Cal Arts Paper on Diversity By Michele Wallace December 7, 2011 Notes I have been teaching a long time.

It wasnt my original intention. My original intention was to become a writer and I still consider myself primarily a writer although more and more of my full time effort goes into teaching. It goes without saying that Diversity in Curriculum and Faculty would be a paramount lifelong goal of mine because 1)it is the right thing to do for all of us I believe 2) I myself am considered one of those who embodies in this country the concept of diversity and 3) a working concept of functional diversity particularly in curriculum, pedagogy and intellectual history has shaped my interests as a writer and intellectual. Lets deal with each of these points in turn. The right thing to do for all of us. I. This point which should be the obvious one is actually the most difficult to substantiate. In order to defend diversity as an educational goal, I think we need to be able to say that it will benefit all students, and all faculty, that all of us will grow in our understanding and capacity to learn and to perpetuate the most deeply critical kind of knowledge, empathy and understanding. Not only students or faculty who are themselves considered representatives phenotypically or ethnically of diverse or minority constituencies in the United States. As such the notion is that the diverse perspective is the more enlightened perspective. The benefits are huge in terms of the humanity achieved and reinforced in our young people. In the humanities we actually think of ourselves in the role of producing an enlightened citizenry. In my courses, in my writing and I my teaching the concern is the production of a citizen who will want to do the right thing for all the rest of the world (should it come up) as a matter of course. The right thing for students I believe is not only build a protective and supportive environment for minority students in our schools and classrooms but also to educate all students as to the importance and significance of these differences and distinctions, how they came about historically and what they currently signify. In other words in the classroom one doesnt run or retreat from diversity, or breathe a

sigh of relief when it seems almost invisible and perhaps not relevant to what you think youre teaching. Even if it isnt relevant to the subject matter, than it is relevant to the community the students inhabit. Although you probably dont spend much time supervising their social lives, nonetheless the need to be instructed and guided in entertainment and social choices. Would that their parents had taken that task on and done it well. By college it may be already too late to instill in a student the requisite humanity and empathy needed to welcome the challenge of engagement with diversity into their lives. I think that diversity is also the right thing in terms of being intellectually engaged because obviously the countrys population is going in the direction of greater diversity, from the figures which indicate that Latinos represent a larger minority than African Americans to unfolding globalization of our computer access and we define our fields with much more considerable international engagement. There really isnt any reason anymore to limit what we talk about or what we teach to the physical boundaries of the United States. It seems also clear to me that to incorporate diversity in the development of the faculty and curricular development. Diverse faculty and curricular development go hand and hand. Hiring someone from the African American world or from the African Diaspora who is engaged by issues of diversity and how to express the difficulties that currently face the African American population nationally and incorporate them into curriculum would of course be highly desirable, particularly given your location here in Southern California. You already have a diverse student body and a faculty brimming with potential in this area. II. I myself am considered an embodiment of diversity in this country. I have struggled with this reality for as long as I can remember being in an educational context, that is to say long before I became a teacher beginning when I myself was a student. There were many negative feelings associated with being a child representing a minority in the 1950s. It is not a pleasant thing to be the token and I felt as though I was playing the role of the token most of my professional career. I teach at a place, the City College of New York in Harlem, which is composed of large numbers of minority students of all sortsCaribbean and African Americans, Bangladeshi, Algerian, Vietnamese, Africans from all over the continent. I always have my students write autobiographical essays including a photo of themselves as my first assignment. In these papers they invariably discuss the struggles their parents have had, which usually involves fleeing from a less hospital country to the United States, and then the struggle they themselves have had with mastering the English language well enough to complete high school and enter college.

The faculty at CCNY doesnt begin to be as diverse as the students because the mechanisms for faculty hiring or promotion are slow to unfurl. Also, it has never been the desire or the will of the faculty recruitment process to increase the diversity of the faculty or the ability of the faculty to teach diversity. In fact, quite the contrary. At this point most of our introductory courses are taught by an army of graduate students and adjuncts are underpaid and overworked. Recently we lost our senior African Americanist in English to retirement. There has been no effort to replace him. I suspect when my time comes, there will be no effort to replace me either. African American Literature and Culture, which is what I teach is barely holding on in the curriculum. We do, however, have a Black Studies Program which has been recently taken over by an African American member of our faculty and I am hopeful for its positive development. Nonetheless traditionally Black Studies is usually devoted to the Social Sciences rather than the Humanities or the Arts. We have some other exciting things going on at the college, in particular the New Haarlem Theatre, which is a multiracial, multicultural summer theatre which last year put on two productionsBlues for Mr. Charlie, and Nothing But The Blues that were exceedingly well reviewed in the Daily News and the New York Times. Theres a lot of talent uptown so a permanent theatre company is something that CCNY has needed for a long time. At the helm of the company is my ex-husband Eugene Nesmith. III. But to move on to my most important topic that is how a working concept of functional diversity in curriculum, pedagogy and intellectual history has sharped both my teaching and writing particularly in the past two decades. In 1999 I completed a Ph.D. in Cinema Studies at New York University. The thesis was called Passing, Lynching and Jim Crow: African American Visual Culture 1895 through 1927. The three themesPassing, Lynching and Jim Crowwere an attempt to isolate the three crucial processes impinging up African American life and representation during that period of the turn-of-the-century up through the 1920s. My research had been into American film history (particularly the silent period) and American visual culture. I was becoming and would remain an Americanist, which I would argue offers many attractive options for people wanting to incorporate diversity in their curriculums. In the past decade, out of a sense of frustration with what was happening or not happening institutionally, I began to develop my own curriculum, my own sense of what the appropriate thing would be to teach concerning the development of African American culture and history. The reason to do so is because substantive

