At North Carolina State University, along with Americans around our nation, on Thursday, November 3^rd, we held an Occupy-Wall-Street Teach-in.

    I was one of the speakers at the Occupy-NCSU Teach-in.  This is what I said:

   Long ago, sociologists made this discovery: when the economy gets bad people have a tendency to scapegoat; to blame other people.  So people begin to say that “…things wouldn’t be like this if we didn’t have those ‘blanks’ around.”

    And recently we have seen that happen.  Hispanics, gays and lesbians, Muslims… they are bringing this country down. That’s the scapegoating tendency.

    But let’s think back to the success of the civil rights movement.  Your generation has been taught and convinced that racism is in people.  But that is not true.

    Racism is not in any person.

    I grew up in the Jim Crow South.  I was not allowed to go to school with white kids… by law.  That is racism; racism resides in the customs and structures of a society.

      Yes, there were men and women who engaged in violent, bigoted behavior; Bull Connor, Governor George Wallace. But the question is, how could that be; how could that happen?

   Well, individuals like Bull Connor were given free rein and power by the racial laws and customs of our society.  For that reason, the civil rights movement targeted institutions not individuals. The success of the civil rights movement was to ignore individual bigots and attack those racial laws and customs through the use of the U.S. Constitution.

    Turns out that now with Occupy-Wall-Street and Occupy-NCSU, Americans are on the right track.  Yes Bernie Madoff was a bad man who cheated people.

    And just this week we appear to have a new individual culprit.  Ex-New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine whose company MF Global filed for bankruptcy on Monday.  Why? 

    Corzine and his company lost 600 million dollars of their investors’ money. Somehow the money has disappeared they say.  They just lost that money, they say.  And now investors have once again been Madoffed.  But let’s not scapegoat individuals.

    Putting Bernie Madoff in jail and putting Jon Corzine in jail will not rid of us the problem that allowed for a Bernie Madoff and a Corzine to do what they did. Still, don’t misunderstand me.  Taking legal action against Bernie Madoff was right; it is right that he is in jail.

   But, I say again, putting Bernie Madoff in jail and putting Jon Corzine in jail will not rid of us the problem that allowed for a Bernie Madoff and a Corzine to do what they did. We have to attack the economic structures, the economic customs that set up Bernie Madoff and Jon Corzine. Those Wall Street customs support an attitude where money matters more than people.

    You need to know, for example, in the midst of the mess he created at MF Global Jon Corzine was trying to sell MF Global.  He knew millions of dollars had gone missing. But he knew too that if he sold the company, he would be given 12 million dollars.

    Turns out, when he was hired to run the company, the contract given to him by the board of directors of MF Global guaranteed him 12 million dollars if the company was sold.  It didn’t matter if that sale came because the company was failing.

    Where is the accountability for poor management of other people’s money?

    That’s just one of the common practices of Wall Street that is bringing our country down.

    And by the way, there is something else that smells funny. For some reason, with the Occupy Wall Street movement across this great nation… the police are sent to watch those gathered. That’s kind of odd in America… where we are guaranteed the right to peaceable assembly.  Now, the police should show up if there is a reported incident, but not just because people have gathered to protest the practices of Wall Street. 

    But that’s part of what’s going on.  Too many of our institutions are being used to uphold the Wall Street way, but not the American Way.

    All that more reason that it’s time for us to push for changes in the economic and political structures, the economic and political customs that set up the Bernie Madoff’s of the world. Those Wall Street customs support an attitude where money matters more than good stewardship; where money matters more than people.

   It is time for us to push back against that.  It’s time for us to force a change in that attitude and in those Wall Street customs.

   And keep in mind that this must be a sustained effort; it will not work if it’s a one-shot effort.  As one writer has put it,

    “…Everything requires energy.  We must put effort and energy into anything we wish to change.”

    We have to begin healing our own communities.  That is the message I have been delivering to a neo-diverse set of audiences.  Yes, I speak with student groups, but I also speak to older adults in specialty classes and in churches. 

    I am asked to speak by these varied groups because they too are experiencing the press of neo-diversity.  That neo-diversity press creates anxiety that comes from knowing you have to interact with people from different American-groups everyday of the week.  What are we supposed to do, how are we supposed to interact is always the question.  Sometimes though the question is how can we help “…them”?

