Katya Gibel Azoulay
Anthropology, Africana Studies and American Studies
When I moved from New York City to Jerusalem, Israel in 1970, it could not (let alone would not) have occurred to me that 26 years later I would be a professor at a liberal arts college in Grinnell, Iowa with so many outstanding students.
If that seems strange, what would have been even more surprising was that I would encounter so many students who had never had a teacher of color as well as students who had never had close friendships with a Black person because there were none -- or very few -- in their social environment. But of more significance, in 1970 it would have been unthinkable that, more than a quarter of a century later, prestigious academic institutions would still be debating the merit or necessity for racial diversity. Writing, at the end of 2004, from the vantage point of a scholar who fits the popular term multiply positioned, and as a woman who grew up in the sixties, I was, and remain, mystified (naively) by the persistence of racial preconceptions and prejudice among educated people of my generation.
But if I am mystified by prejudice among those who grew up during the Civil Rights era, I am appalled by the persistence of practices of prejudice accompanied by protests of innocence. In this specific context, the lack of even polite public criticism of the absence of feminist scholars of color in general, and Black feminist scholars in particular, among the distinguished visiting scholars for this year’s theme Feminist Scholarship Today, is remarkable. If anyone thought that this issue had been discussed, debated and resolved in the twentieth century, they will be surprised to discover that though we are (I think) in the 21st century, the news seems not to have arrived in our community. Or perhaps it has.
As Kimberle Crenshaw (one of Harvard Law Schools distinguished Black alumni and but one of many examples of a prominent feminist scholar of color), who holds a joint appointment at Columbia University Law School and UCLA School of Law, points out, many of those who work in the academy (scholars, students, staff) are still challenged by the virtual lunch counter, which is manifested by a colorblind discourse or, more succintly, the rationalization for racial power in which few are served and many are denied (eds. Valdes et. al., 26).
Crenshaw and other critical race theorists have carefully mapped out how a conservative backlash -- not necessarily carried out by self-identifying conservatives -- manifests itself in the academy through a strategic insistence on activating a mechanism of democracy in which invoking academic freedom serves to veto inclusive curricular revisions and to silence the minority. Racism, sexism, nativism, and other isms are too often compartmentalized as diversity is analogized to a shopping list from which one can pick and choose from the isolation of the monochromatic complexion of departments and majors where whiteness remains an unmarked default (as in the phrase feminism today. When did feminism morph back into a singular concept without a prefatorial adjective?).
Since my return to the U.S. in 1991 to pursue a PhD, no year passes without coming across an article that remarks on the difficulty of challenging hierarchy and subordination in the absence of strong student activism. Sometimes this is said with a tinge of nostalgia for the sixties (without the excesses). Yet some of us are comforted by New York University Law Professor, Professor Derrick Bell, who instructively reminds academics of color that although academic faculties either ban us from their midst entirely or ensure that our numbers do not exceed one or two ... readers who hail our work may not be powerful but they do exist. (eds. Valdes et. al. 412). Our presence is troublesome only to those who insist on protocols of polite silence and ignore how these enable discriminatory practices protected under the shield of claims to academic freedom (energetically advocated whenever gatekeepers face objections to their authority, an insight activists in the Womens Movement acquired from activists in Civil Rights Movement). Those of us who choose a place at the vanguard of the struggle against prejudice and historical amnesia may be encouraged by Derrick Bell’s observation that, although racism may turn out to be a permanent characteristic of U.S. society, our lives are made more meaningful by making a contribution against the multiple permutations of racism and their intersection with other virulent forces of oppression. It is a perspective which resonates well with the great Babylonian-born scholar, Rabbi Hillel whose injunction, written in the first century BCE, reads “If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, then what am I? And if not now, when?” is a good starting point for helping to bring about change in the locations in which we find ourselves either as insiders or as outsiders.
1 Francisco Valdes, Jerome McCristal Culp, and Angela P. Harris, eds. Crossroads, Directions and a New Critical Race Theory. (Temple University Press, 2002).
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