“A Disturbance in the Force” is the title of Chapter 4 of my memoir “Making Gumbo in the University.” In that chapter I describe a ten-minute presentation I gave at the DOD World Wide Equal Opportunity Conference. The hook of the talk is that I gave it using a Star-Wars Theme. “There is a great disturbance in the force,” is the first line. Unorthodox as it was, at the end the mostly military audience went wild. Here is the video of that talk.

People live life at the interpersonal level. Eyes light-up, smiles erupt, arms open for hugs; hands reach out to be gripped. Or, eyes are downcast, shyness takes over. Or, heated words spring forth, two people back away from each other in anger and frustration. Or for some, letters burn with “…white heat.”

Read More »

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.
Read More »

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.”
Read More »

On November 3, 2009 I was interviewed by Frank Stasio on “The State of Things”. That show is on the North Carolina Public Radio station WUNC. I was very impressed with the people running the show; Lindsay Thomas (Producer) and Frank (host). All the others I met there were impressive, but those are the two people I had the most contact with. Frank was an energetic, warm and engaging host.

Read More »

“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.

Read More »

Having served in the U.S. Navy (1972-1976), I know about military justice. Having been a scholar of the different ways in which a trial can be formally set up, I know about varieties of justice systems. Having heard the old joke about the black man who is sent downtown for “justice” only to find out that in the jails it’s “just us,” I know about racial tensions in the American justice system. Knowing all that, I was still stung by The Interpreter, Alice Kaplan’s story of the history racial injustice in the American military in WW II France.

Read More »