful appreciation to her.

Our colleagues on the University Council supported and encouraged us. Mahendra R. Gupta, Dean of the Olin Business School, hosted Danforth Campus events. Deans David H. Perlmutter and Larry J. Shapiro served as hosts of the School of Medicine events. Executive Vice Chancellor Henry (Hank) S. Webber helped to democratize our efforts by leading the event delegates in conversations and dialogue. Provost Holden Thorp provided consistent and enthusiastic support throughout the process serving in many roles. Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton supported the concept from the beginning. We are fortunate to work with an outstanding leadership team.

Foreword—Tales to Astonish: Why Race Matters and Why It Shouldn’t

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Image: Visual Map of Panel Titled “Tales to Astonish: Why Race Matters and Why It Shouldn’t,” Race & Ethnicity: A Day of Discovery and Dialogue – 2015.

At 9:20 am on Thursday, July 16, a 15-year old black boy who lived in a low-income housing project ran out of an apartment vestibule, reportedly, with a knife. He had run into the building while waiting for his summer school class to start, angered that the building’s white owner, while cleaning his front steps, had sprayed the black teens who were milling around with his water hose. The owner thought the teens were a nuisance, and he wanted to make sure that they would not sit on his steps or congregate in front of his building. Someone accused him of calling the students “niggers,” which the owner denied; but the water-dousing, not the name-calling, made some of the teens, most of whom were girls, particularly angry. The 15-year old black boy grabbed a knife from his friend and followed the owner inside the building. When the boy came out, a minute or so later, unable to catch the owner, he was confronted by an off-duty white police officer who saw the incident from across the street from the window of a repair shop. The policeman testified that he identified himself as a police officer and told the boy to stop. According to his testimony, the boy did not stop but came at him with the knife. The policeman fired three times and shot the boy twice, fatally. Plenty of people witnessed the shooting as it occurred on a busy street in broad daylight, and the accounts varied, often contradicting one another. Some said the boy was surrendering when the police officer shot him; others said the boy did not have a knife; others said that the police officer stood over the boy and shot him while he was lying on the ground. The physical evidence gathered at the scene and presented to the grand jury did not support any of these versions. This did not matter as many blacks asked, even if the boy had been armed with a knife, did the police officer really need to shoot him to death to stop him. Would he have fatally shot a white teen? On September 1, the grand jury chose not to indict the officer, ruling justifiable homicide. This was a bit of an anti-climax as not one but two sections of the city broke out in rioting and violent confrontations with the police immediately after the shooting occurred. The rioting lasted for six days, from July 18 through July 23.

This incident did not happen in Ferguson. It did not happen last summer or even the summer before last. It happened 50 years ago in 1964 in New York City. Rioting broke out in both Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant, the black section of north-central Brooklyn. Whites in those areas feared for their lives, some beaten badly without provocation, and some angry black folk, at war with the police in the streets, shouted “The only good cop is a dead cop” and “Get the white occupiers out of our neighborhoods.” They screamed “Uncle Tom!” and “Race Traitor!” at black policemen. The police, in several instances, returned the favor, by shouting profanities at the rioters, by beating some innocent black bystanders for no reason other than being there. The police did almost nothing to stop local businesses from being looted and the fact that an African American owned a store did not protect it from being looted.¹ Some might point to this 1964 incident as proof that nothing has changed in race relations in the United States over the last 50 years, as carbon copies of this incident have continued to occur. The British doughboys of World War I used to sing, “It’s a long way to Tipperary/It’s a long way to go.” And with race relations in America, many believe we still have, so it seems, a long way to go.

But 50 years can be a long time in modern human affairs and things have changed. In 1964, laws prohibited abortion, sodomy, and interracial marriage, acts considered illegal in all or in a significant portion of the United States; now, none of these acts are. Immigration and the rise of women, gays, and the disabled as powerful grievance groups have also changed identity politics in America. If nothing else, the world in which we play out our race drama is strikingly different than it used to be. Over 80% of the poor now have air conditioning (only 36% of all American households had air conditioning at the end of the 1960s) ² ; 92% of African American adults have cell phones, a slightly higher percentage than whites. ³ Today, about 20% of all African Americans over the age of 25 have a four-year Bachelor’s degree, over three times the percentage of 1964. African Americans have become judges, prosecutors, wardens, highly touted fashion designers, noted academics, renowned architects, CEOs of major companies, successful Hollywood stars and filmmakers, mayors, police commissioners, highly regarded chefs, prize-winning authors and artists, famous physicians, university presidents of non-black schools, even president of the United States. Blacks occupy positions in this country considered unthinkable 50 years ago. Things do change and things have changed. On the other hand, in 1964, African Americans made up less than 7% of the NYC police force. They make up only 16% of the current New York City police force, although they make up nearly 25% of the city’s population. ⁴ Eighteen percent of blacks have Bachelor’s degrees compared to nearly 30% of whites and over 50% of Asians. ⁵ African American four-year college graduates are twice as likely to be unemployed as their white counterparts. ⁶ As a result of 2008 recession, the black middle class lost more than three-quarters of its net worth; the white middle class about 24% of its net worth. ⁷ And the average white person’s net wealth still remains 4–5 times at least or more of the average black person’s net wealth. ⁸ Some often said that when the American economy sneezes, middle class whites catch a cold, but African Americans catch pneumonia. Sometimes things don’t change at all.