    Truth is, though, that before anyone can help another group, you have to heal your own community.  Church groups want to help, to reach out to various groups in need.  Yet many members of those groups have not faced up to the neo-diversity problems in their own community.  How can you reach out to others, when there are members of your community who suffer because of your silence?

   So has your community addressed the use of stereotyped language by your group members?  Has your community set a new standard that forbids tolerance of intolerance in language?  Or are members of your community still getting away with whispering or speaking out loud about “…them” and “…those people.”  Whenever people in a group think “…we can talk this way because it’s just us,” an awful mistake is being made. With neo-diversity, you see, it is not always easy or possible to know who is a member of a “…minority” group within your group.  And so in the presence of a vulnerable person, letting your group members speak in stereotypes or use anti-group slurs lets group animosity live on in your community.

    Last week was a very busy week for me.  In addition to my regular teaching, I was involved in a number of diversity events on campus.  One of those events was called, “These Hands Don’t Hurt.” I was asked to participate as a “…prominent man on campus” who stood against violence against women. You see violence against women is not a woman’s problem.  Violence against women is most often perpetrated by men.  How can men let that go on?   Violence against women is a problem of my male community; we have to begin healing our own community.

    A neo-diverse group of men (students, staff, faculty and administrators) stood out front of the D.H. Hill Library on the brickyard.  We put our gloved hands in colorful mixtures and then made our handprint on a big sheet.   Then we gathered for a group picture.

    We men stood to say that we will speak up against violence against women.  We stood in public to say that we will also support and help anyone we know is being abused. 

    We stood to begin the work of healing our own community.

    “We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal.  That they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights; among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

    These are our words.  These are the first words used to describe what it means to be an American citizen. 

    We hold these truths to be self-evident; so obvious that there is no need of discussion; there is nothing to be explained. Yet, for a long time in America, the whole country said that these words did not apply to someone with my skin color.

    No right to my own life; so I could be sold and used as a slave.

   It took the Civil War to start to have those words apply to someone who looks like me. But even after that, Americans resisted. Racial segregation became the law of the land, so no right to liberty to choose where to live or go to school; no right to vote until 1965.  And no right to choose who to marry, that is no right to the pursuit of happiness until 1967.

    Racial segregation, Jim Crow, which I grew up in… did something very important.  It made it clear who was ‘we’ and who was a ‘they.’

    With those immoral laws gone, we now live in a time when interacting with someone who does not look like us is unavoidable.  Now we struggle with neo-diversity anxiety. That anxiety is causing some of us to want to keep other American citizens in the category of “they” and “them.” 

    But the problem is we have made a diversity promise to all Americans. Diversity, it turns out, is the core value of the American identity.

    “We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal.  That they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights; among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

    That statement makes diversity the American value.  And so we are all required to accept and work for that American value. 

        About that principle, General Colin Powell said,

    “This beautiful statement was not the reality of 1776, but it set forth the dream that we would strive to make a reality…Governments belong to the people and exist to secure the rights endowed to every citizen.”

     Whenever we have fought diversity in the past, we have held ourselves back. In fact, that seems always to be the point in fighting against diversity.  Those who fight against diversity seem to want America to stay the same; to stagnate.  When we do that we fight against our own best interests.

    But, when we have come to accepting diversity, we have moved forward… we have grown as a nation.  Why?  Because we have begun to use all the talents available to us… and that makes us stronger.

    I served in the U.S. Navy… 1972-1976.    At one point in our American history, that would have been impossible.  Then when it became possible for a black man to serve, at first all that black man could be was a cook. America fought through that discrimination against it citizens.  My older brother was a submariner.  I served in air anti-submarine squadrons as a personnel clerk.  My younger brother graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy and became a Navy pilot.

  I served with men of honor.  Some of those men were gay.  On board ship, aircraft carriers, did we know that… yes, we did.  Yet all that mattered was that everyone did their job.  That’s all…

   About finally removing don’t ask, don’t tell, the outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mullen, said,

     “I still believe that it was first and foremost a matter of integrity, that it was fundamentally against everything we stand for as an institution to force people to lie about who they are just to wear a uniform. We are better than that.”

