University President Lee Bollinger teamed up with professors to explore an issue at the heart of much recent campus debate titled “The Language of Race in America” on Wednesday night in Low Library.
The event, which was part of the Kraft Program Series, aimed to provide an open forum for discussion of race and the future of diversity—topics that Columbians have grappled with this year through the fall’s hunger strike and string of bias incidents. Bollinger acknowledged that these issues are “difficult to talk about, difficult to think about,” but said that the University wants to “really force us to have settings in which we try to do that.”
In addition to Bollinger, who moderated the discussion, the panel included Columbia professors Rodolfo De La Garza, Kimberle Crenshaw, Ira Katznelson, Robert O’Meally, and Sandhya Shukla. Topics on the table included the American presidential race, the pros and cons of affirmative action, and the University’s responsibility to maintain an open and unbiased forum for student self-expression.
Some of the problems of racism today, panelists said, stem from language flaws. “So much of the language of race is the language of stereotypes,” said O’Meally, who teaches English and comparative literature.
Crenshaw, a law school professor, suggested that the language of racism has become the language of preference. “Virtually every attempt in American society to open doors has been denounced as preference,” she said, citing the negative feelings many people have toward affirmative action programs.
“I want to suggest that ... we think about affirmative action as a way of equalizing,” she said. “You are not giving anyone an advantage, you are giving equal opportunity.”
About halfway through the event, De La Garza, who is a member of the political science department, suggested that today’s youth are less prone to forming impressions based on race. In response, Bollinger asked all audience members under the age of 30 to raise their hands if they thought young people today do not think in terms of race. No hands were raised, turning the conversation to whether or not universities are successfully fostering open discussion on the topic.
“Are we fulfilling our responsibility to talk about these issues in a way that would be truthful?” Bollinger asked the panel.
Katznelson, a political science professor, said that a university serves as an open forum when it provides a respectful community where all have an equal opportunity to discuss race.
But some students who attended the event felt that the panel could have focused more on Columbia and its responsibility to promote discussions of race. “I was surprised there wasn’t more about how there is so little conversation of race [on campus],” Nickerson Hill, a student at the School of Social Work, said. “It’s unfortunate that conversations like this can’t happen outside these sterile self-appointed settings.”
aviva.erlich@columbiaspectator.com
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