Why are race relations in America burdened by this seeming contradiction: that things have clearly improved for African Americans over the last 50 years but African Americans still lag behind whites at the same rate in virtually every category – health, wealth, education, social capital – as they did 50 years ago. To borrow a phrase from black novelist Ralph Ellison, blacks in America feel they “move without moving.” And they are right to feel that way. Perhaps Martin Luther King, Jr. put it best in his 1967 book, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?

“There is not even a common language [between Negroes and whites] when the term ‘equality’ is used. Negro and white have a fundamentally different definition. Negroes have proceeded from a premise that equality means what it says, and they have taken white Americans at their word when they talked of it as an objective. But most whites in America … proceed from a premise that equality is a loose expression for improvement. White America is not even psychologically organized to close the gap – essentially it seeks only to make it less painful and less obvious but in most respects to retain it. Most of the abrasions between Negroes and white liberals arise from this fact.” ⁹

No one denies the existence of this gap but we hotly debate the cause of the gap. Most African Americans feel that whites have the political might, the tremendous economic advantage, the institutional power, and the far greater amount of social capital to make something change, to make equality happen. But blacks feel that whites want to evade the idea, refusing to accept any moral responsibility for this inequality, which is why they wish to ignore it. Many whites, on the other hand, feel that blacks try to evade the responsibility they bear for their own situation by, in effect, shifting the blame to a deep-pocket defendant. According to this view, blacks cause their own problems because they behave in such a dysfunctional manner. Besides, some whites feel that with Affirmative Action, various anti-poverty programs, and other interventions that all that can be done for blacks has been done. The most talented African Americans have taken advantage of these policies; the rest don’t want to. It is that simple. This impasse about the gap between black and white, which dates back to the end of Reconstruction in 1877, signals discontent and anger among many blacks and fatigue and impatience among many whites. Blacks become incensed by the arrogance of whites and whites annoyed by the militant special pleading of blacks.

What makes race relations a true conundrum in the United States is this: the drastic inequality of blacks and whites makes every solution that gets tried eventually become part of the problem, as every solution becomes tainted by the racism that it tries to end, as no solution ever really frees black folk from the category of being black. The fact that whites and blacks hold such divergent views on so many subjects as to almost constitute different versions of reality exacerbates this conundrum: take, for instance, the black and white views on the O. J. Simpson case, the black and white views on the dog-fighting case of football player Michael Vick, the black and white views on corporal punishment, the black and white views on the police, the black and white views on capital punishment, or most recently the black and white views on the Charlie Hebdo murders. And of course the black and white views on the cause of the racial gap.

Let’s start with this: the problems that blacks face arise not from how they behave but from how they have been perceived and categorized historically. Black people were invented as a category in a grand scheme called race. Blacks did not invent the concept of race; if they had, they certainly would not have put themselves on the bottom. Whites invented race. King was right in his observation about the jousting over equality, for the concept of race serves an elaborate and cunning defense of inequality; race was and is about the naturalness and inevitability of inequality. We will never have equality as long as we have race.

