 Good evening. Welcome. For those of you I have not met, my name is Ame Lambert and I am proud to be RWU's first Chief Diversity Officer. I would like to extend a special welcome to our first year students because tonight's event is about your Common Read. This conversation started for you during orientation and extended through convocation and it is because it is your Common Read that our Provost Andrew Workman is moderating our discussion tonight. For all of us, this event is the main part of our focus this year. Our theme is talking about race, power and gender. As you folks know and as you have heard, these conversations can be quite difficult. We often don't have the context or the framework to have the conversation. We do not know how to navigate the difficult emotions that arise during the conversation and we do not know how to bridge radically different experiences as part of the conversation. So we are incredibly fortunate to have with us an author who has spent a lot of time helping folks with these matters. My invitation to you tonight, this year and well beyond, is that you lean into these conversations. You might be ready to engage with some things and not others. You might accept some things and reject others. It's okay as long as you stay in the conversation because you really have no idea what might happen. I am a black woman. It is the primary way the world and I interact with each other. This is not always being the case because I am a Nigerian black woman. I was raised in a country where there is race. Race has impact but it's not foregrounded in the same way it is in the United States. So I did not develop a racial identity until I was in my mid-twenties. Before that, I thought people talked about race too much. Now I'm the one always putting race on the table and having people roll their eyes at me. Karma is a, you know what, it might be very hard to believe that in high school my gender expression was primarily masculine or that there was a time in my life where I believed that women were the weakest sex. Now I believe that women and strong are synonyms and I spend my life working for equity. So you just don't know where these conversations will take you or where you will end up. One thing is for certain though, nothing will happen except you are in the conversation. So lean in tonight. Thank you and it is my pleasure to welcome our president, Dr. Donald Farrish. Thank you very much Amé. It's great to see so many people here tonight. Thank you for joining us. This is an important conversation and let me just review how this came to be. A year ago we began developing year-long themes for the Presidential Distinguished Speaker Series. Last year it was dealing with refugees and this year it's raised gender and power. And this came about because as Amé said a moment ago, Andy Workman, our provost, heard our speaker tonight speak at a conference and said, this is the person we should build our year around for the following year. And we were able to do this. Dr. Tatum is a very popular speaker and we had to work pretty hard to book this time for her. But we wanted very much to have her come in and talk about the second edition of her book, which came out just this year. And that takes the book that she wrote in 1997 and carries it forward 20 years. Now Dr. Tatum is a person that has to be introduced in a sense in parts because she is several things together. She's a scholar. So her undergraduate degree in psychology is from Wesleyan. And then she has a master's and a PhD in experimental psychology from the University of Michigan. She also has a master's in religious studies from the Hartford Seminary. She began her career as a faculty member. She worked at the University of California, Santa Barbara, also at Westfield State. Then moved to Mount Holyoke, where she was a dean and for a semester was acting president. While she was acting president, she was nominated to be the president of Spellman College in Atlanta and ultimately was offered that job and was a very successful college president for 13 years, having received a Carnegie Award for leadership during that time. But during that time, she was also still working as a psychologist. And so eventually it was made a fellow of the American Psychological Association and won what amounts to a Lifetime Achievement Award from the APA just three years ago. So she's a scholar and she's an administrator, but she's also a writer. And she's had several successful books, one of which we'll be talking about tonight. And at the same time, she's a very effective public speaker. And she talks a lot about the issues that are in her book. She talks about race on campus. She has conversations about how to deal with these difficult conversations that campuses are having. She is now retired from Spellman, but is still staying very active in the Atlanta community, working on several boards locally as well as nationally. And so, for instance, she is on the board of Teach for America. But locally in Atlanta is still very focused on creating access for students from underserved populations into higher education. A pretty remarkable individual with a myriad of successful components to her background. We are very delighted and pleased to welcome her here tonight to speak to us at Roger Williams University and a forum that is, as you can see, set up behind me. A conversation between our Provost Andy Workman and Dr. Beverly Tatum. Please welcome on both. Welcome, Beverly. Thank you. Thank you very much. I'm very happy to be here. It's been almost a year since I saw you speak and decide this would be a great idea. So it's very exciting to have you on campus. I'd