DR LISA COLEMAN:
Good afternoon.
Thank you for joining us.
My name is Lisa Coleman and I'm the
senior vice president for global
inclusion and strategic innovation here
at New York University and I of course
lead this great team of people in this
Office of Global Inclusion, Diversity,
and Strategic Innovation.
Before we get started, please note that
at the bottom of your screen there is
the opportunity for captions.
So right at the bottom, if you see the
CC you can press that and get captions.
I'll wait just a second
to let people do that.
I always begin by saying that I hope
everyone out there is taking good care
of themselves. This has been a
particularly challenging time for so
many, and particularly for people
in already historical historically
marginalized and disenfranchised
communities and of course we've seen the
pervasive anti-black and anti-Asian,
anti-Latinx, etc, particularly
heightened during this COVID-19.
Obviously other disparities, such as
Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, etc,
are with us and continue to be with us.
I want to also acknowledge those people
working behind the scenes and those
people who keep us safe,
or relatively safe.
I guess it's all relative.
Especially the essential workers,
those people who clean up, who made it
possible for us to be at
home and stay at home.
Thank you for all the work you
have done and continue to do.
I'd like to take a moment of silence
for those ancestors and those people who
have paved the way for us to be here,
and of course to honor and acknowledge
the land upon which we occupy the
land held by Indigenous peoples.
We will take a 10-second
moment of silence in
acknowledgement and recognition.
Today we're coming together
to have a discussion.
This discussion is going to focus on
interrogating racist ideologies, and
hate speech, part of the ongoing
programs we offer at the Office of
Global Inclusion. We hope our new
initiatives will allow us to reflect on
who we are as a community, what our
values are and who we want to be to one
another. This global context
we've been providing a lot of
information during this time.
We've had antiracism and
microaggressions workshops, dialogues,
mentoring, management institutes, we've
put up a digital inclusion tool kit.
We have a lot of work happening.
We've also held some discussions and
so I want to reference those again.
For those of you who weren't able to
join us, you can look at these online.
We had a Juneteenth conversation with Rachel
Swarns, one of our NYU professors from
the school of journalism,
a panel discussion on blackness, racism
and protest, featuring Kirk 'Jae' James,
Christina Greer, Jennifer Morgan
and Timothy McCarthy.
We've had a panel focusing particularly
on anti-Asian discrimination and that
was coping and contextualizing
anti-Asian racism in pandemics and we
have a program for
NYU summer reads.
We've had a conversation with Nell Painter on The History
of White People and also had a conversation with Kenji Yoshino on Covering:
The Hidden Assault on Our Civil
Rights and we have an up upcoming
conversation with Matthew Frye Jacobson, a Yale professor on
Whiteness of a Different Color.
We hope you will join us
for those discussions.
We also hope you'll continue to use
our resources, including the antiracism
resources and obviously we will
be posting more on that today.
Our work is in line with all the
messages that have been going out.
This week, over the past week and a half
or so, we've had the opportunity to do
-- to think about a
lot of other work.
Over the last week and a half we've had
the emergence of an article written by
one of our professors, Lawrence Meade in Poverty and
Culture prompting questions about who we
are as an NYU community and what
types of ideas and beliefs we support.
The university has issued several
statements certainly obviously from our
president, from the FAS, we've seen
various deans, including dean of the Schools of Social
Work, etc,
issue various statements.
But what I would like to say is that we 
agree and reject what we believe to be
the article's false, prejudice
prejudicial and stigmatizing assertions about the culture of communities of color in the United States.
These concerns have raised much deeper
implications about this singular publication or this singular group,
our professor, but further evidence
about our need to create opportunities
for action and for us to follow up
on what it means to be a community
responsible and
accountable to one another.
History in present day has taught us
that language through scholarship and
policy can be used to codify and sustain
legacies of racism and discrimination
that are pernicious.
As we know, and as we've heard from some
of our scholars previously, including Nell Painter
our panel Jennifer Morgan, Christina Greer, Timothy McCarthy, and Kirk Jae James, as well as with Kenji Yoshino is that what we have heard is that
historically how research has been used,
particularly within academic
institutions to actually sustain some of
these legacies of racism and
discrimination and how some research is
used to combat that.
We'll have conversations
about that today.
We'll be linking these specific
incidents to a broader conversation
and talk about the
inner lackings.
These panelists today, as we think about
NYU situated in the broader context, we
thought it was important not only
to bring faculty experts to have a
conversation about this but also to
bring some of our students and a alums.
So, I'll explain the
format a little bit.
Today's program is
organized in two segments.
The first is with students and alum of
NYU and the second is with NYU faculty
members. After each segment, we'll have
a brief time for question and answer and
then we'll have a wrap-up after the
students and then move into the faculty
panel. Given the size of our audience,
we will not be able to take questions,
all of them,
or to answer all of them.
We will -- we do copy the
questions, so put them in the Q & A.
We keep track of them and we will try
to answer them or provide you with
information, particularly as people
ask, as much as we can and then in our
resource pages where we try to follow
up with information about that or direct
you to the appropriate resource.
We will also group questions if they
are -- if they map on to one another.
You might hear the essence of your
question used with different language,
but that's because we're bringing
multiple questions together.
Please feel free to put your questions
in at this point if you would like and
all along the time
as we go forward.
Now I'd like to ask the student
and alumni panelists to join me.
We'll get started.
I have Joan.
I'm trying to see if
I can see everyone.
Research assistant at the AI for people
and a program intern at COVID Black -- where she
assesses the social and political
impacts of technology and focus on
racial injustice,
transnational activist and afro-futurist.
For those of us who know something about
Afro-futurism, thank you for being
here. I have a good
friend who does that work.
Also Joan researches and writes about
digital political organizing tactics
with a mission to identify
and share best practices.
As a member of our class of 2020 is
receiving an undergraduate degree in
global liberal studies with a
concentration in politics,
rights and development.
Thank you, Joan.
We have Krystal McLeod, a third year
law student at the University of Notre
Dame, a proud Dalai Lama fellow, Truman
scholar, Compassionate Leadership fellow, and Human and Action fellow.
Krystal's social justice is
intersectional and rooted in black femi
feminist thought. A proud feminist Black
Krystal is the founder of Canity True LLC an
organization focused on raising the
collective consciousness of people
through mediums that free the
mind, body and soul.
She has used her experience as
a former White House intern.
Her work with national non-profits,
NGOs and the UN department of public
information and her education at NYU
to help challenge and refine her value
system as well as other
organizational value systems.
As a social justice activist, she
reflects -- uses that as a reflection on
self and accordingly thinks about how we
can be our whole selves in who we are.
Guided by this belief, Krystal continues to do the hard work each
day to identify her own biases, mistakes
and hold herself and I believe
others accountable as well.
Thank you, Krystal,
for being here.
She, as someone who's mental health
presents consistent challenges
she's also an advocate for highlighting
the importance of mental health and we
know this COVID-19 has had a
differential impact on people with all
kinds of differing abilities,
including mental health.
So this is important.
And the stigma that
surrounds such issues.
She's grateful to a community of
stronger mentors, many of whom she met
at NYU and we're glad you're a proud NYU
graduate and that you've gone on to new
things, of course.
She enjoys daily meditating, running
and dancing with Charlie to
reggae dance hall tunes.
Oh, that's good.
So thank you so much
again, Krystal.
And then I have - I hope I
don't mispronounce your name,
and when I do please correct me.
Kananaka...Ikawana?
SPEAKER: Ikaika Ramones.
DR LISA COLEMAN: Thank you, Ikaika
Ramones, thank you.
Is a student from the Ford Foundation
Fellow in NYU's Department of
Anthropology and its cultural
and media program.
His research engages the roles of
bureaucracy and philanthropy in projects
of social change.
Specifically he studies the relationship
among and between grassroots and more
institutional aspects of Indigenous
nation building, and movements in the
context of Hawaii. He has also made a
short film, 'No Retreat,'...
I'm going to mispronounce that,
so I'm not going to say the linguistic
patterns but he made
a film that explores the conflict
between Hawaii as a paradise retreat -
you can tell I need my glasses on too,
because I'm obviously squinting.
Paradise imagery and the lived
realities of colonization.
For five years he's co-directed an
Indigenous educational field program
serving on the youth island.
Let me say this also.
As we're talking about Indigenous
populations, the other thing we have
noticed during this pandemic of course
is the disparate and differential impact
on Indigenous populations.
As many of us know, in some places the
infection rate has been 11 times as high
as other areas, and that includes places
where we have located and colonized and
put people from Indigenous populations
into those areas, particularly here in
the United States.
We've seen that
disparate impact as well.
I'm going to turn to the panel
now and ask some questions.
Here we go.
Panelists, as a student or alum, can you
talk a little bit about your classroom
experience? We know that during our 2015
assessment that we all took, we heard a
lot about different experiences that
students had, whether you're a woman,
student of color,
student with different abilities.
Can you talk to us about a time when you
did not feel respected, when something
happened in the classroom and your
fellow peers or your professor did not
value your opinion, and how did that
impact your academic experience?
How about I start with
you, Krystal?