Since the end of World War II, the United States has been trying, with occasional measures of success, to dismantle its racial caste system. In part, World War II necessitated this idea as the western world no longer considered racial superiority a legitimate or respectable ideology because of the genocidal mania of the Nazis. This dismantling has not been easy because the American racial caste system represented such a totalizing concept: within it, elites to the uneducated defined races not just by physical or biological characteristics, but by emotional, mental, and even spiritual traits. And a group’s racial definition not only explained its place in the world but its fate. What made race as a concept seem inescapable in the western world, including the United States, was the fact that it was, for well over 150 years, endorsed by the entire membership of the educational and opinion-making apparatus: scientists, humanists, journalists, poets, teachers, politicians, merchants, all believed in and promoted the idea of races, and nearly all believed in racial inequality. Race did not simply dominate American life; more importantly, it suffused every pore of American life. America racialized everything, from medical treatment to the selling of popular music, from professional baseball to mortuaries. The concept of race was compelling because it seemed so vividly to explain the difference that human difference makes and it also justified a world where whites ruled blacks. Because African-descended peoples came to the United States as slaves, stripped of their languages, religions, and politics, makes this comprehensive system of categories especially problematic. The slave system forced them to adopt the language, religion, and politics of the people who enslaved them without actually being integrated into their captors’ culture. African Americans had the language, religion, and politics of their captors but lacked any historical connections to the European cultural tools that they had to use. This made blacks cultural orphans and exiles, treated like a defeated people or the spoils of war. Being forced for such a long time to use their captors’ cultural tools on their captors’ terms reminded them constantly of their subordinate status. The history of African Americans can be seen, in one regard, as a series of attempts to redefine themselves in an effort to escape the prison house of race theory that so totally subjugated them. The story of African Americans is the story of redefinition. That is why blacks have changed so frequently in the twentieth century what they wish to be called.

African Americans thought three things would free them from their inferior status: first, the arrival of social science and Marxist analysis because social science and Marxism would challenge the idea that blacks were biologically inferior and would offer, instead, an explanation of social and structural forces that conspired to keep blacks subjugated and gave whites built-in advantages. Second, the creation of a usable black history would not only change black people psychologically but inspire them politically to change their situation, to show black people that they, indeed, had a rendezvous with destiny. Third, was the preoccupation with the creation of great art – literature and music, particularly – that would make black experience profound by making it both particular and universal, able to speak to other blacks but also able to speak to people who were not black. The NAACP, an organization of blacks and liberal, committed whites, embarked on the extraordinary task of breaking legal racial segregation in this country with Supreme Court challenges. Along with this organization, African Americans used the strength of their churches, their colleges, and other organizations to mount protest, unending protest, boycotts, marches, sit-ins and threats of boycotts, marches, and sit-ins.

African Americans were also caught on the tides of three major shifts that profoundly affected them: the first was the move from the rural south to the urban north during the Great Migration of World War I and World War II. This made the race problem a national problem and not just a southern problem. Second was the rise of the American welfare state. This greatly expanded the ability of the federal government to intervene in the affairs of the states and it also committed the federal government to some notion of social justice. Third was the rise of anti-colonialism and nationalism among nations of color and our competition with the Soviet Union called the cold war. Without these shifts, black Americans would never have made the headway that they did. Social Science in many ways dominated how nearly every liberal and leftist saw blacks, stressing the disparities and gaps between the races, the deficiencies of black life and experience, the inner cruelties, pressures, and fears of black communities, the way white institutions and the market worked against African Americans. This solution became part of the problem.

Noted African American novelist Ralph Ellison disliked the famous sociological treatise that condemned the racial caste system in America, An American Dilemma by Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal, published in 1944. ¹⁰ Ellison hated the sociology used in the 1954 Brown decision that ended school segregation. Ellison hated it because he felt it distorted black life, that it impoverished being black as an identity, made being black just a form of self-hatred. Social science, for Ellison, did not seem to lessen the stigma of being black but rather intensified it. So strong was this feeling, this intellectual proclivity toward distrusting social science, that a group of African American scholars and intellectuals emerged in the 1980s called Ellisonians. They felt strongly that black life was not the total of its disparities and its deficiencies. Blacks are more than the gap that separates them from whites. Ellisonians felt that in collectivizing blacks as social science tends to do, it neglected the importance of the individual and individual’s interior life. An individual has choices to make; an individual seeks his or her own agency. Black people are not trying to live their lives as a form of self-defense; nor do they simply live a life of reaction to racism. And the Ellisonians grew equally impatient with leftist scholars who see blacks as only some vast repository of resistance and anti-Americanism. I have learned from examples like seeing the militant, foul-mouthed, hard-drinking, demagogic, in-the-white-folk’s-face, NAACP leader Cecil B. Moore, a Marine who fought in the Pacific during World War II, crying with his hand over his heart when he heard the National Anthem. I learned that blacks in this country have, with great sacrifice, accommodated as much as they have resisted. Black folk are more complicated than you think.