like to start by talking about your first book, which was published in 1997. And you're very eloquent about the intellectual and the personal factors that encourage you to write that book, which is also a little bit about those factors and then also why 20 years later you decide to return to the topic. Absolutely. Well, again, I'm happy to be here and I want to thank all of the students and faculty who are gathered here for being part of this conversation. When I wrote my book back in 1997, it was after I had spent close to 20 years, almost 20 years teaching, of course, on the psychology of racism. And as I had more and more experience teaching that class, I was being invited to speak to audiences of parents and teachers and others about what I would call unlearning racism or how to talk to children about race and when I would visit schools, often racially mixed schools, the teachers or the principal or somebody would say, why are all the black kids sitting together in the cafeteria? They would often ask that question, but it wasn't just that question. It was other questions and so that's where the title came from. Why are all the black kids sitting together in the cafeteria and other conversations about race? Because really the book is not so much an answer to that question, though as you know I do try to answer it. It was really about helping a general audience, not just students, not just professors, but really anyone who would pick up the book to have an understanding of what racism is, how it operates in our society, how it impacts what we think about ourselves and other people, the identity development piece of it, and ultimately what each of us can do using our own spheres of influence to interrupt what I call in the book the cycle of racism. That's what I wanted to do then and in fast forward 20 years I still wanted to do that, but it became pretty clear that our social context was changing and that I wanted to reflect on the experiences of the 21st century. If you were born in 1997, you're 20 years old now in 2017, and how does the world look through the lens of a 20-year-old who has had a very different life experience in the 21st century than say even students who were my students back in 1996, those students are 40-year-olds now. How do we think about these questions today in real time? That's what I wanted to share. Excellent. So I have some questions and these are mostly drawn from faculty and staff and students who have read your book and are interested in it. We're also going to have an opportunity later to hear some questions directly from students who have been reading the book in their freshman classes. The first of these is this, as discussed in your book, most whites grow up without significant contact with people of color. That is true of the majority of students on the Bristol campus of Roger Williams. How would you encourage them to take the difficult steps necessary to begin talking about race and power and acting to undo the damage that racism has done to our society, to people of color, and to whites themselves? Absolutely. Well, as implied by your question, it's very clear that all of us are impacted by racism. Everyone is hurt by it, but not everyone in the same way. And so that is one of the points I try to make in the book. But I want to take a moment, if I might, and ask some questions of this audience because one of the things that you've mentioned is that a lot of students grow up in homogeneous communities. They come to a college like Roger Williams, and maybe it's the most diverse environment they've been in. And it is sometimes very difficult, as has already been pointed out, to have these conversations because there's a lot of self-consciousness about it. Sometimes there's worry that you'll say the wrong thing or offend somebody. And that anxiety about these conversations is deep rooted. And I always like to just take a quick poll, if I might. So I am going to ask those of you here gathered to raise your hand, knowing I'm not going to call on you, but just raise your hand if you can recall an early race-related memory. Raise your hand if you can think of something that happened early in your life. A lot of hands are up. Okay. And now I want to ask another question. And it's going to be a little chaotic, but I want you to just yell out how old you were in your memory. Okay, so here's what I heard. I did hear some numbers. I heard three. I heard four. I heard seven. I heard eight. I heard 12. Anybody younger than three? Anybody got a memory younger than three? Okay, I see one hand back there. Maybe two, two and a half. Another one over there. Okay. Anybody older than 12? If you think of your earliest race-related memory and you're older than 12? A few people? And, you know, there's no right answer to this question. It depends entirely on where you grew up and what your life experience has been. But how many of you have a memory that goes back to either preschool or early elementary, like kindergarten, first, second grade? Raise your hand if that describes you. Quite a lot of hands. Okay. Now I want to ask a question, and that has to do with what emotion, if any, is associated with the thing you remember. I heard fear. I heard anger. Confusion. Amazement. Sadness. So far, I know that there's a lot of words out here, but these are the ones I heard. Fear, anger, confusion, sadness, amazement. Anybody got embarrassment? Okay. Sometimes I hear the word shame. Sometimes I hear the word... Well, I did hear confusion. Sometimes I hear curiosity. Sometimes people say affection or love because it could be in the context of a close relationship. But most people have a word