I'm going to change it
up so there's to order.
KRYSTAL MCLEOD: Thank you very
much, Lisa.
To everyone,
I'm so excited to be here.
When I think of my classroom experience
is not when I was reflecting in
preparation for the panel, the first
thing that came to mind were instances
of inaction. Oddly enough, I felt
grateful that I couldn't think of
outright instances, at least on the part
of faculty members, where I felt as if
they had perpetuated
racist, sexist ideologies.
As soon as that thought came to mind,
I realized how problematic that was.
The fact that I equated silence
with somehow with equity.
I remember one moment in particular, it
must have been my last year when I was a
senior I was in an advanced seminar
that was based in discussion and we were
talking about social welfare.
Somehow the topic of
affirmative action came up.
A student brought up a notion that is
as problematic as it is inaccurate that
the reason students of color are
in elite institutions is because of
affirmative action. I remember
being so hurt by the comment.
I was mad at my peers
because no-one said anything.
I was the only person of color in the
class and it was clear that I was hurt
and no-one said anything.
I also to this day, not only am
I frustrated at that student but
frustrated at myself because
I didn't say anything.
But it wasn't until thinking about this
panel that I thought about the faculty
member's role in all of this, and how their
inaction solidified this inaccurate
notion and that the classroom is a
forum in which faculty members have an
opportunity not only to correct false
histories, but it's a forum to
advance social justice.
And the opportunity
was lost.
Some students walked away that day, I'm
sure, feeling as if that comment was OK.
And I walked away that
day -- thankfully, I knew
that comment wasn't OK.
I've been super blessed because I have
so many mentors, a lot of them who have
come from NYU, who only substantiated
the fact that asserting that is not OK.
However, I think about what
if I had been someone else.
So that's definitely the first
thing that comes to mind.
In terms of my reaction, I think a lot
about the fact that I was silent in that
moment and how that silence has
traveled with me to other professional
experiences and academic experiences
where false narratives have been
asserted and I don't speak up.
And I wonder, if I had felt supported
in that moment, if the classroom in that
moment had become a space where I felt
like it was OK to speak up, would I
change my reaction?
Would I change my reaction in
moments that came afterwards?
That's been my experience.
DR LISA COLEMAN: Do either one of our
other panelists want to comment
on this question?
JOAN MUKOGOSI: Sure.
I'd just like to add because as another
black woman who went to NYU, I have
similar experiences and I feel like the
sad part, the reason we're here, is a
lot of us have
similar experiences.
I just wanted to add what Krystal is
describing, that silence that becomes,
not even on our behalf but on behalf of
professors or faculty, -- being the only
black student, having a silent
professor, we don't have the leverage or
privilege often to speak up in those
spaces because we're outnumbered.
There's only one of us in the classroom
and there's that fear of am I the only
one who thinks that was
kind of racist?
We don't have that space because
simply you're the only black person
in the classroom.
It reminds me of something
that Simone Brown calls the absented
presence of blackness, which is that is
you'll have students or even professors
say things that are about race
or touch race, and there will
be a black person in the room.
But we will dance around the subject
without actually addressing the
underlying problem, which in this case
about affirmative action -- I assume
there was a deeper discussion
there that wasn't had.
But at the same time you're sitting in
that classroom as a black person changed
from that person.
Also other people in that classroom,
like you said, can leave unchanged or
unaffected or (INAUDIBLE)
I just
wanted to add another experience.
My sophomore year I had a professor who
didn't understand, didn't know about
racial capitalism,
and this is in a politics class.
I was confused
because I had transitioned from
that feeling of silence to now I
have my voice and I spoke up in
the class about racial capitalism.
After the professor was like
what are you talking about?
I was like, racial capitalism,
it's the same thing.
It was shocking because I was like
whoa, like, as a black student in your
classroom I want to feel protected
in the sense that you
understand the systems that I carry into
the classroom that
impede my experience as a student on the
academic level as a professor.
So that was an instance where I became
-- I started teaching my professor how
to be more holistic in her
analysis, and it was kind of weird.
Was that negative or positive ?" was it
negative that I have a professor who's
very well respected in the community who
does not understand ration capitalism?
Should I be worried about that?
Or is it positive because we left having
her learn about it and she understood
me deeper as a student
after that conversation.
I think these are moments where it
becomes clear that classrooms aren't always
equalizing spaces and that the actions of professors and students and the 
inaction can exacerbate that.
DR LISA COLEMAN: I think it's important
the silence and the ways in which you
all are talking about how inequity can
flourish in the space of silence and
also the inaction and this idea of
learning and navigating these spaces and
the misconceptions that can be put forth
if not right then corrected and who has
the responsibility and
accountability for those corrections.
Is it on the onus of an individual
student, and how do we manage that, not
just within the classroom
but outside of the classroom.
I want to make sure -- so one of my
questions actually is about and you all
saw the questions so you know this,
about mis misconceptions in the
classroom, but one of the things I
want to turn to now is given that these
things happen,
how have you as students navigated?
I know we want -- I want to think that
your entire NYU experience that we're
doing this great job and that it was
just wonderful the whole time through.
That's not the case.
So, how did you navigate?
What kind of support systems?
Who did you turn to?
How do you think about students
navigating, whether it's a difficult
situation in the classroom or the
aftermath of that, and what kind of
suggestions would you suggest -- and
I'm going to come to the institutional
question in a minute, what we can do as
an institution, but how did you navigate
it personally in terms
of your own lives?
Anybody can start.
I'm not going to -- unless you want me
to choose you, which you know I can.
JOAN MUKOGOSI: I can just
say for me
the way I navigated it was
that I centered my studies on racism - race and racism.
My experiences informed
my academic interests.
And I found affinity spaces.
I found where other people like me were
gathering, went there and talked about
it. Those are the spaces that
were most helpful for me.
But now I've made
it my life mission.
That's how I'm processing it.
DR LISA COLEMAN: That's great.
More research, more study.
That's always a
good place to start.
I see you're nodding your head.
We are in an academic institution,
so that's really important.
KRYSTAL MCLEOD: Going off of that, I
would definitely say that for me, I was
a politics major, so within at least
just my major, I don't think that I was
equipped with the language to articulate
what it was that I was feeling.
I really appreciated that I did have
bandwidth with the NCAS to take classes
like race and ethnicity,
to get that language.
Because I think that's really important,
that substantiates these concepts that
you know are real, but you're still like
-- I don't know what this is called.
So definitely, Joan,
I 100 per cent agree with you.
Number two, which was just as important,
was having folks that look like me and
folks that didn't look like me
substantiate what I was feeling.
Saying this -- and that's where -- why
I think it's super important for faculty
members, white faculty members, faculty
members who are not of color, Cis
gendered faculty members, heterosexual,
who are not part of historically
marginalized communities, to call out
white supremacy, to call out these
concepts that we know are pernicious,
because it is so affirming when, as a
person of color, when you're feeling
attacked by white supremacy, to see a
white person say, "No, that's wrong,"
and to say that to their colleague as
well. So I think that was
really helpful for me.
DR LISA COLEMAN: Thank you.
I think that's really important,
who's holding one another
accountable? I think what you said,
Krystal, people who look like you but
people who don't look like you, and
what's the accountability loop therein?
I think that's important.
Ikaika,
do you want to say anything?
Do you want to add?
IKAIKA RAMONES: Sure.
The classroom is an interesting space
just because the racist and all types of
horrifying comments that people make
are often backed up by research, because
something like anti-affirmative speech
is very often -- they can cite up and
down all of these studies
that will prove their point.
I think it brings us back to the
conversation about the article that set
a lot of this off.
The responsibility is collective, I
think, because when professors or people
of authority in the production of
knowledge start to make these comments,
it's coming from a
particular set of resources.
Something like the professor Meade's
article isn't the problem itself.
It's the fact that A, it got funding,
so this research was looked over by a
committee and that
research was funded.
B, there's a whole peer review process
that this article supposedly went
through. So you had multiple eyes
on it that didn't see problems
and it still passed through.
The journal this was published in needs
to think about the effect this would
have not only in policy but also in
classroom discussions, because this type
of research really
does impact people.
By continuing to support it, whether
it's through tenure review processes,
it's only adding support to this
position that's very harmful to students
and people outside of
the academic community.
DR LISA COLEMAN:
Thank you very much.
I think that's right.
You speak to the institutionalization
and the embedding in terms of these long
historical practices of discrimination
and racism built within practices and
ongoing systems of white supremacy,
whether that's within educational
systems, research systems,
health care systems, etc.
Thank you for that, and thank you also
for turning to -- I often ask what the
bottom line is in higher education
and then I get strange answers.
So thank you for talking about the
production of knowledge, because
actually that's one of our bottom lines
- research, teaching and the production
of knowledge,
as opposed to our corporate partners.
I think it's important we return to that
idea of the production of knowledge and
the kinds of knowledge that we want to
produce, which is not just about the
reproduction of
self, let's hope.
Let's turn to this
other question.
Some of you have touched
on it in your answers.
