Dark Continent: April 2007

Sunday, April 22, 2007

When Race and Gender aren't parallel

I have lots of things in my portfolio as vice provost for faculty affairs. Among the most interesting is the work I do to help diversify NYU’s faculty. I’m particularly intrigued that dealing with racial and ethnic diversity, on the one hand, and gender diversity, on the other, calls for different strategies. I also get vastly different reactions to the work I do in each arena. When it comes to issues of gender, I have lots of support and allies. I’m sure there are people who look askance at the recent seminar that I co-sponsored with the Faculty of Arts and Science Women’s Faculty Caucus on women and negotiations. But no one raised an issue. Plans for a conference on women and leadership at NYU, planned for the fall has garnered great support from around the campus. When the provost and I hosted discussions for women faculty in the sciences last year on gender climate issues, most showed up. I suspect that women who don’t want to be identified by their gender simply ignore such events.

Lately, I’ve decided to work on environmental issues for faculty of color. I have had a number of faculty of color, especially but not limited to junior faculty, express how isolated they feel teaching at NYU. There are more minority faculty here then many suspect but we are spread out across the university. This place is very large and some long for the camaraderie and support that comes from knowing other people who share minority identity. I began to see that making these connections influences whether faculty stay at NYU. In response, I decided to have two receptions for faculty of color this spring. I especially wanted to target untenured faculty. I asked the provost to join me in this effort. Without hesitation, he agreed and we sent out email invitations.

But who is a faculty of color and how do we find them? What do we do about those faculty of color who do not want to be identified by race or ethnicity? I decided to cast as wide a net as possible by using the racial and ethnic codes used by Academic Appointments. I was hopeful that those who did not want to attend such a reception would simply ignore the invitation, just as many women ignored the Women’s Faculty Caucus workshop on negotiation. By in large, most of those uninterested must have simply deleted the email invitations; one person accused me of being ‘misguided’ and out of date. Personally, I’m not so allergic to identity politics; but I do recognize many of the pitfalls of racial solidarity. As someone who is invested in diversifying the NYU faculty, I’m trying to create a culture here that is broad enough to appeal to faculty of color on all sides of this issue. I believe that NYU is a complex enough community to accommodate those differences.

It is also interesting that non-faculty of color have felt comfortable raising questions about the receptions. One group asked me how were people of color supposed to relate to the larger faculty. I was a little surprised by this question. The receptions were not meant to be prescriptive—to create segregation within the faculty. Similar questions had not been directly raised about any of the gender diversity initiatives coming out of the provost office. This is just another instance in which the analogies between race and gender, which are often helpful, breakdown.

Saturday, April 21, 2007

THELONIOUS MONK - DON'T BLAME ME(1966)

I grew up in a house full of music. One of the favorite tunes that my uncles and cousin used to play on our piano was a ragtime version of Don't Blame Me. I couldn't resist putting this on my blog.

Sunday, April 01, 2007

Memories of Sierra Leone

Source: http://www.sierra-leone.org/HistoricPostcards/

Over the last two weeks, I've gone down memory lane about my first trip to Sierra Leone, 1975-77. First I spoke to the Albert Gallatin Scholars at Gallatin. Then I had a conversation with a Ph.D. history student who plans to work on Sierra Leonean visual culture at the turn of the 20th century. Some of my photos:

The picture above is of me around 1976 in front of the Big Market in Freetown, Sierra Leone, the main subject of my dissertation. It was taken in the evening after the market had closed. The Big Market was the central market of a wide-spread trading network that included many Krio women traders.

The second picture is of a market woman who had a stall at the Big Market. This was at the side of the market. She’s with her grandson and is wearing traditional Krio clothes, even though she was not herself a Krio.

Finally, this is the picture I took of the new Big Market when I visited Freetown in 2005. The old market had been burnt down during the civil war and this was its replacement.

For the official story on the rebuilding of the Big Market, see http://www.statehouse-sl.org/big-mark-feb10.html.

Academic Biography

Professor White's first book, Sierra Leone’s Settler Women Traders: Women on the Afro-European Frontier, was winner of the Letitia Brown Memorial Publication Price in 1987. Her book with Iris Berger, Women in Sub-Saharan Africa: Restoring Women to History, has become a standard reference text and has been translated into Japanese. Her most recent book is Dark Continent of Our Bodies: Black Feminism and the Politics of Respectability. She has been named a Fulbright Senior Research Scholar in Sierra Leone and a Mellon Scholar and has received a Kidder-Peabody Grant for research in The Gambia. Her appointments have included chair of the Five College Black Studies Executive Committee and member of the Graduate Faculty of the University of Massachusetts. She has a B.A. from Wheaton College, an M.A. in African history, and a Ph.D. in history from Boston University.

Along with her teaching and scholarly career, she has had a distinguished career in academic administration. At NYU, she was appointed Vice Provost in 2005. She advised the Provost on faculty appointments, tenure, and promotion. She worked closely with the Faculty Senators Council to enhance work-life conditions for faculty. She also spearheaded the university’s efforts to diversify the faculty and has responsibility for the Office of Academic Appointments, the Center for Teaching Excellence, and the Faculty Resource Network, a faculty development consortium of 52 institutions of higher education.

From 1998 to 2005, Professor White was dean of NYU's Gallatin School of Individualized Study, where she greatly increased the school’s visibility and reputation. From 2001-05, she was chair of NYU’s Deans Council. Prior to coming to NYU, she was a professor of history and Black studies at Hampshire College, where she also served as Dean of the School of Social Science and Dean of Faculty. While completing her Ph.D. at Boston University, she was an instructor at the University of Sierra Leone and a research assistant at the Afro-American Studies Center at Boston University.