that, like the ones we've just heard, anger, fear, embarrassment, sadness, that is associated with discomfort. Raise your hand if the word you were thinking about for yourself is associated with an uncomfortable feeling. Okay. Maybe raise your hand if the word is associated with a comfortable feeling. Okay. Clearly the uncomfortables outweigh the comfortables and then there are a bunch of people who didn't raise their hands at all. That's okay. But I now want to ask something. How many of you have experience with four, five, or six-year-olds? Babysitting, brothers, sisters, children, you know. Okay. So if you know something about four, five, and six-year-olds, you know that they are pretty candid. They say what's on their minds. But I like to ask this question. If you had a memory that goes back to that early time in your life, raise your hand if you had a conversation with an adult at the time that it occurred, like a parent or a teacher or somebody like that. If the people in front were looking behind them, you would see that there are not very many hands up. If we were counting, I'd say maybe 10, maybe a dozen hands, raise your hand if you did not have a conversation. There are a lot more did nots with their hands up. I always like to ask these questions because I always get the same result. It is always the case that there are people who have early memories. It's always the case that there are people who have uncomfortable feelings attached. And it's always the case that most people will say they did not discuss it, even though we've just talked about the fact that four, five, and six-year-olds are pretty candid. So why is it that so many young people, now looking back on yourself as a young person, didn't have that conversation when, in fact, most of the time, kids are very chatty about what's on their minds. And the answer to that question, if we had more time and there were fewer of you and I could hear everybody's voices, I might ask you to tell me what you think. But I have heard from lots of people to say things like, I didn't have the words, I didn't know what to say, I was too confused to be able to articulate it. Maybe sometimes it was the person I would talk to, like the teacher or my parents, that person was the source of my confusion or the source of the event that happened and I didn't know how to speak about it to that person. But I think however we get around to it, we end up in the same place, which is that we learn early, you're not supposed to talk about it. And if you have had that experience at 4 or 5 or 6 or 7 and fast forward now to 17 or 20 or 63, you know, whatever the age might be, you have had a lot of experience, I'm going to argue, in not having the conversation. And it is, for some people, feels like a taboo, like breaking a rule of some kind to be asked to engage in these conversations. It feels very risky. But in fact, this is the kind of environment where we should be able to risk some discomfort to recognize that, you know, we are all learning how to do this and we will sometimes make mistakes, need correction, need feedback, but that risking that discomfort will help us develop the skills we need to be able to move forward together. That's great. And that's really what we've been hoping for you from reading this book and from the discussions that we have all year. So let's plunge on into more discomfort. Yeah, let's get uncomfortable. On our campus, there's been significant frustration among students, primarily students of color, but not exclusively students of color, with campus climate on issues of race and gender difference and other similar differences between dominant and subordinate identities. Over the last few years, the college has put a great deal of emphasis on educating the college community, the campus community, on differences. But I think that everyone would agree that we have a long way to go in building a truly inclusive campus. Would you please talk about how other predominantly white campuses have successfully addressed this issue and maybe some of the strategies that we might adopt here? Sure. Well, one of the things that I want to start by saying is that there are a lot of colleges and universities that are also struggling, so you are not alone in that. I think you probably know that. But it's useful to occasionally remind ourselves that this is a challenge for everyone, for many people. But I like to talk about what I call the ABCs. A stands for affirming identity. B stands for building community. C stands for cultivating leadership. And the A, affirming identity, is really about the fact that everyone wants to see themselves reflected in the environment in positive ways. Reflected in the curriculum, reflected in the faculty and staff. Everybody wants to see themselves. And the way I like to make this point really tangible for people is to ask each of you to imagine that there was a photographer and there is right there. But if there was a photographer on the stage taking a picture of all of you with a really wide-angle lens and the lights are up and you can take that photo and everybody's going to be in the picture. And at the end of the evening, someone hands you a copy of this photograph. What is the first thing you're going to do when you get your copy? You're going to look for yourself. Have you ever heard people say that? That's the only answer to that question. You're going to look for yourself. Nobody is going to say, where's Andy? Unless you are, first, you're going to look for yourself. You're going to look for yourself in that photograph. And I'm going to argue, once you find yourself in the picture, you're going to evaluate how you