   Yet some of us still want to tell American citizens, some of whom are willing to risk their lives to serve and protect our American freedoms… some of us want to tell gays and lesbians they have no right to marry… That these American citizens, that “they” have the right to life and liberty but not to the pursuit of happiness…

   Some of us want to put that restriction on other American citizens because of anxiety; because we want to hold on to something to point to in order to say who is a ‘we’ and who is a ‘they.’

    “We can do this and they can’t.”

    But by our first citizen principle, diversity is at the heart of the American identity; diversity is the first American value.  It has been so from the beginning, when we declared…

    We hold these truths to be self-evident…

[Above are the remarks I made at a forum on the State of North Carolina’s legislatively proposed amendment to the state’s constitution to ban gay-marriage; October 13, 2011.  I along with Maxine Eichner, a UNC-Chapel Hill law professor, participated in the forum to inform students of what is at stake, and at risk, if this constitutional amendment is passed by vote of the citizens of NC. For a report on the forum, go to:

http://www.technicianonline.com/news/forum-held-to-educate-students-on-glbt-marriage-ban-1.2651605]

    Interpersonal relationships and race; many times I have mentioned that course. 

    You may have wondered why I focus on the interpersonal when it comes to (what seem to be) racial matters.  Anytime I have discussed neo-diversity, the reason has been implied.  But to be direct the reason for the interpersonal focus is that interacting with each other remains our great racial, ethnic, gender, religious, challenge. 

       Fast and dramatic social changes have put us in the same situation as Dr. Seuss’ Sneetches.

 

    We rid ourselves of the immoral racial laws of segregation. With that change and other changes in the social world, we were no longer able to say “…well they can’t come in here”; they can’t come to our frankfurter parties.  With that some yelled out like Dr. Seuss’s Starbelly Sneetches did:

 “Good grief!”groaned the ones who had stars at the first…

“We’re still the best Sneetches and they are the worst.

But, now, how in the world will we know,”they all frowned,

“If which kind is what, or the other way round?”

      Caught off guard by the changes, we began our struggle with neo-diversity.  And we sent our children out into that neo-diversity unprepared and without hope of getting aid. 

      2006 is when I created and first taught the course, Interpersonal Relationships and race.  Why did I create the course?  What was my motivation? In the Spring 2004, in my introduction to social psychology course, I was teaching the section on race as an interpersonal phenomenon. I teach this topic late in the semester because I want students to have gotten to know me. Otherwise having me, a 6’3”, 280 lb., dark-skinned black man as the professor might dampen the discussion of race relations.  To a certain degree that strategy had worked in the past, but this time the class of 200, mostly white, students froze up.  The tension in the room was palpable. Discussion was strained.

    After class, I returned to my office.  I sat and waited for a student from that class to show up for a previously arranged appointment. When this young white female came into my office, after she took her seat, and we exchanged our quick hellos I said,

     “Sorry but before we get to your questions, I have a question.”

     She looked at me as if to say, “I knew he was going to do this.”

     By that point in the semester, my students know me well. That means they know that I notice things and will ask about what I think is going on.

     “Did you feel that in the class today?”

    Still looking at me in that way, she hesitated.

     “Yes…” she finally said.

     “What was that,” I asked.

     She looked into my eyes then dropped her gaze to the floor.  I waited.  Again, she looked up, dropped her gaze briefly then looked back up at me.

    “Everybody says we have to be more accepting,” she said.  “But nobody tells us what that means.”

    Profound… this was a profound statement about the state of race-relations and diversity on our campus and elsewhere.  During orientation, colleges and universities tell students that the campus is one that has and accepts all kinds of people.  Students are told that they too have to accept all kinds of people.  But, as this young woman said, nobody tells students what that means.         

     It turns out that even as America becomes more and more diverse, nobody tells citizens what that means. And so Americans are struggling with how to manage their day to day interpersonal lives because the old racial, gender, ethnic rules do not apply.  Without laws and social understandings prohibiting who can go where, we all find ourselves interacting with people from other American racial, ethnic, gender and religion groups. We struggle then with the question, “who are among the ‘we’ and who among the ‘they’?”

     We are all Sneetches wondering:

 “Whether this one was that one… or that one was this one

Or which one was what one… or what one was who.”

