My work with Sanford’s One-by-One (race-relations improvement) group took me to an unexpected place.  One of the newer members of the group is Matt Martin, a teacher at East Lee County Middle School.  He asked if I would be interested in coming and talking to his Language Arts classes; eight graders. 

    Now, I have been a college professor for over twenty years.  I have no experience dealing with non-college students, let alone eight graders.  But because Matt told me he had them reading Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” and Tim Tyson’s “Blood Done Sign My Name,” I was intrigued.  I also thought this would be a good way for me to learn more about the social contexts and dynamics of Sanford, NC.  So I said yes.

    March 19^th, 2010, during our Spring Break, I drove to Lee County and found my way to East Lee County Middle School.  After finding the school sitting in a prairie all by itself, I drove into the parking lot.  Looking for visitors’ parking spaces I steered through that lot until I stopped my car to look at this greeting.

    I was blown away.  Understand, I have been the keynote speaker in some auspicious places that include the U.S. Pentagon, but this was the best, warmest greeting of my career.  So now it was on.

   College students tell me that I am intimidating.  Well I am who I am as a professor and lecturer.  Although I changed the language of my presentation to suit eight graders, there is no way for me to change my style of presentation.  So although they were somewhat intimidated, they did not back down from me.

    No doubt those eight graders were able to deal with me because of the kind of teacher Matt Martin is to them.  As I looked around his classroom at the books and posters, and as I watched him interact with his students, to myself I said “…Matt is a real teacher.” And I told that to the students. I said you guys are having a singular experience because of this teacher; appreciate him now, because you will surely appreciate him later.

   So it was a good time.  Not just fun; those very young people opened up to me.  They told me of their own anxieties about interacting with people who do not look like them.  When I mentioned that at NCSU we have Muslim female students who wear the Hajib, an African American female student blurted out, “…oh they scare me.”  So we had a real conversation about their experiences with the neo-diversity of our time. 

    I saw real evidence of that while we talked, and in the written comments those eight-graders wrote about our time together and that Matt sent to me in a letter. One student wrote:

    “I loved the way you introduced the concept of confusion in the world, as far as racism goes.”

    Another wrote:

    “It helps to know that to not show prejudice to people we meet that we should…relax and not assume and set the conversation ‘on fire.’”

  Yes, neo-diversity is happening even in what appears to be a sleepy county middle school.  I learned that even in middle school, some of the young people are encountering and struggling to manage intolerance.  One of the eight-graders wrote:

    “Thank you for your powerful lecture. I liked the way you talked about the way people judge one another without knowing them.”

    So, not intolerance aimed at themselves, but intolerance from within their own group that is aimed outward at other groups. I had confirmed what I have been teaching my college students; that in the age of neo-diversity, there are no innocent.

    People are trying to understand and manage neo-diversity.  That’s what I have been observing and teaching since 2005.  I grew up in the Jim Crow South; that time of legal racial segregation. But now, we no longer live in a society where our racial contacts are controlled and restricted by law. Nowadays, everyday, each of us has some occasion to interact with a person from another racial, ethnic or gender group. And those persons come from multiple racial, ethnic and gender groups. So, today our interpersonal encounters with race are not black and white, but neo-diverse.  That is why I say today diversity in black and white is dead.  Long live neo-diversity.

     Fast; this has come upon us very fast. That rapid social change has involved race (Jim Crow to President Barack Obama), gender (bra-burning to female CEOs and national politicians), communication-technologies (telephones to Iphones to Ipads) and international-relations (peaceful coexistence to being a post 9/11 America).  Those rapid, and simultaneous, social changes have put each of us in situations where we have to interact with people on an equal footing, but people who do not look like and sometimes do not even sound like us.  That is neo-diversity and that neo-diversity creates social uncertainty about how to interact with people. 

     In my essay “Post-Racial?: Something Even More Bizarre and Inexplicable”(see Essays link), I work out the idea of neo-diversity in more detail.  My point now is that it has become more, and more, clear to me that this is what we are struggling with the most right now.  That is why we are so quick to call people names (Harry Reid is a Racist; see my post on this).  That is why we have people who can be led to believe that our President is a Muslim plant with the goal of turning American into a Muslim country.  The quickness of the social changes in our society means we are not psychologically prepared and so we are filled with anxiety about who is who.