look. Are my eyes open? Is my collar straight? Is my hair looking today? You're going to evaluate that picture. If we think about our campuses as like a big photograph and people are stepping into the photograph, they are stepping into that environment looking for themselves in it. And when you ask students why they chose a particular place, they'll often say, because there was something about it that made me feel at home. There was something about it, the posters I saw on the wall, something that said, this is a place for people like me. But we're all looking for those cues, those indicators that says, this is a community to which I will feel a sense of belonging. And when we are on a campus where there are small numbers of students, underrepresented, I'm going to use that phrase, underrepresented students, when they enter those spaces are always going to, because it's human nature, look for themselves in the environment and to the extent that they see themselves there, they're going to feel a greater sense of belonging than if they don't. So the first thing I always like to say to administrators and others who are thinking about these issues is to get in the habit and students can do the same thing because students are part of creating that picture. Students, who are contributing to the campus climate in lots of different ways, we should all get in the habit of asking who's missing from the picture. That if we get in that habit, we are much more likely to create an environment where people feel included than when they feel left out if we're asking that question. So that's what the A is all about. The B is about building community. And here's what I want you to imagine. I want all of you to imagine that there is that photograph being taken. And let's say we have this conversation, the evening goes by, at the end, the picture's being taken at the end of the night. And someone says please don't leave until we've taken the photo. So you're being asked to wait. And then you get the copy of your photo and you are looking. I was sitting on the end of the row, you would see the photographer. I'm sure the photographer saw me. I got that picture. I'm looking for myself in it. But unbeknownst to you, you have been digitally removed from the picture. So you get this photo, you're not in it. Let's imagine this happens repeatedly. You come to an event like this, pictures taken, you're always missing from it. I don't know how long it would take, yet we're going to have a photo. Unless you're confident that you're going to be in the picture, you're not going to hang around. You're going to excuse yourself. You're going to be the first person in line for the book signing. Why wait for that photo? My point here is that when we do community building things, like taking a group photo, that's a community building activity. That community building activity only works if you're confident that you're going to be included. So we have to think about the A and the B together. Affirming identity, building community have to go together. And the C, cultivating leadership is really about giving students, not just students, but particularly students, practice in learning how to engage across lines of difference. For the reasons you said, if you come from an environment where you haven't had much opportunity for people whose life experience is different from your own, there are going to be awkwardnesses. Maybe you don't know how to pronounce that person's name. Maybe you have questions about that person's life experience. You're wondering, what's appropriate for me to ask? What's not appropriate for me to ask? How do I engage? What if someone says I have privilege and I don't think so? How do I have those conversations? Those are really important skills particularly if a college or university has the mission of leadership development. And I've never been on one that wasn't concerned about leadership development. We have to give those opportunities and figure out how to make that happen. And to your question, how do other campuses do it? I think one of the best strategies that I write about this in my book, but one of the best strategies is through the creation of intergroup dialogue opportunities. And what's so positive about intergroup dialogue is that it's not a one-time thing. You bring people together across lines of difference. They talk about difficult topics with the support of a good facilitator and maybe it's uncomfortable the first time, the second time, the third time, but you've made a commitment to six or seven or eight times and over that time period it gets easier and the skills get developed and people deepen their understanding. And I find for that because of all those things it's a really great strategy. Thank you. We'll work on trying that here. Yeah. Faculty and students of color are often called upon to take the lead in conversations about race and that can be exhausting. Yes. It's an extra cost of the legacy of racism. So I'd like you to talk about that a little bit because a number of the students here tonight I'm sure have had that experience and have been frustrated. Do you have some advice for them on pursuing this kind of work? I do have advice which is to say that it's important to remember to take care of oneself and what I mean by that is when I was dean I've been a faculty member a long time and then I was a dean and then I served as president but particularly when I was dean people were struggling academically not because they couldn't do the work but because they were spending so much time on co-curricular things that their work was they weren't spending enough time on the work because they were so busy