Let me conclude with a brief story: In Philadelphia, in a small alleyway across from the Mother Bethel AME Church at Sixth and Lombard Streets, lived my great Aunt Jenny, that is, until urban renewal swept her and the other blacks from this neighborhood in the early 1960s. I remember this old woman with iron-grey hair all done up in plaits, no teeth, and a strong whiny southern accent. She grew up in Mobile, Alabama, left school after the third or fourth grade to pick cotton. She married at some point, had a son named Josie to whom she sent money which he spent on cheap liquor and bad women. He never sent her any. My great aunt Jenny dipped snuff, periodically spitting streams of dark saliva in a tin can, a habit I found by turns fascinating and disgusting. Her home, in this cramped, shabby alleyway, consisted of two tiny rooms, heated by a pot-bellied coal stove, upon which, during the winter, she would cook yams. She always gave a yam to me when I visited. I didn’t like them much but ate them anyway. Always on the stove set a hot comb with a big container of Royal Crown pomade nearby. She would sometimes straighten my mother’s hair. She was the sister of my mother’s mother; my great Aunt Jenny and my mother were very close, especially after my father died. We visited her often when I was a small boy. I recall that my great Aunt Jenny had only one book, a well-worn Bible. But she loved comic books, particularly Tarzan comics and comic books with names like My Greatest Adventure, Journey Into Mystery, House of Secrets, and especially a comic book called Tales to Astonish which featured stories of radioactive monsters, invaders from space, and supernatural tales where greedy people got their just desserts.

What I remember most on many fall and winter evenings was being at my Great Aunt Jenny’s little hovel, eating a baked yam. We would be wrapped in her ugly but warm green quilt and reading Tales to Astonish: the semi-literate old lady and the little boy just learning to read. I came across the word “Tipperary” in one of the stories and asked her where that meant. She told me it was a town in Texas. As time went on she rather elaborated a bit, and Tipperary became a colored town in Texas with colored cowboys and a colored sheriff. And there were colored farmers and ranchers. And colored cattle rustlers and horse thieves. She made a little mythology of all this, and said how she and I would go to Tipperary one day and I could ride a horse and learn to hunt. I was eager to go to Tipperary with my great Aunt Jenny.

This past December, I visited my mother in Philadelphia and we spoke about my great Aunt Jenny. “She was a good old soul,” my mother said, “she had a wonderful life.” And for a moment I could not understand this. How did this poor, nearly illiterate woman, some cotton picker and house cleaner with a no-good son, herself sick with diabetes and hypertension, beaten down by brutal southern racism and sexism as a child, have a wonderful life? She never had a car or a telephone or even teeth. Poverty and racism had robbed her of her life.

While I was in Philadelphia this winter, I went to the Mother Bethel Church, the oldest black church in America, started by Richard Allen in 1795. It is, in fact, the oldest continuously-black-owned piece of property in America. I looked at the church and I looked across the street at where my great Aunt Jenny used to live. It is all gone now. Except for Mother Bethel and a mural a block away celebrating the fact that W. E. B. Du Bois lived in this neighborhood when he wrote the first social science book about urban blacks called The Philadelphia Negro in 1899, one would never know blacks ever lived here. I realized then how wrong I was. I realized that my great Aunt Jenny did indeed have a wonderful life: she took things as they came, she worked, she loved people well, and she seemed to say with her whole being, “I ain’t nobody but myself.” She was happy in a way that made me happy as a child. I realized, with her comic books that she shared with me, she was trying to teach me that stories, like love, will save us somehow, anyhow, whether we want them to or not. “How bad can black life be” black critic Stanley Crouch once said to me, “if it produced you, your wife, your family, and all the black people you know?” It was important that my great Aunt Jenny lived here. Her life was the glory of the racial gap. I finally understood that. People, black and white, have obsessed so about fixing black people, but it is infinitely harder in the end to accept them for who and what they are. Jack Judge was right: It is a long, long way to Tipperary. Maybe my great Aunt Jenny made it there. I hope she did. And if she did, all I can say to her is, I’ll see you when I get there.

Gerald Early

Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters

Washington University in St. Louis

Introduction

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Image: Event Logo, Race & Ethnicity: A Day of Discovery and Dialogue – 2015.

The maintenance worker … wrote down what he saw in case he had to recount it to the police. “On Saturday, August 9^th, at approximately 12:15, I witnessed one white male police officer gun down and kill one black male.

Somashekhar and Kelly (2014, para. 18)

Hands up, don’t shoot.