    

    With that anxiety we interact with people who do not look like or sometimes even sound like us.  Our racial struggles are today intergroup struggles of interacting with many different American groups. Those interactions are formal and informal; at work, running errands, going to a sports bar, sitting in a classroom.  And whatever the case, those interaction struggles are all interpersonal.

    By invitation, I give talks to student groups around the campus of North Carolina State University.  A couple of weeks ago, I gave a presentation to students in our university-honors village. 

    It was one of those laid-back, get to know the professor kind of gatherings.  My job was to let the students in on my history as a research-scientist.  To do that I had to walk them through my life from my Navy experience on because it was in the Navy that my personal and scholarly interest in race-relations and diversity really came to life.

    I brought the gathered students up to date including my creation and teaching of my “Interpersonal Relationships and Race” course. Letting them in on my why I created the course, I said something along the lines that

     “…we have eliminated the immoral laws of racial segregation. What’s left now, our greatest challenge, is learning to interact with each other as equals. You see, we live in a time when contact with people who do not look like or even sound like us is unavoidable.  So we struggle with the neo-diversity question, who are the ‘we’ and who are among the ‘they’.  But as I tell my students, everybody on our campus is a ‘we;’ everyone in your classes is Wolfpack. Our challenge today is to accept and live in that reality.”

    After interacting with the students for about an hour and a half, I headed home.  That evening I got this email from one of the students who attended.  A freshman, she wrote:

     “I just wanted to thank you for sharing your experience and perspective on diversity with us at the Honors Colloquium. I attended a large public high school, where the bottom line was “diversity is good”. However, I’ve often asked myself what exactly is diversity? and why is it such a big issue? Your perspective and the whole idea of a “we” has given me a much deeper understanding of diversity and why it’s so difficult (especially for Americans) to find peace with it. It’s not necessarily about putting Chinese people, African Americans, Whites, etc. into a room together, it’s about developing understanding and acceptance. As you said, I think this interpersonal connection is a societal necessity that a lot of people do not understand and therefore do not strive for.”

    Turns out, we continue to do a lousy job of teaching young people about diversity and why it is important in America. We continue to offer only sound-bites, “…diversity is good.”  Having been given no substance, our most academically capable young people leave high school confused about diversity.  And too often those young people end up at colleges and universities where that confusion continues because there too they get nothing but “…diversity is good” sound-bites. 

     But what the email from that young woman tells me is that young people want substance; college students, at least, are looking for a real understanding.  That email and what I see happen to students in my class tells me that once students come to understand that the real challenge today is interpersonal, they feel better, calmer, and more prepared to live, go to class, and eventually work within a diverse community.

    It was a hell of a time.  It was a complicated time.  It was the time of the civil rights movement.  It was the movement for black equality in which some white Americans were foot soldiers. 

    In this memoir, Dick J. Reavis tells us his story of being a white civil rights foot soldier during the summer of 1964. His mother and father objected.  His father said to him that yeah Dr. King wants you down there but don’t you see why; “…If white kids die, then this Dr. King will get more publicity.”  Still Dick Reavis left Texas to go South to Georgia and then Mississippi. Reavis become a worker for SCOPE (Summer Community Organizing and Political Education) a project sponsored by the SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference).

    A Texas white boy, Dick J. Reavis had a lot to learn about the civil rights movement and about interacting with African Americans.  He learned that SCOPE represented a shift in the goals of the movement:

    “Always before… the Movement had in many ways pleaded… for whites to accept blacks.  The shift towards community organizing meant that the Movement would henceforth demand not a seat next to whites in a diner, but the seat at which the whites were sitting: it was [now] a struggle to take from whites the seats of power and patronage. …the Movement was not asking for acceptance, tolerance, or love; it was demanding power.”

    That made things complicated.  But even a young and motivated white boy could find a way to wrap his mind around that. More difficult were the lessons that were to come from interpersonal interaction mistakes. One of the things that made it a hell of time was the push to transition from a racial-caste system where being white made you right, and being black meant you had to get back, to a system where black and white people would have to interact with each other on equal terms.

   Problem was the caste system still existed. That meant that even an attempt to prevent a negative racial incident could go bad interpersonally for those on the same side. 