     Racial segregation did many things, but one of its main functions was to make clear who was a “we” and who was a “they.”  All that started to change when we struck down the unjust, immoral laws of racial segregation.  Along with all the other changes that started to happen, the removal of racial segregation meant that more and more each of us had to figure out who was a “we” and who a “they” and we couldn’t reasonably use race as the indicator.  As I remind my college students, everyone on our campus is a citizen of the campus. No matter what your classmate looks or sounds like, I say, when it comes right down to it, that student is your classmate, and is therefore a “we.”

     That is the neo-diversity that people are trying to understand and manage.  Sanford’s One-by-One is an example (see my earlier post, Back to the Future II).

    There is something going on. 

    Before I bring us to Fall 2010, I need to tell you about One-by-One.  In the sleepy Southern town of Sanford, NC a group of mostly white, elderly women had pulled themselves together with a common goal.  Their goal is to improve race-relations in Sanford. 

    A friend, Gary, had invited me to a Mike Wiley’s one-man performance of Tim Tyson’s Blood Done Sign My Name.  I use Tyson’s book in my “Interpersonal Relationships and Race” course to give my students a detailed history of the modern civil rights movement.  Knowing that, and having read Tyson’s book because of me, Gary invited me to this performance.  So, with his wife Nyree, we drove to Sanford and the Temple Theater. 

    Mike Wiley’s performance was amazing. 

    But before he started I came across a very interesting insert in the performance program.  The flyer advertised a group called One-by-One with this statement:

    “To improve race relations, a community forum is being planned to discuss racism, with the hope of sharing, understanding and healing.  The ability to work inside and outside of this community as one people, called to work together for the betterment of all, will result.”

    Also on the flyer were spaces to put your name, telephone number, etc as part of their call that read, “Be One with us! Please complete the sheet and drop it in the box.”

    Very interesting, I thought, and said so to Gary and Nyree.  Having been working on diversity issues for so long, I could see that this group needed some help. After all, you don’t ask people to give you their name so they can contact you about race-relations in the community, without giving a name of a person who is working as part of the group. 

    That Monday, by email, I got in touch with the director of the Temple Theater, who then put me in touch with the two organizers of the One-by-One group.  I gave them a bit of my history and asked if I might be of some help to their race-relation effort.  Both replied with enthusiasm, and asked if I could attend their next meeting.  February 21, 2010 I attended that meeting and have been working with the One-by-One group ever since.

    Something is going on.

    Exemplified by the existence of Sanford’s One-by-One group, what’s going on is that Americans are feeling the press of neo-diversity in their (large and small) communities.  And some are pulling together to try and figure it out, not to stamp it out, but to make it a well functioning part of the mosaic that has always been America.

    It’s time to bring you back to the future.  Fall 2010 was the busiest of my 23 year career.  Busy but not hard because everything I was doing I was doing by choice.  So busy that I got way behind in updating my website which is why I have to take you back to get to the present.

     The only place to start is with April 2010 when my memoir “Making Gumbo in the University” was published.   My favorite bookstore, Raleigh’s Quail Ridge Books, hosted a reading and book signing for me on the evening of April 29th.  That was quite a night; about 100 people were in attendance.

      And it was extraordinary night and weekend because my sister Elinor, her daughter Tresha and my “little” brother Phillip all came to Raleigh to support me.

     I read from “Making Gumbo…” to give the audience a taste of the flavors of the book.  That gave me the opportunity to present my ideas about diversity in general and diversity on university campuses.  And for me that means engaging people in a dialogue; pushing for a conversation that opens people up to other perspectives and shows people how to respect each others’ perspectives.  On that point I ended my reading by reading from the book’s prologue.  “Daddy liked his conversation the way he liked his gumbo.”

     Then the reading turned into a classroom session.  I took questions and slipped into my professor persona. 

     Really that’s not my fault.  Members of the audience asked real questions about matters of diversity and so I was off and running.  In fact, I had to remind the bookstore staff that they should stop me so that I would have time to sign books.  It was quite an evening.