It's this concept of -- we know that
right now -- so I'm not going to get
into the debate around academic freedom,
etc, but what I'd like to ask you
all is this - If you had to,
in lay-person's terms, what does free
speech mean to you? If you think
about that, or academic freedom.
And when does it cross the line
into hate speech and/or racist, xeno
xenophobic ideology.
Anybody can start.
IKAIKA RAMONES: Something like the
article that I was talking about, yes,
it could be categorized
as hate speech to me.
It's also I think important for us,
again in an academic realm, to dismantle
it on its own terms, because that
research, while it is hate speech, is
poorly executed, misinformed,
very outdated, and I think
that's one bubble to put that in.
But then the whole hate speech and
academic freedom, it's tricky just
because it really comes
down to a question of power.
Something like that, there's a
conversation to be had around is this
hate speech, is it academic
freedom, is it freedom of speech?
Whereas in somewhere like a university
at the same time any sort of research or
call to boycott, divest and sanction Israel and support Palestine
can be branded as hate speech.
A loft these conversations pop up left
and right and it's helpful to think
about power that's involved in the
conversation, and is this speech further
adding weight onto a
marginalized group or not?
JOAN MUKOGOSI: I agree with Ikaika.
When I first think about the question,
it seems too simple to even answer.
Free speech means that you can say
what you want,
but you might face consequences.
Hate speech is not free speech.
I struggle with this because what
underlies this conversation is me as a
black person fighting to have other
people understand how to treat me and
people like me
with basic dignity.
It seems too simple for me to explain
what hate speech is versus free speech.
Either you're racist or not,
you know what I mean?
It's kind of frustrating.
There are points where people make
the free speech argument
and miss the harm.
Yes, you can say anything you want,
but if it causes harm, especially in
academic spaces,
then we have a problem.
I think it should go without saying that
no teacher, student or faculty member
should be able to use abusive language or
produce abusive content
like this article.
But I agree it's a
question of power.
So yeah, yeah.
It's a question of power that I feel
like we already have the answers for.
We know who has power at
NYU, at systems like NYU.
We know who is protected and who's
not protected in these instances.
I think at this point it's kind of like
less of a conversation
and I'm wondering
where the action is.
How are we actionable around questions
of free speech?
How do we hold people
accountable?
That's the point of the panel
today and it's a longer discussion.
But I do want to have that movement
towards debate and discussion
and more towards how do we act as a
community
to protect marginalized
students, teachers and faculty
from abusive language and also to
support the right to share ideas
and to debate in an academic space.
KRYSTAL MCLEOD: For me it's complicated,
because if you would have asked me this
question
even just before I went to law
school, I would have just had, you know,
I think I would have been able to say,
OK, any language that further
disenfranchises
the historically marginalized
populations,
well that falls into the
category of hate speech.
And I don't know that -
I think... I don't know
that I wouldn't agree with that now,
but I think one of the things,
especially in this climate that we've
seen,
and that I wrestle with now as
a black woman,
I think...
historically marginalized people
in this country
have had to deal with
being oppressed,
being disenfranchised,
and it never being acknowledged,
us never been vindicated,
us never given the space
to see other people
acknowledge our pain.
And one of the things that I do
appreciate about these conversations
is that it has provided a lot of people
with the opportunity
for people of color to get
the acknowledgement for our pain, to get
the acknowledgement, and just overall
historically marginalized populations,
for that pain to be acknowledged in ways
that I don't think
that it has before.
I think we've been forced to just kind
of like let's skip over oppression and
let's get -- yeah, so I do -- it's
definitely complicated for me, as
someone who does want that
acknowledgement in all spaces, because I
think it's deserved.
DR LISA COLEMAN:
Thank you very much, to all three.
Let's move on in some ways to I think
a related question, which is -- some of
you sort of harkened
around this question.
When hearing about these in instances,
whether they have to do with the
production of knowledge or different
kinds of knowledge or de devaluing, what
do you see as sort of the
responsibilities of the institution?
What would you like to see?
One of the questions that I had for you
all earlier, which we're not going to be
able to get to, is in encountering
these experiences with your peers, how
did your peers
respond, etc?
How would you like peers to be
supportive, how would you like the
institution to be supportive?
Thinking about comprehensive, thinking
about that in terms of address to these
kinds of issues.
JOAN MUKOGOSI: I think what
you're talking about here is how
do we end the cycle of harm.
That's what I'm hearing.
There's been a cycle of harm at
various institutions in this country.
How do we break that?
It's a huge question
and a huge problem.
I think one approach is talking about
diversity at NYU, just the simple fact
that students of color are not
represented as much as we should be in
the student body and
especially in faculty.
I do not have a single black professor
while at NYU and that was problematic.
I was in a global
studies program.
There's also a limit there, which is to
say statistics in terms of the racial
makeup at NYU are only so helpful TOEFL
verify what we know to be true but don't
help with championship it if five years
from -- this has been an ask for years
and still we represent ten 10 per cent
of the population year after year,
undergraduate and graduate.
Yet 50 per cent of
the US population.
I think we should approach this degree
a restorative justice framework.
Restorative justice is about affirm
affirming life when we're -- and moving
away from punitive measures.
I think in this conversation about free
speech and how to be in community with
one another, I think it's
important to think about, A, whether or
not there are private efforts or
accountability, which I think a lot of
students are frustrated because
we don't see those efforts.
So we're looking and we're like, OK,
I experienced X YZ and nothing happened.
If there are those efforts of accountability I
think we need to hear about it.
I also think that moving forward
survivors of racial violence should --
our healing should
take the front seat.
When we have these discussions, our
primary focus should be on how do we --
how are the students who are
professor's classroom feeling?
They had to listen to this professor
repeat this type of racism.
How are they?
Are they OK?
That's an institutional fix, I believe,
because we need the systems in place to
support students
in that process.
But I also think we're talking about
how to address hate speech or how to
address racist comments
or stuff like that.
Restorative justice teaches that,
putting the perpetrator back into the
cycle of harm that allowed them to
cause the harm, it's problematic.
Shutting someone out of a community
doesn't work because they can just go to
another community and
do the same thing.
It doesn't change the underlying system
that allowed their thoughts or behavior
to thrive or to exist.
It kind of sounds broad that we need a
cultural change at NYU, the way we treat
each other and especially
treat marginalized students.
But I think the way to focus in on that
is to center us, center our experiences,
not just celebrate but center.
I'll just say antiracism
is a way of life.
It's not something that
you can read in a book.
It's something you have to
practice every single day.
What does it mean for NYU to
be an antiracist institution?
Not just to have antiracist classes,
programs, teachers and professors,
but what does it mean for NYU to be
antiracist as an institution?
Once we start there, I think there's
a lot of things to unpack,
but I think that's central to what we
have to do going forward.
KRYSTAL MCLEOD: A hundred per
cent, Joan.
Everything you just said I
agree with wholeheartedly.
Over quarantine I was re-reading the
autobiography of Malcolm X
and there's line where he talks about
northern white supremacy
versus southern white supremacy.
I remember reading that line over and
over again because I'm like,
Northern white supremacy?
What does that even mean?
Especially someone who's grown up in
liberal spaces,
I spent my whole life in New York,
to be honest, I never really associated
white supremacy with liberal spaces.
I think the reason is
white supremacy looks
different in liberal spaces.
Many times -- it may
not look explicit.
It may not look
explicitly violent.
But that doesn't make
it not white supremacy.
I think we get a pass in the northern
and liberal spaces
because it's not as explicit,
and we often have the rhetoric, we have
the scholarship that looks good.
But if we're merely speaking about
values of antiracism,
if we're merely speaking about values of
diversity and inclusion,
that does nothing for me as a black
woman, period.
JOAN MUKOGOSI: Yeah.
Where's the practice?
KRYSTAL MCLEOD:
Where's the practice?
And I think that's what I would
challenge all liberal institutions
to allow the rhetoric they assert
to coincide with the practice.
I 100 per cent agree that the only way
that can be done is by centering folks
that are historically
marginalized.
I do think that the 2015 listening
session was a really great moment where
you saw students, they articulated
a series of demands, wrote them up.
The institution did take note,
which I think was an inflection point.
But the work just begins there.
White supremacy,
this is a deeply
entrenched, systematic concept
that could never be dismantled
you know...in a couple of years,
by...even by really significant actions
by university.
It requires constant...
it requires you to be
constantly questioning
what can we be doing better,
are we really doing work that is
consistent with the values we say that
we have, and how do we continue to
center the most marginalized in our
practices? Something I also believe
is our social justice will always be a
reflection of us, period.
So if we don't have faculty members
and administrators that are constantly
working on their own biases
-- because we all have them.
Even myself, who is someone who
identifies as a black feminist, that
loves this work,
I still have my own biases.
And if I'm not working on that, whatever
social justice effort I'm doing will
always be limited and
will always reflect that.
So I think it's really important in
this process to -- for administrators,
faculty members, to be constantly
challenging their own biases.
IKAIKA RAMONES: I 100 per cent agree.
Those are really good points.
I do think what we're talking about, it
begins with diversity but it doesn't end
there. I think it does
bring larger institutional
questions of what can be done.