Protestors

On November 24, 2014, Bob McCulloch, the St. Louis County Prosecutor, announced that after an “exhaustive review” and two days of deliberation, a grand jury decided not to indict white Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson in the death of black 18-year-old Michael Brown (Lippman, 2014, para. 3). After weeks of protest in St. Louis, the international community erupted. From Ferguson to New York City, Washington, DC to Seattle, and London to Tokyo, protestors took to the streets shutting down major thoroughfares such as interstates and bridges and crowding popular commercial districts (Almasy & Yan, 2014; Segal, 2014). With their rallying cry that “black lives matter,” they called for a renewed commitment to racial justice (Frosch & Calvert, 2015).

Historically, institutions of higher education have served as epicenters for this kind of political activity. Students, faculty, and staff have protested against national and international government action, including the Vietnam War and South African apartheid. Ferguson was no different. Walkouts in the days leading up to and following the grand jury decision became common as students grappled with questions about the future of race in America (Feeney, 2014; Yan, 2014). These events compelled colleges and universities to look inward and engage in a process of self-reflexivity when the upheaval thrust higher education into the center of the national conversation on race.

Universities in Crisis

The University of Oklahoma closed its local chapter of Sigma Alpha Epsilon, one of the country’s largest fraternal organizations, after someone taped members singing a racist chant en route to a Founder’s Day event in March 2015 (Fernandez & Pérez-Peña, 2015a, 2015b). Again, the American populace roiled, and OU responded by not only shuttering the SAE house, but by also removing the Greek letters from the façade and expelling two students from the fraternity who played a leadership role in creating a hostile environment on campus (Fernandez & Pérez-Peña, 2015a, 2015b).

The Michael Brown case and a racialized incident similar to what occurred at OU deeply affected us at Washington University in St. Louis. On February 26, 2013, while about ten black students sat in Bear’s Den, a campus dining hall, eating dinner together, three to four white male pledges from Sigma Alpha Epsilon approached the group, took out their phones, and proceeded to take pictures of the group of black students (Tabb, 2013; The Huffington Post, 2013). When the black students asked the white males whether or not they had taken a picture of them, the white males responded that they had intended to take a picture of something behind the students ( The Huffington Post, 2013; Toler, 2015). Approximately half an hour later, the white males returned with a larger group in tow and began to recite the lyrics to a rap song (Tabb, 2013; The Huffington Post, 2013). The white males encouraged the group of black students to “show some respect” for their performance and when the “n-word” came up several times throughout the recitation of the lyrics, the white males read the word, as a tipster stated, “without any hesitation” (The Huffington Post, 2013; Toler, 2015). Washington University suspended, temporarily, the SAE chapter and Chancellor Mark Wrighton released a statement that centered on doing a better job of affirming our values as a university and growing stronger in our resolve to challenge the “deep-seated societal issue of discrimination.”

These do not represent isolated incidents. Nor is racism directed toward marginalized students specifically the purview of members of fraternal organizations. Universities are in crisis. The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education has documented more than forty separate racially-charged incidents that have occurred on college and university campuses since Michael Brown’s death on August 9, 2014 (2016). On February 28, 2015, students appeared in KKK uniforms at Wheaton College, a Christian liberal arts institution in Illinois, as part of a bonding activity among football players (Goldsborough & Rhodes, 2015). Students found racist graffiti on the entrance to Lincoln University, an HBCU in Chester County Pennsylvania (Shamlin, 2015). Bucknell University, a private institution also in Pennsylvania, expelled three students who made racist comments over the student radio station on March 20, 2015 (Scolforo, 2015). At Miami University in Ohio, two students faced charges over writing racial slurs on residence hall bulletin boards in April 2015. In an email to all students, faculty, and staff, Miami University in Ohio President David Hodge noted that, “Unfortunately, it seems Miami is not immune from the behaviors that have challenged college campuses across the country” ( The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, 2016, para. 2).

More recently, the University of Missouri system president Tim Wolfe and the Chancellor of the Columbia campus, R. Bowen Lofton, resigned following several days of student protests which were in response to multiple racially motivated incidents on campus such as graffiti and spoken racial slurs (Eligon, 2015; Izadi, 2015). In addition to campus protests, students presented the University of Missouri administration with a list of demands which included increasing the number of black faculty and staff, required curriculum around inclusion, resources directed to diversity efforts, and the creation of a strategic action plan to increase the retention of marginalized students (Izadi, 2015; Keller, 2016). One graduate student began a hunger strike during the increased activism and several black students on the football team announced their intention to cease playing if the students’ demands were not met (Eligon, 2015; Izadi, 2015). Yale, too, has been faced with a number of racial incidents ranging from tensions over Halloween costumes to the naming of campus architecture and university positions (Jackson, 2016; McQuaid, 2016).