knowledge concerning the achievements and facts of the lives of African Americans historically has been so incredibly lacking in our educational system. I call my curriculum Blues People, after the book by the same name written by Leroi Jones aka Amiri Baraka in 1963 about the history of African American music. Of course Baraka doesnt get it all right in 1963, which was early in his career, but the questions he raises about the relationship of the musicspirituals, gospel, jazz, r&b in relationship to the social and political development of the people seems the right ones to ask. Much writing on the blues and on African American music in general has stemmed from this beginning he made. At first I taught the 20th century, incorporating the music together with the literature and beginning it all with W.E.B. DuBois Souls of Black Folk. What I found increasingly however is that we were getting more and more bogged down in a vague and amorphous sense of what the history had been. Many of my studentsespecially international studentshad no idea when slavery had ended for African Americans, even less so that the trade of African Americans was only one tiny aspect of a huge trade in African Americans who were redistributed all throughout the Americas. Some of the text and interpretation and sources I have drawn into it can be viewed at my curricular blog, which is at http://blackandbluespeople.blogspot.com Also related offshoots on music, on photography, visual art particularly that of Faith Ringgold and film are available at related blogs. All of them can be accessed via my website michelefwallace.com. Having taught Blues People for two years as an incorporation of music and literature of the 20th century something happened which drew me back to the Declaration of Independence of 1776 and the impact it has had on the lives of people of color in the United States. First, a man named Sid Schiff who had a special art press called the Limited Press after asking my mother to illustrate A Letter from a Birmingham Jail written by MLK in the early 1960s, then asked Faith to illustrate a special edition of prints looking at the Declaration of Independence and I tried to help her. Indeed, I wrote about the process that unfolded at http://mjsoulpictures.blogspot.com/2010/12/declaration-of-freedom-andindependence.html She asked that I help her to reconstruct the racial scene in the United States in 1776 and it posed questions and problems that were to become intriquing to me and were to lead me to shift the content of my course from the 20th century to the 18th and 19th century with a greater focus on the intricacies and complications of an international slave trade. Our readings have been three ex-slave narratives by Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs. To support this material students are given access to

the legislation relating to slavery from the Declaration of Independence through the Gettysburg Address and the Emancipation Proclamation, as well as the 13th, 14th, 15th and 19th Ammendments. I also include a series of maps from David Eltis nad David Richardsons Atlas of the Transatlantic Salve Trade and at the following website: http://slavevoyages.org The second half of the class is spent reading WEB Du Bois Souls of Black Folk, which helps us to reconstruct the decline and deterioration of the situation in the status of African Americans after slavery had obstensibly ended. For many African Americans slavery by another name went on for another 100 years until the protests and successful legislation of the 1960s. Since it would appear that the history of African American, how it is that so many African American families find themselves in such a difficult and untenable situation in terms of poverty, homelessness, incarceration, is not well understand by most Americans, including most particularly African Americans themselves, it is my feeling that it has ameliorative effect to acquaint my students with how Enlightenment thought both helped and hindered the flawed democracy we find ourselves in possession of today. Another series I am currently developing is a course on the 1960s. I will be teaching the course as Reading the Civil Rights Movement at the undergrad level, Writing the Civil Rights Movement at the M.A. level and as Black Feminism and the Civil Rights Movement at the Ph.D. level at the CUNY Graduate Center in the spring of 2012. A centerpiece of the course is provided by Manning Marables new and engaging biography or Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention. This course as well as the course on slavery brings religious topics into the foreground because so much of what has stood between people working peacefully together seems to have religious roots. It is my thinking that substance teaches and educates better than platitudes. And that knowledge serves people better than good intentions.