We can increase the number of black,
brown, Indigenous, queer and Muslim
students at NYU, but what does it feel
like for those students when they see
administrators passing out water to NYPD
that is cracking down on BLM
protests or
that a lot of food procurement is from a company that is tied up with the prison-industrial complex, with US military supporting
research or even operating an account with occupy Palestine, I think it's important to
talk about the institutional changes
that is can happen to support students
that come from marginalized communities
so that they can feel that institutions
are affirming them in their actual actions.
DR LISA COLEMAN: Thank you all.
I think all of the points you brought
up, particularly if we think about
communication and trust, the
transparency and of course centering, I
think centering the marginalized
experience in terms of the learning.
Thank you for saying that.
Certainly we've tried,
but we have a lot of work to do.
I think what's key is action.
All of you have brought up
thinking about what are the
action steps we're
going to take?
What are the practices?
That's not just individual but
then collectively, institutionally.
It's like working on diversity
institutionally and individually, and
what's that
simultaneity look like?
We have a couple of
questions I want to get to.
One of the questions asked which is
sometimes important often for members of
marginalized groups is how do you deal
with this idea of impostor syndrome,
sort of navigating that in
and out of the classroom?
You all sort of touched on the
experiences and then having to navigate
that, but if you could go a little more
deeply into that in terms of how do you
navigate that if you're thought of as
the affirmative action person and then
the impostor syndrome
and all of that.
Anybody can take that question and
then piggyback off one another.
KRYSTAL MCLEOD: Thank you
very much for that question.
It's so real for me.
Right now I'm working
at a law firm.
In the law, women of color are
historically under-represented.
I constantly struggle with
this impostor syndrome.
I think the only way to deal with
impostor syndrome is to -- well, to
know, one, you're not an impostor,
but to go into that a little bit more,
being a person of color in a country
that was founded upon your oppression,
just that alone, putting all of -- that
you had to do in order to get into an
elite institution like NYU,
to get an education in this country in
institutions that were not built for us,
just being a person of color requires
an insurmountable
amount of resistance.
The capacity that you have, the
strength, the courage, dealing with the
comments that we talked about, the in
inaction we talked about, and still
somehow not allowing that to stop you
from showing up to class, trying in
class, being in a pandemic and still
being able to pursue an education.
I guess the point I'm trying to make is
affirming your power as a marginalized
person, because I think
that's super important.
That's what I constantly try to do is,
is remember how powerful I am because
I've had to deal with a system that
people who do not look like me don't
have to deal with.
That's my practice,
that's the way I pump myself up.
Sometimes it works,
sometimes it doesn't.
But I think it's really
important to center that.
DR LISA COLEMAN: Thank you.
Any other comments?
JOAN MUKOGOSI: You're on mute.
DR LISA COLEMAN: Thank you. Let me see
if there are other, I actually can't...
the questions are supposed to be sent to
me
and I'm having a little
bit of a problem here.
OK, so we have another question
on transformative justice
and restorative justice.
So thinking about how we operationalize
that and thinking about whether you
think that's relevant for the kind of
institutional change we're looking at.
Anyone want to talk about
transformative and restorative justice.
JOAN MUKOGOSI: As I said before, I think
it's absolutely necessary.
I don't think there's a way to be
antiracist without restorative justice.
I kind of wanted to add to that point,
just to say as an Afro- Afro-futurist,
I'm going to borrow
from Adrien Moree Brown, who says that all organizing is science fiction.
And what she means by that is - What we're doing is thinking
about the future of NYU.
What do we want NYU to look like in the future?
What do we want it to feel like?
Classrooms, most academic spaces are
I think a misconception about them is
they're affectual spaces where we don't justice
learn but feel, we don't just exchange
ideas but experience,
trauma and healing.
I think we need to reframe the
way we think about classrooms.
Restorative justice is about what future
do you want to build and how do we
build that together?
I think it would be valuable to say how
do we want NYU feel for marginalized
students next year, how we want it to feel fee in four
years, ten years, a hundred years?
And then go back and say what do we do
today to work as hard as we can, to make is so
...to make it fulfill our imaginations and within that.
I think we need to dream a lot bigger,
huge, we need to shatter common ideas of
what an academic
institution looks like.
If thinking to wants to lead, we need
to say, "What is a university?" How do we want this to look?
That's revolutionary, restorative
justice, that's centering life and
that's one valuable way to confront
white supremacy, which limits our
imaginations, which tells us what
things are possible and impossible.
Restorative justice,
it's a great question.
I think it's so central to any
institution that's looking to change
systematically.
We have to dream huge.
DR LISA COLEMAN: Does
anyone else want to comment?
I think our last question is -- so this
is sort of the last question for this
part of the panel, which is,
If there are things that you would like
-- so one
of the questions is really, when you
have these experiences, what can we do,
not just as an institution,
but what would you like to see as some
of the outcomes?
What can we do as a community, not just
in terms of the institution holding
accountable, but how can we hold one
another more accountable and what would
be desired outcomes there?
KRYSTAL MCLEOD: Thank you
so much for this question.
It reminds me of this line
from a book that I love.
It's on black liberation theology by
James Cohen, where he talks about it not
being the job of the oppressor to
dictate how the oppressed should
vindicate themselves. That always
resonated with me because -- I think
often, for instance, the BLM protests,
you'll have your liberal friends that
are not of color say, hey,
I support this, but I personally
wouldn't go about it this way.
Or you'll have someone say, Generally,
I support antiracism,
but I don't think that this way of
actualizing antiracism
in institutional spaces, etc
is the way that you all
should go about it.
And I want to emphasize how problematic
that is and that that is not your job.
I think the outcome -- and I can only
speak for myself, but I know, as someone
who identifies within a historically
marginalized community, I
believe that when it comes to my
liberation, I'm the one who gets to
drive and decide what
would vindicate my pain.
And your job, if you truly want to be
an ally, is to put whatever thoughts you
have on how I decide to go
about my liberation a aside
and only stand with me.
If you truly want to be an ally,
being OK with how I decide to pursue my
liberation. I think that's what I would
want to see more in terms of an outcome,
less of folks talking about being
supportive but then -- with an and, and
then just standing there and letting me
guide them
and telling them what I would want.
IKAIKA RAMONES: That's
a really good question.
It really is about being comfortable
with supporting people unconditionally.
I think the flip side of it and some of
the less pretty sides of it is when I've
seen race weaponized
for personal ends.
So you see people -- creation
of a hostile environment.
When there are more productive ways to
support people that are already very
exhausted. So I think it's about
creating the right types of frameworks
to have these productive conversations
that are productive and not weaponizing,
so that we can actually create
institutional change on personal and
broader institutional levels.
JOAN MUKOGOSI: I think we should
have a base set of understandings.
Let's be done debating about racism,
because, really, if we get down to it,
there is no debate.
The books are there, read them.
It's very clear.
Let's end the debate and I think this
whole conversation has been let's
transition towards action.
How do we make antiracism
a way of life at NYU?
I think it's possible.
I genuinely think it's possible.
It has to start today.
We might not see the change in a
year, but what do we do today?
Hopefully I think it starts with making
classrooms more welcoming spaces
for students of color to feel like, at
the very least, if they're experiencing
racism from their peers,
they're not going to experience it from
their professors.
I think a lot of the work needs to be
focused there.
DR LISA COLEMAN: So read and act,
take action, do the reading, stop the
debating and stand with me as
I fight for my own liberation.
Thank you very much,
Krystal, Joan, Ikaika.
I really appreciate all of you.
I'm sorry if I mispronounced
your name earlier.
Thank you very much.
Thank you for taking time out of your
busy schedules to be with us today.
I know I talked about the
burden of representation.
And you all referenced this,
I talk about it a lot.
I really appreciate you
taking time to be with us.
It tells me you care about our
community, you care as students, as alum
and you care about who we're going to be
and how we hold each other accountable
and where we're going to be, as some of
you have said, 150 years from now, who
do we want NYU to be?
Thank you for participating
in this conversation.
We're going to transition
now to our faculty panel.
We have a few faculty
members here with us today.
Thank you again for joining us.
We have three
panelists, I do believe.
I think it's three.
Now I'm going to squint again
as I try to read the bios.
I lost my glasses,
so this is what we're doing here.
Robert Hawkins is the McSilver Associate
Professor in Poverty Studies and
Assistant Dean and Director of
undergraduate education at the Silver School of
Social Work.
He holds an endowed chair in poverty studies and holds four teaching awards.
Among them is the 2016 NYU
distinguished teaching medal.
He also has focused his research on
poverty reduction, race and social
justice, social capital,
diversity and social policy.
In his work he also focuses on the
structural and psychological effects of
discrimination, marginalization and
trauma and risk and resilience factors
for policy and
applied interventions.
Dr Hawkins also conducts research
on the effects of discrimination and on
decision making and consults and teaches
and writes nationally, internationally
on a range of related topics to the
aforementioned, as I said, inequality,
resilience, poverty, trauma,
structural racism,
oppression and community and
economic development.
His courses focus on racism, oppression, privilege, poverty,
social policy and international poverty
and he was recently selected as the
sterling network fellow of the Robert
Sterling Clark foundation.