A Response

A recent article, published in The Chronicle of Higher Education on April 21, 2015 by Peter Schmidt reviewed two new studies that have found that colleges and universities expressed concern primarily for their institutions’ reputations following “hate crimes, hate speech, or other high profile incidents of bias” (para. 1). When higher education institutions “respond to the racist rather than addressing the underlying issues of racism,” they leave the victims vulnerable and they devote the majority of their efforts to punishing perpetrators rather than utilizing the incident as a means of targeting bias and bigotry across campus (Schmidt, 2015, para. 3).

Washington University in St. Louis sat at a crossroads of responding to racism within the campus community and the St. Louis community more broadly, and we chose a different path. On February 5–6, 2015 Washington University held a university-wide Day of Discovery and Dialogue. The University invited students, faculty, and staff from every department and school to serve as delegates to the event. Delegates attended programming during both days and facilitated conversations with their peers following the event. Panelists for the event were selected from across the University to speak on issues such as the social construction of race and ethnicity, how race and ethnicity operate in everyday life, moving beyond stereotypes, and the future of our university community. Artists captured moments from the event, and event coordinators live-streamed all speeches and panels to facilitate participation from all university constituents. This program served as an important step toward creating a more engaged, welcoming, and inclusive community at Washington University in St. Louis.

A graduate student report on the campus climate related to diversity that called for training for graduate student-teaching assistants on creating inclusive classrooms and for a commitment to hiring more diverse faculty matched the importance of the Day of Discovery and Dialogue. Students in Solidarity, an undergraduate student organization, submitted 16 demands to university leadership calling for a required undergraduate course on diversity and inclusion as well as a re-evaluation of admissions procedures in order to facilitate the development of a more diverse student population.

University administration has begun responding to student requests for change by creating a training initiative for teaching assistants, by developing an undergraduate course on diversity and inclusion, and by establishing benchmarks for recruiting more diverse students and faculty over the coming years. This book aims to provide one method through which a university began to cultivate the space in which important conversations about race, diversity, and inclusion could take place. We sought to better understand the expertise existing within our campus. Scores of scholars and program leaders contribute to the literature related to race or design diversity-related interventions across our campus. To convene this expertise represented an important step toward building institutional capacity in the area of access and opportunity. The effort proves relevant to other higher education leaders in that it provides a model for democratizing and sharing knowledge across disciplinary and programmatic boundaries. We need each other to do this work. Each chapter in the book represents an effort by faculty members, staff, or students to apply their scholarship, professional knowledge, and experiential learning to issues focused on race, diversity, and inclusion in higher education.

Organization of the Book

We organized the book into four sections. The first section – comprising three chapters – examines historical, biological, and social science evidence related to the concept of race. The root of race as a construct resides in the false conception that observed physical differences symbolize human capacity and behaviors. Manifested by human thought and social construction, race emerged as a product of human invention rather than a material fact supported by science. Beginning with the Foreword by Gerald Early, several authors in this volume argue that the racial hierarchy conceived and affirmed by humans has influenced the course of history. Early offers personal insights into his life course, while detailing the contours and contradictions associated with race. His assessment of race raises important questions about opportunity structures in society and higher education.

In the chapter “Genetics and the Origins of Race,” the late Robert Sussman, Garland Allen, and Allan Templeton argue that there exists no scientific basis for hierarchal racial structures. They maintain that evidence generated about humans from research in biology, anthropology, and genetics does not support socially constructed notions of races. Instead, they argue that racial hierarchies represent a product of intolerance to human variation and racism. In light of the racial strife on college campuses across the country and in society, their synthetic review represents an important knowledge base for students, faculty, and staff. They call for this knowledge base to be integrated into the undergraduate experience.

In the chapter “The Missing Box: Multiracial Student Identity Development at a Predominantly White Institution,” Ashley Macrander and Rachelle Winkle-Wagner share findings from a project designed to examine how multiracial students navigate their identity in the college context. Their chapter describes how multiracial students adapt and moderate their identities depending on situations and engagement with their peers.

In the chapter “Narrating Race and Identities from the Periphery: Diversity, Dilemma, and Discourses,” Linling Gao-Miles offers insight into the experiences of Asian and Asian American college students as they navigate higher education. The analysis focuses on how race and identity intersect with concepts of ethnicity, gender difference, marginality, and diversity in shaping the collegiate experience. She offers insight into the politics of campus recognition and diversity discourse.

