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.

      Fall, 2010 is off to a gumbo start. We have been in classes for three weeks. Even so, there’s a lot of action in my academic life.
        For one thing, I have increased the enrollment for my still newish “Interpersonal Relationships and Race” course. Although I created and first taught the course in 2006, it’s still newish because I have continued to work on details of what goes into the course. Up to now I have kept the enrollment at 35 to ensure we can have good group discussions. My students have liked that, but at the same time encourage me to find some way to have more students take the course. That’s why, as an experiment, this semester I have increased the enrollment to 75. So that has meant new group dynamics for this social psychologist to manage. It seems to be going well; I’ll report on that at the end of the semester.
          Aside from my regular two courses, I am teaching a six week course for the NCSU Encore Program for Lifelong Enrichment. The course is for adults 50 and older. To explore how an older group of adults reacts to the ideas I am teaching to undergraduates in my “Interpersonal Relationships and Race” course, my Encore course is “Living on the New Racial Frontier.” I’ll report later on how that goes, but the start has been fun and productive. It has also made for a very busy schedule of preparations.
          And that’s the other part of the gumbo start of the semester. I am being asked to do a lot of presentations based on my memoir “Making Gumbo in the University” and based on my “living on the new racial frontier” ideas. Wednesday, September 15th, the same day I opened my Encore course I also gave a presentation on “Making Gumbo…” at our College of Natural Resources. If you’d like to see that presentation, here is the link:

http://mediasite.online.ncsu.edu/online/Viewer/?peid=7fedabf703f84d048b4eb9ae53b80e761d

      Like I said my Fall, 2010 is off to a gumbo start. But I like that. As I said in my talk to the College of Natural Resources:
    “My people are gumbo people. We don’t make or serve anything bland.”

My memoir is published! At $18.95 you can order a copy from Plainview Press (at P.O. 42255, Austin, TX 78704 or email sbpvp@sbcglobal.net). Of course you can get a signed copy from me by Ordering It Here…

If we are going to have a conversation on race, we have to stop throwing words around incorrectly. The Harry Reid “…controversy” is a good place to start. People are claiming that Reid’s statement was “…racist.” Right now, if you Google Harry Reid one of the things you get is “Harry Reid’s Racist Comments.”

Here is what we have to get straight. There are differences between prejudice, bigotry and racism. The word “…racism” is thrown around with so much inaccuracy that it has lost its real meaning. Let’s begin by rectifying that problem.
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Every one says we need a conversation about race. Yet anytime a person makes a statement or misstatement in a racial context people scream “…fire him/her,” “…she or he should resign.” I am not talking here about outright racial animus. I am talking about a comment like that made by Senator Harry Reid. Senator Reid was trying to be honest about why he thought that, although he is a black man, Barack Obama had been attractive as a presidential candidate. When it came to race, Senator Reid said he thought that it was a plus that Obama was “light skinned… with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.”
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“Post-Racial?: Something Even More Bizarre and Inexplicable,” is the title of my newest essay. That essay was just published in the journal, Making Connections: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Cultural Diversity. As technical as the title of the journal sounds, my essay is written for the general reader.

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Making gumbo is the way I like to describe my life as a university professor. Being from the Louisiana bayou town of Opelousas, gumbo is close to my heart. To Creoles and Cajuns of Louisiana, no matter where we reside at the moment, just the word gumbo resonates with family, childhood, good spirits, challenge and hope. As a university professor I try to bring that mix of ingredients to my efforts to teach.

Right now, I am in the fourth week of the Fall semester. As always, one of my courses is a 200 student, auditorium class. This semester that course is my favorite, Introduction to Social Psychology. My specialty is social psychology and I teach that course as a course on what it takes for a relationship to develop and be maintained. My goal is to challenge students’ romantic assumptions about how romantic interpersonal relationships work. We are at the point in the semester where my students are starting to realize that I meant what I said when on the first day I declared to them, “you’re not going to like this class.”

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