He received a master's degree from the
University of North Carolina chapel hill
and his master's and
PhD from Brandeis.
Thank you for being with us.
Sonia Das is Associate
Professor of Linguistic Anthropology at
NYU where she combines ethnographic,
linguistic
and bibliographical and archival methods
to investigate how linguistic ideologies
interface with interactional practices
that contribute to social
inequality and cultural change.
She works across North American and
South Asian contexts -
right, not South American, South Asian,
sorry.
Her current research
analyzes verbal and non-verbal signs of
escalation in racially charged
police-civilian interactions in the US
to understand how multi-modal
communication impacts
criminal justice and constitutional
rights.
She is the co-editor in chief of the flagship Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 
and a junior fellow in the melon society
of fellows in
critical bibliography.
Thank you for being with us.
And our final panelist, Patrick Egan is
an Associate Professor of Public Service
at NYU and specializes in political
attitudes and behaviors and consequences
for public policy, partisanship and identity.
He is author of Partisan Priorities,
How Issues Ownership Drives and Distorts
American Politics and his peer-reviewed research has
been appeared in nature, the American
Political Science Review and the American Journal of Political Science. He is a
recipient of the golden dozen award in
recognition for his
outstanding contributions to
learning in the classroom.
Thank you very much
for joining us.
Again, please submit your questions and
they will be curated and passed on to me
as we go throughout the panel.
We're going to start with a
question that the last panel asked.
We're going to
piggyback on this.
A lot of the discussion we've seen not
only in relation to the most recent
article that the other panel talked
about just in general in higher ed is
this debate about hate
speech and freedom of speech.
Can you talk about the
differences as you see them?
What are the specific ways to reinforce
the importance of free speech while also
acknowledging respect,
etc for others?
I guess I'll start with you, Patrick,
but that's -- I'm just picking out of a
hat. Then I'll just move through
the panel approximately feel
free to jump in as you see.
PATRICK J EGAN: Thanks,
Lisa and Robert and Sonia, it's
great to be with you today.
I want to start by joining my colleagues
in repudiating Larry Mead's
article, the vies in the article trade in racist tropes and
stereotypes that I unambiguously reject
and each of the colleagues
of mine do so as well.
I think it's important, particularly
after hearing from our students in the
last panel, which was, as always, our
students move me with their heartfelt
and insightful ways of thinking about
these really complicated topics.
So I felt it was even more important to
repeat that and make sure that's known.
I think the question that you
ask, Lisa, is a complicated one.
Again as our students nice
nicely put their fingers on.
I think about the line not so much
between free speech and hate speech but
at what point speech, particularly
academic speech, in that case writing,
should be censored or censured.
In this case the university and
certainly our department has been in
consensus about censuring what's
happened and we should be sure that
happens rarely in academia, that a
department or a university uniformly
says one of the people in our body
of faculty has done something wrong.
That doesn't happen very often.
It shows you how much my colleague
crossed the line with this work.
I think what I find myself thinking
about when I think about the difference
between academic freedom, censuring and
censoring, I think we need to tread
lightly, in part because I think so much
innovation and liberation that's come
from scholarship, and I'm thinking
about queer theory, about critical race
theory, have come from
environments where those authors faced
censorship or censorship
for their innovative work.
So you want to be careful about
establishing an environment that
minimizes the harm caused to
marginalized communities, at the same
time creates the openness to take risks
and to innovate in ways that can lead to
some kind of innovation as well.
That's the place I'm sitting with all
of this in the shadow of what's happened
over the last couple of weeks.
DR LISA COLEMAN:
Robert or Sonia?
SONIA N DAS: I'm happy to chime in. Thank you Lisa.
I love this question because it's
forcing us to start with some basic
definitions.
That's what I'm going to do.
It's important -- I love this discussion
by the students in which they talked
about their personal experiences
with hate speech, free speech.
I think it's important to disambiguate
between the legal parameters of these
laws or codes and whether they exist
or not and more pragmatic ways we
experience them
in our daily life.
Freedom of speech is protected
by the first amendment.
So it's a constitutional right.
It essentially protects our right to
express our opinions without being
censored or being
interfered or constrained
in any way by the government. So essentially
free speech is our right to critique
the government and government officials.
There's a common misperception that free
speech is protected speech in private
institutional
contexts such as NYU.
So unless NYU is acting on behalf of
the government, free speech laws or
protected speech don't apply in the
same way as it does in, say, my own
research, where I look at
police civilian interactions.
A police officer is an agent of the
state so they are actually supposed to
protect the free speech rights of, say,
somebody who's being arrested and say
you shouldn't arrest me.
The reason I bring this up is because
this is a really important category of
discretion,
which I'm going to talk a lot about.
In my research on policing -- first let
me say that the Supreme Court has upheld
a freedom of speech up until 2017 to say there is no exception to free speech - there is no
such thing as hate
speech legally in the US.
you can go to another country, such as
Germany, there is as criminal code that
will identify certain forms of speech
and it's not even speech, writing,
symbols, as anti-Semitic or targeting
marginalized groups and there will be
punishments. But in the US, up until
2017 and ongoing, there's no
there is no hate
speech exception.
Now there is this thing called fighting
words that gets employed strategically
in contexts in which imminent harm is
seen as intended or about to happen.
So again police officers -- sorry to
talk about police so much, but it's on
our minds -- police officers can use
their discretion to interpret the verbal
and non-verbal signs of communication
as hey, you're about to hurt my -- me,
meaning the police officer.
Therefore, I can interpret
what you're doing as fighting
words or a true threat.
That's really as far as hate speech
goes in terms of what's constitutionally
allowed.
Let's talk about academic freedom.
I think -- again, NYU is a private
institution, so free speech protections
are not in place as they are maybe
in a place like a CUNY, which is a public institution.
What ends up happening at NYU and other
private institutions, corporations,
whatever, or educational institutions
is that academic freedom gets
conflated with free speech
in an interesting way.
Without even thinking about what's the
underlying linguistic practice that's
making any of this happen?
In my understanding, academic freedom is
tied to the production of knowledge in
general. It's also tied to
the institution of tenure.
It's not tied to any specific
communicative act in the same way as the
First Amendment is.
So in private contexts such as NYU,
where free speech protections
don't apply,
you have a tremendous area
of discretion where institutions can use
their authority to parse between the
differences between our rights under
academic freedom, if you're tenured,
and again it's only a few people who
have this freedom, right -
our rights to academic freedom
and then our responsibilities and
privileges as members of a community.
What I would suggest is that
What I would suggest is that yes,
we can side step these thorny issues
about academic freedom,
which I support because I
want to continue doing my research on
policing and not have someone tell
me that,
and when I say this is racist
I don't want to lose my job.
But I almost feel like we bring up
this academic freedom argument as a
smokescreen
because universities have so much power
to do so many things,
to censure as opposed to censor.
I love that.
Faculty members who are
inflicting harm
onto the members of the community
through their actual language practices,
whether it's teaching,
publishing articles.
One of the things I would simply
recommend is that you maintain,
for example, with the case of Lawrence Meade's article,
you maintain his academic freedom
but his privilege to come into contact
with students or maybe other
faculty members who would be harmed by
his words might be revoked and that's a
privilege that the university
can do through its discretion.
This is how I read these issues
of hate speech, free speech and academic
freedom.
DR LISA COLEMAN:
Thank you very much. Robert did you want to add?
ROBERT L HAWKINS: First of all,
thank you for having me here.
It's a privilege to be with Patrick
and Sonia on this to talk about this.
This is one of my favorite, along with
race and poverty, this is one of my
favorite conversations.
I'm a big free speech advocate.
But as many of said, and I don't want
to repeat, there is a big difference
between what is academic
freedom and what is free speech.
Sonia started to go in this direction
and I will just take it one step further
as my contribution.
We can think about
academic freedom.
Academic freedom is not you can
say and do whatever you want in
whatever way that you want.
If we were doing something in the name
of academic freedom that actually harmed
our students, for example,
I think there would be a limit there.
The question for me
is where is the harm?
Where is the harm?
So the harm might not be -- I've
actually known Lawrence Mead for 30
years or at least known about his work,
I should say, for about 30 years, and
then I've debated him I think twice
around various topics, usually welfare
and poverty. I can be insulted
by what he says, what he
writes, but am I harmed?
That's the question.
Am I harmed?
Generally speaking,
no, I'm not harmed.
I'm just annoyed.
But then the larger question for the
university is what faculty member,
because of his words, because of his
actions, what faculty member who would
have otherwise gotten tenure
or promotion did not do so?
because of something Lawrence Mead
had said, potentially even written?
Who did not take an opportunity at
Wagner, at MIU, because of the presence
and the existence of the words
and actions of Lawrence Mead?
Who did not pass a class?
Who did not take a class because of the
words and presence of Lawrence Mead?
If this were any other situation beyond
poverty and race, I think we might have
something to say about it.
If we looked at it as someone who
insults women on a regular basis and
women decide I'm not going to engage
with that professor, I'm not going to
interact with that person, you know
what, I'm not even going to apply to
Wagner or apply to political science,
that's where we start to see the harm.