The second section of the book focuses on how race influences life course. Race in social context varies as an asset or risk during the life course. Evidence from a variety of disciplines and fields explicate these protective and risk factors, while offering insight into how to better support positive academic, social, and emotional outcomes. Where appropriate, the chapters describe the role of higher education and the implications of experiencing racialized interactions in the education contexts.

In the chapter “Retaining Students of Color in Higher Education: Expanding Our Focus to Psychosocial Adjustment and Mental Health,” Juliette M. Iacovino and Sherman A. James convey the unique stresses on psychosocial adjustment experienced by students of color in college. Their review indicates that psychosocial factors, such as social and emotional adjustment, coping abilities, and social support influence college attainment among students of color. They advocate the need for adequately staffed counseling services to address the negative social identity cues in the campus environment.

In the chapter “Roadblocks on the Way to Higher Education: Non-Dominant Cultural Capital, Race, and the “Schools are Equalizer” Myth,” Olivia Marcucci and Rowhea Elmesky present the framework and findings of a study being conducted in a predominantly African American high school in the Midwest focused on the nonverbal, visual cues in the form of signage experienced by students in the setting. They hypothesize that visual cues influence students’ psychosocial adjustments by minimizing certain types of cultural capital. Moreover, the process universities use leading up to college admissions devalue non-dominant cultural capital, limiting the opportunities afforded to the most vulnerable students.

In the chapter “Learning to Live Together: Connecting the Classroom to the Community for Racial Justice in Housing,” Molly W. Metzger reasons that communities can serve as a unit of policy intervention for college students living in hyper-segregated regions. She describes course assignments that investigate public policy related to exclusionary zoning laws. Learning moved beyond reciting statistics and memorizing codes to include direct participation in public events and community engagement. Students’ civically engaged learning focused on Washington University’s role in community development and its relationship to neighbors in Forest Park Southeast. This pedagogical approach teaches an important lesson that debunks the notion of civic problems being self-defining. The lessons in this chapter point to the need for the type of cooperation described in the chapter “On the Light versus Dark Side of Empathy: Implications for Intergroup Dynamics in a Diverse Society.”

In the chapter “Academic and Community Partnerships and Social Change,” Vetta L. Sanders Thompson and Sula M. Hood review the efficacy and applicability of institutional arrangements employed by academic organizations and nearby communities aimed to positively influence pressing social, political, and economic conditions. The chapter provides a powerful reminder of the service mission of the university. They argue for the inclusion of this part of a university’s mission in evaluative processes required for accreditation. Their discussion frames academic and community collaboration as a core operating function of institutions of higher education.

Humans constantly assess the relative value of other humans. Stereotypes and related stock stories inform our assessments. With respect to race, stereotypes present oversimplified conceptions of people groups based on cultural mythology. The chapter “The Missing Box: Multiracial Student Identity Development at a Predominantly White Institution” emphasized the fallacy of basing racial stereotypes on science rather than human construction. The third section of the book describes the importance of moving beyond racial and ethnic stereotypes toward authentic relationships and understanding.

In the chapter “On the Light versus Dark Side of Empathy: Implications for Intergroup Dynamics in a Diverse Society,” Stephanie A. Peak, Emily J. Hanson, Fade R. Eadeh, and Alan J. Lambert draw on theoretical and empirical research to conceptualize empathy and its potential to stem racial strife. Research focused on racial stereotypes further contextualizes mechanisms influencing empathy described in this chapter. The chapter concludes with a hopeful tone in concluding that empathy might have the capacity to lessen intergroup conflict and minimize expressions of stereotypic thinking about others.

In the chapter “Storytelling in Higher Education, Shyam Akula offers a personal reflection that describes the educative process of story listening and its value as a strategy to overcome the simplification associated with stereotyping. He argues that listening to the stories of other members of the university community has the potential to address personal misunderstanding and prejudice. Moreover, the process helps the listener move beyond stereotypes toward a more nuanced understanding of the life experiences of other members in a community.

In the chapter “The Roots Are Racism: Historical and Current Racial Bias on College Campuses and Their (Unintended) Push on the Diversity Agenda,” LaTanya N. Buck and Purvi Patel explain the historical influences of race in shaping higher education. They chronicle the role of the civil rights movement and campus activism within the ecology of campus life. Their discussion provides a succinct description of the shift from racial inclusion to broader diversity efforts. The diversity shift warrants concern as race continues to influence student development, retention, and attainment. One of the institutional responses, the Center for Diversity and Inclusion at Washington University, represents an effort to build infrastructure to combat the conditions associated with racial stereotypes and other forms of bias found in a campus community. The chapter details the center’s efforts.

