New York Times op-ed contributor Bob Herbert suggested on Tuesday that Senator Barack Obama’s (D-Ill.) March 18 speech on race, which gained publicity for its willingness to tackle a difficult topic, should be required reading in classrooms across the country. He may be years removed from a college campus, but Herbert has the right idea. Obama’s claim that society still needs inflammatory remarks to drive people to action is certainly relevant to Georgetown’s campus.
Fewer than 100 students attended Georgetown’s second Diversity Forum, held six days before Obama’s speech, and many of those students were members of the various organizations hosting the event. It seems clear that many, if not most, students don’t find discussing racial issues a matter of urgency. Perhaps the Forum would have drawn a larger crowd and more publicity if something racially divisive had just struck the media. Obama rightly described one of our biggest limitations in the discussion about race as the inability to face it without the fuel of, for instance, the controversial and well-publicized comments of his hometown reverend, Jeremiah Wright.
Last fall, the Jena 6 incident brought thousands of protestors to the tiny Louisiana town, and drew Red Square vigils and shouts of “Save the Jena 6!” right here on campus. Despite the fervor that was unleashed, especially after a similar incident occurred on the University of Maryland campus shortly afterward, the discussion over ingrained prejudice and discrimination has failed to become as heated since.
“When a single issue flares up, everyone talks about it, but then it just dies down,” Georgetown NAACP president Ellie Gunderson (COL ’10) said. “By just focusing on one issue, we’re kept from having a well-rounded discussion about race.”
In an effort to avoid stepping on any toes, students often only speak directly about the very real presence of racism in America when they can rally around one controversial issue, like the trial of Mychal Bell and the other young men accused in the Jena 6 incident.
In order to push past the “racial stalemate” described by Obama in his speech, some students believe we must face potentially uncomfortable questions about whether or not the campus truly is voluntarily integrated and free of discrimination on any given day.
“If we’re going to talk about racism at Georgetown, there are two things that always come up: are white people comfortable talking about it, and does the community of color have legitimate grievances?” student campaign worker for Obama Nick Wertsch (COL ‘09) said.
Georgetown is taking the right strides in hosting forums and lectures to talk about squeamish topics that Obama outlined in his speech. But a university can only go so far—the rest of the change has to come from the minds of the students, and more than just 100 concerned students must want to tackle these issues.
A prominent leader willing to offer more than a five-minute sound bite on a difficult subject helps to set the precedent for truly open discussion, outside of the parameters of a scheduled forum. By bringing to the surface the most difficult aspects of America’s racial divide, Obama’s speech brought the uncomfortable into the everyday and widened the scope of a complex dialogue.