We can look at this in many different
ways, but when we think about it through
a structural lens especially, we are
saying, you can say and do whatever you
want, with very little consideration
behind the power that holds for him.
When we're thinking about harm, go
ahead insult me, whatever, but we really
should think about, well, beyond just
fighting words, let's say, where does
the real harm lie?
And I think some of these questions, of
course, we can't answer, but it's one of
the things that when we say we have
academic freedom, we also, with freedom
comes responsibility.
And when we're in violation of that
responsibility, that's when the
university really needs to take a
long, hard look.
I'll stop there,
because I know there are questions.
DR LISA COLEMAN: That leads right into
my next question, question number 3.
If we think about this idea of harm or
these ideas of violence, we've seen a
lot in the news reports and
documentation with our cameras, the
plans and attacks certainly across the
United States and globally in terms of
this idea of ethnic or racial supremacy
that some are better than others in
terms of that
supremacist language.
How do we think about this idea of
harm and reconcile or think about this
correlation between violence, whether
that's production of academic kinds of
things or just the production in terms
of thinking about harm within our
community, and what do we see as the
responsibility of higher education
institutions to think about these
concepts of violence and harm?
And to take action?
And I was going to start with you,
Robert, or Sonia, because you're the two
who talked about those concepts most
recently, but I'm open to whoever starts
first. I can call on you?
ROBERT L HAWKINS: I'm not sure if --
there's no easy answer, in my mind,
about this. Frankly,
I'm not convinced that there should be.
There shouldn't be an
easy answer to this.
One way that I'm thinking about it, and
I don't know if this really gets at the
question, but one way I'm thinking about
it is when we're thinking about harm
and how we address things, I was
thinking about Samuel Cartwright, who
was the physician in 1851 who coined
the term drapetomania,
the fear -- the mental
illness that slaves must have had when
they ran away from slavery, when they
ran away. And that's what people
remember him for, but they don't
remember so much that they talked about
how blacks had smaller brains, smaller
blood vessels, and how that theory and a
bunch of other theories really led into
this idea that black people were lazy,
they were barbarous, that they were
socially inferior and
that's what that led into.
There's a direct path there.
That's where Lawrence Mead
is going with his argument.
It's the same argument that was
discredited by many back then, in 1851.
We don't teach math the
same way we did in 1851.
We don't teach math in the same
way, yet this outdated theory can be
communicated through the
academy with no consequences.
And this is the
responsibility of the academy.
I cannot -- I would not -- if I wrote a
paper that white people were created by
aliens, they would say,
what, are you crazy?
I don't think society or any
other journal would publish it.
I think my dean would probably have a
talk with me, at least, if I wanted to
publish or teach something
along those ways.
So it's thinking about - it's the
university's responsibility,
the school's responsibility,
to think about where and how harm is
done.
I know this doesn't get at your
question,
but I feel very strongly that
this is something we
don't even grapple with.
We, as an academy, the schools,
the university,
we don't grapple with this, and we
should.
Because when we are trying to measure
harm...
we're using a lens that's part
of
the racial... the current
structural racist lens.
So the harm that we see -- we don't
see harm in this conversation.
We don't see harm in laying out -- in
Larry Mead laying out what he did, and
he's been doing it for 30 years.
We don't see it as harm.
We see it as an opinion.
It's hard to quantify.
There's a struggle to quantify
exactly where the harm lies.
I think some people can point to that
harm and maybe through a legal lens we
can see it or not.
I'm not sure.
But it's not even a
conversation that we're having.
So I'm happy we're having
this conversation right now.
I'll stop there.
SONIA N DAS: I would just add, I agree,
it's a struggle to quantify harm, but
it's great that we're having this
conversation now, because I feel that
another really outdated theory are the
theories of language that underlie even
notions about hate speech, free
speech, censorship, that have a post
enlightenment tradition and specifically
that language doesn't do harm, that
it's just expressing, describing, exists
in the neutral state and doesn't have a
material impact.
Just the fact that we're willing to
think now about a journal article
causing harm and not just in terms of
tenure or attending classes but also
psychological harm is really forward
thinking, in my opinion, in terms of an
academic community.
So I feel very
encouraged about that.
I think the struggle is to want to be
fair and to not inflict punishment on
individuals that can be reformed
or given second chances.
I feel that's kind of
what I hear sometimes.
So I think the problem is that if we
get into this nitty-gritty kind of
quantifying, this tendency to want to
quantify harm, like how many complaints
have to be issued?
Or how many OEO complaints have to
be issued against a faculty member?
Or what degree of annoyance was that
really when you had that conversation
with him?
Or how intentional was he really?
Did he mean to
inflict harm or not?
Again, these ideas about intentionality
and the degree of anything, these are
all part of an under underlying ideology
of language that has its racist and
colonial histories.
So I'm not giving any answers.
I do think it's a
difficult thing to decide.
That's why I think it's important to
differentiate between the legal and the
pragmatic, and that for NYU as an
institution to think through -- in this
particular current age when we're
dealing with issues of antiblack
violence and all the other issues, Lisa,
that you addressed that we're dealing
with right now, and health disparity,
what are some proactive things that an
institution can do to show they're
taking an active antiracist stance?
What I personally think is
to disambiguate between rights
and privileges. We have certain rights
as individuals,
as American citizens, as humans.
A lot of other things are just
privileges.
If there's a consensus that there is
harm and again I don't know how
that's defined, but it
seems that certain privileges can be
temporarily revoked until
there's some sort of reform.
I don't know.
I'm just speaking off
the top of my head.
But at least we're moving
in the direction of actions.
PATRICK J EGAN: I like Sonia's
distinction between how we think about
these things in legal terms
and in other perspectives.
I want to add one other idea that
I think makes this even further
complicated, which is that the tools of
censorship and censureship are powerful
ones and can be used by anyone.
I know lots of folks who teach queer
studies, queer theory, etc, who
I'm sure have had students who claim to
have been harmed by hearing what they've
said in the classroom.
It goes against their religious beliefs
or their other kinds of traditional
beliefs. So we know -- this is something
we certainly know in US politics, that
Conservative and right forces have
become quite adept at adapting the
rhetoric and tools of the left around
these kinds of questions to their own
ends. I think in the end a lot of
what we -- why we find free speech so
appealing in some basic way is the idea
that each of us could find ourselves as
the target of somebody claiming that
what we had said or written had harmed
them because -- simply
because of different beliefs.
That's my other big caution, is that
when you see these tools being used by
all kinds of folks from all kinds of
perspectives, you get a little cautious
about how extensive you want them
to be out there for people's use.
At least for me that makes it an even
more difficult question on top of the
complications that both Sonia
and Robert have mentioned.
DR LISA COLEMAN:
Thank you so much.
To pick up on something that Sonia
mentioned, back to this idea of language
and how language is
used and codified.
We've had some discussions with some
others and I mentioned this in the
earlier part of -- when I
was doing the introduction.
I've had a discussion with Nell Painter,
I've had a discussion with Kenji Yoshino
and really talking about the various
ways
we've seen the emergence of these
patterns of violence and discrimination.
Of course, I know you all are familiar
with Nel parent's book, the history of
white people,
and thinking about Kenzi's work.
They discussed the ways in which these
patterns of racism get embedded within
historical practices or practices of
science or practices of the law, as you
all have alluded to as well.
But could you talk a bit more about
language and the ways in which these
practices are embedded systemically,
systematically, into our language
and the patterns, and how that
emerges.
Why don't I start with you Sonia?
Since I started with the other two.
SONIA N DAS: Sorry, I have a lot of
notes on that, so...
Yeah. I mean that, I think -
so I'm anthropologist, so we
think of language manifested in practice
and constituting social relations.
Already thinking about language separate
from power is not something we do
because we see language
as seeped in conflict.
and shaped by ideologies,
including -- so the grammatical
structure of language
can be shaped.
There's an intention to thinking about
language as structure, the grammar.
This idea of standard English, we have
this enduring belief there's such a
thing as a codified standard American
English and certain people speak and
others don't and research shows that
non-white populations in the US are
often stigmatized, told they don't speak
grammatical English or a full English
and in the academy that he can lead to
poor teaching evaluations, not being
published in
journals, etc.
At the level of structure.
If we think about interaction, so
language as a practice interaction, or
the performative aspect of power, then
we need to think about how we situate
language in relation to different
participants and what are the relative
positions of power?
I think this goes back
to the question of harm.
I'm reading the comments and someone
has said they're being psychologically
harmed by what we're
saying right now.
That is your right to say that.
But I think harm, if we're going to
take an antiracist stance, and that's
something that needs to come from the
top down, harm needs to be defined by
looking at power asymmetries.
I am a tenured professor who hopefully
will not lose her job by saying what I
say, so I have power
and I recognize that.
And I have power over my students and
therefore I have to be careful in the
classroom. I don't think it's as
complicated as we think when we look at
interactions and we think about
institutional authorities.
Some interactions are low stakes for
people because they're not going to lose
their jobs, they're not gonna lose
their reputations.