In the chapter “Bringing Ourselves Back from Extinction in Academia: Becoming an Indigenous Scholar,” Savannah Martin frames her poetic contribution to the Day of Discovery and Dialogue. The poem titled, “I thought you were all extinct?” describes an account of the stereotypical thinking that might disrupt the academic development of a Native American researcher. The poem, like a lens, positions us for a closer examination of the racial and sexual characterizations that ferment in the incubators of knowledge creation commonly referred to as universities.

In the chapter “A Future of Native Students: From Victimization to Value to Victory,” Carol Schuermann, Molly Tovar, and David A. Patterson Silver Wolf depict the historical trauma experienced by American Indians and Alaska Natives and argue that their experiences remain underrepresented in discussions of campus diversity and inclusion. This failure in representation fosters misunderstanding and inadequate levels of cultural competency on college campuses. Tovar, Patterson Silver Wolf, and Schuermann describe the efforts of the Buder Center for American Indian Studies at Washington University to prepare a new generation of thought leaders and researchers able to contribute psychosocial supports aimed to help ameliorate the intergenerational effects of discrimination and oppression.

Section 4 examines Washington University’s strategies to create and promote greater diversity and inclusion. The strategies have evolved over time due to a number of factors including changes in case law involving admission policy, demographic shifts in higher education, and greater student activism. The chapters point to the future of the community and the possibilities associated with dialogue, discovery, and thoughtful planning.

In the first chapter of the final section, “The Chancellor’s Graduate Fellowship Program: A Pre- and Post-Grutter Analysis,” Sheri R. Notaro, Erin Daugherty, Mark C. Hogrebe, Pat Howard, Diana Hill Mitchell, and William F. Tate IV conducted a study of an initiative established to bolster African American graduate degree completion and to prepare participants to serve as faculty members. The 2003 Grutter v. Bollinger affirmative action case called for a narrow tailoring of higher education admissions. Specifically, the court specified that no applicant is divorced from competition and that the applicant’s race is not the primary consideration of an application. Thus, in 2003, the fellowship program experienced a point of departure from its foundational aims. The study in this chapter compares the pre- and post-Grutter cohorts on demographic metrics and attainment.

In the chapter “Doing Diversity in Higher Education for International Students,” James V. Wertsch and Teresa Sarai describe the rapid demographic change at Washington University in terms of international student growth and the role of the McDonnell International Scholars Academy in the recruitment and mentoring process of master’s and doctoral students who want to become global leaders. The Academy represents an institutional effort to design inclusive opportunities for students with widely different experiences and backgrounds.

In the chapter “The John B. Ervin Scholars Program’s “Legacy of Commitment”: Grounded in Discovery and Dialogue” Michelle A. Purdy provides a historical case study of one the university’s signature undergraduate diversity initiatives. For nearly three decades, the Ervin program has provided financial support, mentoring, and leadership opportunities for talented students of color. She highlights the pillars of the program and selected outcomes.

In the chapter “Honoring our Investment: Low-Income Student Success at Washington University in St. Louis,” Shyam Akula and Scott Jacobs share findings from a project designed to identify factors related to the academic, cultural, emotional, social, and professional successes among students characterized as low income at Washington University. Their report highlights disparities in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) course performance. They offer recommendations to address STEM disparities and to improve the overall student experience.

In the chapter “Academic Support for an Increasingly Diverse Undergraduate Population: Challenges in Initiative Design and Implementation,” Jennifer R. Smith, Heather J. Rice, and Michael Chang continue the focus on academic and nonacademic interventions organized to positively influence undergraduate students’ grades, retention in STEM fields, and engagement with campus life. Using an evidence-based approach, they describe how development teams implement programming and the direction of forthcoming initiatives.

In the chapter “A Private University Called to a Public Mission: Selective Higher Education, Diversity, and Access,” Ashley Macrander and H. Holden Thorp conclude with reflections on the challenges and opportunities associated with the diversification of admissions pools in elite universities. Using Washington University in St. Louis as a case study, they describe the valuable role undergraduate and graduate students played in fueling the dialogue about the significance of diversity on campus. The chapter points to the need for a new frontier of discovery related to effective practice to better support inclusive environments.

In the Afterword, “The Crisis of Race in Higher Education: A Focus on Inclusion” Mark S. Wrighton offers a perspective on diversity and inclusion based on his experiences serving as Chancellor of Washington University. Several programs designed to support greater participation in higher education are highlighted. His remarks reflect the challenges and opportunities associated with building a diverse, inclusive, and just community.

William F. Tate IV

Nancy Staudt

Ashley Macrander

Editors