    A movement meeting was held in the backwoods outside Demopolis, Mississippi; although a SCOPE worker and a driver, Reavis was not allowed in because he was white.  Reavis and Jerry, a black movement spokesperson, left that meeting to head back into Demopolis.  Just as they made it to town, the car lost power. Reavis pulled over and just then two uniformed white men pulled up to see “…what are you boys doing here?” Thinking only of getting both himself and Jerry out of this unharmed, Reavis acted as if Jerry was a “…boy” who worked for his dad.  As part of that act Reavis handed Jerry some money and said to Jerry, “There, boy, go get us some oil.”  The ploy worked; the two white men left, but…

    “…Jerry didn’t speak to me for the rest of the day, and I don’t believe that he ever spoke to me again, though for a month or two, we lived in the same house… It took me years to understand why.”

    Young Dick Reavis was approaching all his interactions through the lens of strategies and getting the work of the movement done.  He had never felt the negative, heavy end of the racial caste system and so had not felt how everyday that system demeaned the humanity of African Americans.  So to save him and Jerry from going to jail he used what he knew of the caste system to play out the role of a white supremacist, using the appropriate language.  What he didn’t understand was that “…Jerry would have preferred risking jail to the insult… however well-intentioned…”

    One of the points I teach in my “Interpersonal Relationships and Race” course is that racial language has a history that still carries into the present use of words.  One cannot avoid that history by saying, “I didn’t mean it like that.”

    Writing with honesty and grace, in his memoir Dick J. Reavis tells us of encountering and failing at a number of these interracial interaction dilemmas.  Here again is a small story of what was going on in the everyday march of the civil rights movement.  Whites were involved and struggled to learn how to interact racially.  At the same time, blacks were struggling to learn how to interact interracially, and making mistakes, but mistakes that were not even seen as such. 

    All those mistakes influenced the successes and failures of parts of the movement, because the movement was complicated and “…a struggle against all kinds of odds.”  Looking back Reavis says, “While we accomplished some of what we set out to do, in the main, I believe we were defeated, and that our hopes now fairly or unfairly devolve onto the generations that will come after us.”

    That is all the more reason that it is time for stories like this one, from the foot soldiers, white and black, to be told.  Reavis makes this point too.  He writes: “My only hope is that in reading this work, members of a younger generation will see what I and my peers did not accomplish, and will do what they can for the cause…”

    We must never forget that it was a hell of a time.  Today, it is still a hell of a struggle. Now we see that this was not and is not just a black and white struggle, but a struggle to find respect for our common humanity; racial, ethnic, gender, religious humanity. All who care must be forever vigilant.

    At the time, I was North Carolina State University’s Vice Provost for Diversity and African American Affairs.  I was living through the kind of hell that comes when doing diversity work and finding resistance to change from all sides. Foggy, eerie… that was my experience.  In my memoir (Making Gumbo, p. 153) I wrote about that day. I wrote:

   September 11… 9/11… morning drive… radio news… what did they say?… some fool has hit the World Trade Center… small plane I guess… how funny… bagel and coffee filling… tasted good… office… did you hear… what… airline jet… World Trade Center on fire… TV in basement… oh no another jet hit… oh no… buildings burning… collapsing…  have to teach today… walk from administrative office to teaching office … preparing to teach but… won’t be a normal class… I begin class… “No man is an Island” I recite… “a day that shall live in infamy” I say… 200 students… anyone have anything they want to say I ask… student dismay- who did this… why… student fear- what will happen next… fear and sadness- I can’t get a hold of my father in NY… student anger- let’s nuke them… student balance- nuke who… shocked… dismayed… weakened… students’ sense of a new existence- I don’t feel like the world is safe anymore… that night… me… I called Mom…  I watched the images… over and over… too much… couldn’t stop… had to stop…

    9/12… morning… slow, sluggish, heavy… coffee and muffin… office… Provost needs you Rupert… wants help with speech… in three hours… all campus community event… talked with Provost… got idea… theme family… writing… conferring… editing… writing… done… walking to event… Chancellor speaks… Provost speaks… my words… spontaneous applause when the Provost said… we had argued about that line… unnecessary, he said… I said most necessary… reluctant he kept it in… loud applause when he said… we will not tolerate any person or group directing anger at anyone in our, in the Wolfpack family…We are a family… we are still the Wolfpack…

    Today, September 11, 2011, ten years past, we remember.

    I remember the hell of it all and the moments of grace.