For those of us who even dare to raise
our voices,
which I didn't do two years ago because
I didn't have tenure,
everything is high stakes, right?
Putting that at the center of a theory
of language and communication
kind of reshapes everything.
The last thing I want to say
about language
that pertains to this discussion
are the things we don't pay attention
to, which is the ideologies of language
and they're deeply entangled with
ideologies about race and gender and
class and things like that.
These are the ideologies of language
that fly under the radar, so it actually
takes serious cross-cultural scholarship
like we do in anthropology
to understand what are other beliefs
people have about language?
For 50 years anthropologists have
been studying societies
that actually believe,
their default thought is that
language does harm so you better do
whatever you can to mitigate that
in every single interaction.
What would happen if we endorsed that
kind of view in our interactions,
in our legal system,
in our education in the US?
It would offer profoundly different
way of thinking about things.
Those are some of the
examples that I had.
DR LISA COLEMAN:
Robert or Patrick?
ROBERT L HAWKINS: I was thinking about
the woman who's been on -- the doctor
who has been on the news recently who
talked about the demons sperm and how we
are -- this is someone that President
Trump has been touting or his son maybe
has been touting.
She said something like, and I don't
remember exactly, but something like the
reason for a lot of ailments, including
COVID, is because of demon sperm and
that demons are coming into
people's bedrooms at night
and having sex with them.
I didn't make this up.
New York Post.
Would that person get tenure
at NYU or would they be able
to keep tenure at NYU?
According to this conversation,
maybe the answer is yes.
I can tell you from my own experience
it's not so easy to get tenure at NYU.
I don't say that to belittle that
process, but I will say that when we
think about language, and maybe
that language doesn't do harm.
I don't know.
But when we think about language,
in relation to the academy, there are
standards. We push back on people
who promote bogus theories.
We push back on people who promote
outdated scientific experiments,
outdated theories. And the way we know
that they do that is through their
language, through what they
communicate and how they communicate.
At some point, your school, your
university, has to say, or should say:
We do have certain standards.
It actually -- you have
academic freedom, but it
actually isn't a free-for-all.
There are things that
we consider appropriate.
We may agree or disagree, but there are
some things that are not appropriate.
There are some things that, as a
professional, we are concerned about or
that you should be
concerned about.
So I think the language that we use has
evolved, but our theories have evolved.
Our ideas, our experiments, what we know
and what we don't know, all of that has
evolved. And it is the place of a
university to say: Wait a minute.
Your job -- part of your job,
part of who you are, your identity as a
university professor,
is to represent the university.
And if this were social work,
I would say it's to represent the field.
What you're doing, saying, communicating
does not represent the university,
well, nor does it
represent the field well.
What are the
consequences for that?
That's harder for me to unpack.
Maybe it's not being fired, but maybe
it goes back to what Sonia was saying
earlier. Maybe it is a restriction
of some sort, keeping students away.
Maybe it is some type of
training, learning.
Again, going back to the sexual
harassment example, Professor Mead would
be in consultation
with someone at least.
And what consultation is he in?
We don't know.
Maybe we won't know.
Where is his diversity training?
Where is the -- what are the
consequences of doing something that
particularly does cause a hostile
work environment?
These are all his words.
Now his colleagues, the few colleagues
of color that I know he has, have to sit
in the same room with him knowing that
this is how he feels about them, knowing
that he believes -- if he doesn't
believe that they are intellectually
inferior to him, he believes
that they're the lucky ones.
That's my colleague.
That's Sonia's colleague.
There are people who will sit across the
desk from him who will be in the same
classroom as him.
The university really should not
be able to put this to the side.
It's a much bigger issue
than academic freedom.
It is representing who
we are as an institution.
PATRICK J EGAN: I think these
questions are really complicated ones.
I think Robert very power powerfully
puts fort the kinds of implications and
impact that the behavior of somebody
like Larry Mead does for those who work
with him and learn from him.
It's also interesting because if you
think about, for example, the kinds of
debates that go on in, say, our nation's
law schools about LGBTQ rights, there's
a whole line of legal thinking called
natural law, and it has big, powerful
proponents in many of
our nation's law schools.
Those people, one of the first things
they'll say is that same-sex relations
and marriage equality
is against natural law.
It's unnatural.
I can think of a lot of people,
including myself, if I were sitting in
that classroom, who would feel harmed
by those words, and yet their proponents
are often on nationwide debates with
prominent leftists about that very
question. So part of the needle that
needs to be threaded here is figuring
out exactly what the -- realms of debate
are and should be, because they shift
and they are often kind of fluid
in ways that we don't actually
have a pretty good handle on.
I guess what I'm trying to say is it
seems there are a lot of different
examples of this in the academy, and we
really haven't figured out exactly what
to do with them.
DR LISA COLEMAN:
Thank you so much.
I'm going to turn to a question
actually from the audience.
A question we already had sort of,
which is around the impact on students.
We had a student panel, so we don't
want to leave the students out of this
conversation. Thinking about -- so this
is from one of the questions, we hear
from students that they don't want
controversial topics to be eliminated
from the classroom and they want
faculty to be thinking and writing about
difficult topics.
But they're worried because it seems
like faculty
sometimes avoid these topics
and don't delve into them,
or don't delve into the experiences we
even
heard from our students,
silence or inaction in the classroom.
So how can - I think there are two
questions here that are coming out of
our audience. How can we be more
impactful with our students - in thinking
about those classroom experiences? but
also how can we help our peers, meaning
our faculty peers? because one of the
other questions is we're talking a lot
about students, but what about the
racism and the accountability between
and amongst our colleagues
and our faculty colleagues?
I know that's a big question.
We have several
embedded in there.
I'll definitely let whoever wants to
go first go first and I'll keep talking
until I see someone's mic
-- you unmute yourselves.
If you need me to repeat that very large
question, I can, but really thinking
about the student
experiences in the classroom.
Then, of course,
the faculty, peer to peer.
SONIA N DAS: Let me offer a few
suggestions, but this is obviously a
larger conversation. I think we're at
a critical point of reckoning in higher
education and in the country where we
see ourselves lacking moral leadership
at the highest levels our government
and therefore it's in some ways an
opportunity for us in higher education
in any leadership position to take it
upon ourselves to set a new course,
whether it's for antiracism or
anti-sexism or anti-ableism. We've got
this opportunity because we're in a --
we're a private university and not
beholden to the same free speech laws of
a public university.
We have a lot of discretion in being
able to set our agenda and define our
brand as an antiracist
institution.
Something that one of the students
said that I thought was great, it's not
just about doing diversity and inclusion
work, it's about being an antiracist
institution in every sense.
More concretely, I think there are
movements within different departments
to decolonize syllabuses, having
students set the agenda and what they
want to discuss is
something that is under way.
I think students want
to feel comfortable.
They want to see more faculty of color,
particularly black, Indigenous, Latinx.
We need to continue our efforts,
which NYU has been doing.
I'm a personal fan and some of my
colleagues are of an ombuds-person
because we need advocates
for faculty and students.
How do you deal with conflict
in the work environment?
I would say that there needs to be some
external person, a moderator, mediator
or ombuds-person,
someone who can help us figure out the
legal terrain,
understand our rights,
mediate between the different parties.
Ultimately we want to maintain the
integrity of our community and we don't
want to punish but
reform, restore justice.
Sometimes as members of the
community we cannot see beyond our
own biases, our own positions.
I would be very much
in favor of that.
I personally think OEO can play a bigger
role in addressing racist incidences in
the way that they have addressed
sexual harassment cases.
I would love to
see more of that.
But also continuing these kinds of
conversations because faculty we don't
know everything about what students are
thinking and experiencing and I think
being more humble.
I teach a class called language, power
and identity and we talked about free
speech and it was the first time I
talked about it and it ended badly.
It ended with someone saying that even
though there's a law against certain
forms of hate speech in Canada they
would be opposed to it because they
think that in the context
of trans transgender issues.
Someone in the class
was extremely offended.
The whole class shut down.
I had to send everyone home, consult
with my chair, think through my own
failures as a teacher.
I came back to the students and said
this is what I did wrong, this is where
this conversation, where we need to
continue to think about things we
haven't thought
through carefully.
No-one wants to talk about free speech
because you feel vulnerable as a faculty
member, you're afraid you're going
to offend someone in the classroom.
In the end I'm glad I did it,
I met with the students
individually tried to understand
their individual points of view.
One student felt censored,
he wasn't trying to be offensive.
The other student felt
personally attacked.
We need to get comfortable with
being profoundly uncomfortable.
I personally feel that there's a problem
in terms of quantifying harm because --
I'm moving now to the workplace.
I think that there's always this idea,
well, it's not codified, so therefore
we're protecting you if you're issuing
a complaint because you wouldn't want a
similar complaint to be issued against
you and all this kind of stuff.
I get that, but does that also mean
we need to continue to be working in a
toxic work environment?
Something needs to be done.
There needs to be allies.
Break the culture of
silence and retaliation.
The students talked about
the culture of silence.
Maybe we don't need
to do anything.
If an incident happens in a meeting,
something happens to me and everyone
else is quiet and doesn't say
anything, that's a problem.
But if one person says that
wasn't cool what you said to
Sonia,
then I already feel better.
Already the situation
is difficult used.
I -- difficult used.
I feel part of the community.
ROBERT L HAWKINS: I think this is the --
this is a great question, because every
class I teach is
full of controversy.
Part of me thinks that is it is --
there's a balance that we need to
create, one where we can actually have
a conversation about these issues.
I have taught, or at least lectured on
this very topic that Larry Mead wrote
about. I have talked about the idea of
the culture of poverty, which is very
misunderstood,
but that's another conversation.
So these are issues that I think
we don't get preparation for.
My training in being able to talk
about this issue did not come from NYU.
It did not come from the teaching
classes that I never took.
It just -- it was something that I had
learned through not just my life you but
through outside training, preparation,
training in facilitation.
Because these are conversations
that need to be facilitated.
If there's a student in the classroom
who believes -- let's say they believe
that people of color are somehow
inherently less intelligent.
It's a difficult conversation to have,
but we can have that conversation.
It's possible to have
that conversation.
But I don't see, and I'm not part of
all schools -- I don't see where we are
trained to hold
that conversation.
And there are some things that we say
as instructors that we don't always know
when and if a student is going to be
offended because to us it's innocuous,
we said it last year, last month, but
for however we said it, the intonation,
the time of day, whatever it was,
the student was offended and they have a
very valid point.
And it's up to the instructor to be able
to hold that and have a conversation
with that student, maybe have that whole
conversation with the class and be able
to say: Oh, I was wrong.
Sonia's approach was great.
To say: I made a mistake.
Let's talk about this.
But the faculty members know,
particularly junior faculty and
adjuncts, they know they can't always
have a conversation, a controversial
conversation because they don't know who
they're going to offend, when they're
going to offend and the truth
of the matter is they never know.
This is why they
need the training.
They need the preparation.
They need to be able to learn how
to be uncomfortable and use it.
To take this back to Professor Mead for
a second, this is one of my big concerns
about his ability to be and exist
in our community
at a time when a lot of things
are changing for us, changing
not just for people of color but also
changing for white people.
The world is shifting.
So ideas have to shift.
And the way ideas shift
is through dialogue.
I could be wrong about the level of
dialogue
around this that's happening
in Larry Mead's world.
I could be wrong about that.
But I know that this is something
that comes up from time to time.
As long as I've been doing this work,
I've heard the things that he's written,
not just by him.
And the reality of the situation
is we can't dismiss it.
I don't agree with a line
that he wrote -- maybe one.
Maybe there was one line in his paper
that I agreed with, but most of it I
didn't agree with.
But what we struggle with is
having a conversation about it.
Not necessarily what
should happen to him.
On so many levels,
I don't care what happens to him.
But how do we have a conversation when
people have been harmed or when people
have been insulted, people who have
worked in this area for years?
How do we have
that conversation?
Where do we have it?
Maybe this is where we have it,
but this conversation needs to be a
little bit bigger.
PATRICK J EGAN: Robert,
you said the word hold several
times, which I really love.
This will sound wish wash, but it made
me think of the hold environment idea of
a classroom where the faculty member
acts in an almost parental role to
create a place where people feel
comfortable with being uncomfortable and
taking risks and having conversations
about controversial topics.
I think that role or how you do that
role of course is very different if
you're a white faculty member compared
to being a faculty member of color, and
I completely agree that both my
department and the university faculty
itself needs to continue to become
more diverse on all these dimensions.
I found that when I teach race and
ethnicity in a small seminar, the
holding environment is paramount and
critical to -- and getting it started at
the beginning of the semester,
that's when I felt like it's been most
successful, is when I, with the students
-- it's something you do
together with the students -- is create
a place where people feel -- the word I
like to use is open-hearted because
we're all talking about things that are
difficult to talk about, we're all on
different ends of a power hierarchy with
one another, depending on where
we fall in different dimensions of
intersectionality. So creating that kind
of space is a craft and a skill that
we're always trying to improve,
each of us, and we've just all
shared stories about that.
So I really like Sonia's idea of -- and
your idea, I think you both mentioned
this idea of NYU having more of these
opportunities for faculty members of all
backgrounds to learn how to do that
better, because it's tough work and it's
super important.
DR LISA COLEMAN:
Thank you very much.
We've actually -- we're
coming up on our time.
I am going to allow you all to make some
final comments auto you'd like, but I
do think some of the comments you made
about learning from one another, faculty
having more opportunities to learn,
obviously, and sort of expand expanding
some of the opportunities for us to
even bring in external people to help in
those learning processes.
I'm going to talk about a couple of
things we're already doing, but if you
want to make some final comments I'd
like to give each of you 30 seconds to
make any final closing comments
that you'd like to make.
PATRICK J EGAN: I can start.
I just want to say thanks
very much for having me.
I'm completely aware that this has been
a week -- a couple of weeks where the
politics department, my colleagues and
myself, have been front and center,
and I appreciate to
use the word again, the open heartedness
and grace with which all of you
have engaged with this conversation with
me.
So, it's an honour to be here,
and thanks very much.
SONIA N DAS: OK, I'll go next.
Well, thank you again, Lisa, for
inviting me.
I just want to say one thing we haven't
talked about is the journal itself
and the editor.
And the citations- if you look at the
article,
and for those of you who haven't read
the article,
I do want to say that Lawrence Mead
made the claim
that there's a culture of poverty in the
United States
and that black and Latinx communities,
because of their cultural practices,
that is why they are reproducing the
cycle of poverty.
So, and I'm just paraphrasing.
But I want to say that if you look at
the article itself
and you look at its citational
practices,
he's citing himself quite a few times.
And beyond that, it's not a diverse
citational list.
It's not a diverse list of references.
And so one of the things I'm doing as an
editor of my journal
is we've put into place a new policy
requiring,
through the peer review process,
that citations are diverse in race,
ethnicity, sexuality, ability,
nationality, things like that,
and that that's ranked and evaluated as
part of the overall revision process.
So there's so many things that can be
done,
there's so much responsibility to be
distributed
and again, it's about thinking about the
differences
between rights and responsibilities and
privileges
and we can all kind of chip away
at some of the ways in which those
abuses get perpetuated.
Thank you.
ROBERT L HAWKINS: I'd like to thank
you too,
thank you Lisa for putting this together
and doing it so quickly.
Last word about the journal is
professor Mead cites
William Julius Wilson,
who was on my dissertation committee.
And I just want to point out he cites
him incorrectly.
I...it was...I found it a little
annoying.
And also I think this larger question of
the culture of poverty,
what Oscar Lewis meant by it,
has been misappropriated for...
actually a couple of decades now.
And I think what we're, I'm hoping that
what we're entering into
is a way to have these conversations.
This is one of my great hopes
for this panel,
and the conversations that have been
going online, offline
for the past week or so
I hope we can continue to have these
difficult conversations
and make some headway.
So thank you for putting this together.
DR LISA COLEMAN: Thank you all for
taking the time to be here,
for being part of this panel.
As I said before, as I even said to the
students, we've all got a lot going on,
so I appreciate you taking time out of
your busy schedules
and I know a little bit about the burden
of representation.
So thank you for being here.
The, I'm just gonna say a couple of
things
about some of the things that we're
doing already,
because you all have talked about it.
So, I'm not gonna talk about so much
about the external, but the internal.
Of course, we have some new scholars
that James Wildon Johnson scholars
that we put into place
to really think about these areas.
So as you all talked about increasing
the scholars and scholarship,
we actually have,
we've created some new databases
so that we're actually tapping into,
thinking about diversification
for the faculty,
whether that's the Ford or Melon
databases, etc,
looking into emerging scholars,
and obviously we have our postdoc
program
right out of the office of the Provost
and we've enhanced that program and
continued to do so.
And we have a very good appointment rate
out of that program,
which is a postdoc program that focuses,
obviously, on recent graduates
and those from marginalized and
historically under-represented groups.
In terms of trainings,
we've done our training in anti-racism,
micro-aggressions,
all of those are up and running.
We have the data-driven and mobility,
internal mobility initiatives,
so we're also working with HR and the
office of the Provost.
Faculty recruitment and retention
workshops,
so we also have faculty searches,
we have workshops coming out of our
office also on faculty
and bias mitigation for searches,
inclusive teaching.
So we have lots on inclusive teaching,
lots on how to deal with this
in the classroom.
We also have a new initiative called
responsive dialogues,
which is very much built on the Ford
Foundation
and the earlier work on thinking about
difficult dialogues,
so please reach out to that, to us on
that.
We have obviously the anti-racism, our
new group, WATER,
the group that's focusing on white
administrators and faculty-focused,
which has also been re-done
and re-focused their work.
And then of course we have our mentoring
programs as well.
All of this is on our website,
but we wanted to make sure that at least
people know
that we're continuing to take action and
we will continue to do so.
We have recorded, obviously, this
seminar -
I mean, this talk,
but also recorded the suggestions from,
some of which we've heard before,
but some of which we will be following
up on.
So thank you to all the participants
and have a good day
and take care of yourselves and others.
Thank you.