running organizations and being in charge of this or that and on the one hand they felt like that was very important and I could appreciate the passion that they had but on the other hand they had their own academic well-being sometimes or their health sometimes because they were burning the candle at both ends in a way that was not helpful and I used to say someone said this to me once and it was very helpful and I repeated a lot and that is to say if you are making a lot of withdrawals you better be making a lot of deposits and that simply means if you are putting out a lot of energy for whatever purpose but because you're trying to create a more inclusive environment because you want to be in every meeting because you want to make sure that it's better for the next group of students who are coming after you those are all laudable goals but if you burn yourself out you're not really doing them any good or yourself so you really need to be sure to be taking care whether that's getting more sleep making sure you're getting some exercise taking a break someone told me the story of the geese maybe you know the story but geese fly in formation we've all seen the Canadian geese flying in that deformation and the goose who's in the front is taking all the brunt of the wind and the resistance and that person that goose gets tired what happens is the one that's in front periodically will drop back and another one will step forward so the one who has been leading can recover and I think we have to think of ourselves in that way sometimes it's important for us to step back so someone else can step forward and certainly for our allies speaking as a person of color it's important for the allies the white people who are also concerned about these issues to say I can see you're getting tired let me speak about that issue you know I can write a letter you can you know maybe give me input if you want to give me feedback but you know you don't have to always be the one and I think particularly on a campus like this one the role of white allies can not be underestimated I think it's also important for student populations which tend to turn over very quickly and I think the answer here for four years to really understand how to pass down from seniors and juniors to freshmen and sophomores the torch in a way to help train them to be the future leaders and that is about the sea cultivating leadership we need to do that at all levels you know faculty staff senior administrators should be thinking about that but students can think about it too as you said from seniors to first years right and faculty have this burden too you might want to say a few words about them as well I think what you said in terms of putting deposits into the mandate self-care is important but faculty have a unique role on campus and often faculty of color make up a small minority of the total faculty it is certainly the case and you know as provost I'm sure you are aware of this that when you have faculty of color you can turn to as supports, as mentors as you know they are you know asked to come to lots of meetings after hours to spend time with students and often do so quite willingly but when they are doing that work it means less time available for writing research papers and doing presentations and some of the other things and so I think it's important for institutions to acknowledge and give credit for that work if it's work that the institution needs to have done and people are doing it then when it comes time for tenure when it comes time for you know promotion when it comes time for those kinds of value with processes to be sure that that work is acknowledged and recognized for the importance that it has your book focuses on a process for racial identity and it also puts students in history as well and in thinking a little bit your first book was published in 1997 I'd like to compare the experiences of the students who say were born 20 years before that book with those who were born in the 20 years that intervened between the publication of the first edition and the second thing about that when my book came out in 1997 Bill Clinton was president and one of the things that president Clinton said in 1997 was that the nation should engage in what he was calling a conversation about race and that he launched something called the president's initiative on race coincidentally my book came out in the fall of 1997 the same time that he was launching this initiative and I was out doing errands and I came home one day in November in fact right around now in 1997 I came home and my husband tells me that the white house is called I was quite startled by that like why is the white house calling us and he said seriously somebody from the white house called and they want to know if you can come to participate in a town hall meeting that president Clinton is having to launch his initiative on race that was in the fall of 1997 and I did go to that meeting and I remember very clearly it was held at the University of Akron and I was on stage with president Clinton and about 60 other people they had you know people were sitting and in that context president Clinton stood on the stage and he said that this was the right time to be having this conversation because he said we are a nation at peace the economy is expanding things are unemployment is low things are good and it's during this time when we are sort of feeling pretty happy with how things are going we are able to take on this difficult topic I say that to say that was 1997 fast forward to 2017 we are a nation at war unlike in 1997 we are a nation at war we are a nation that has experienced the great recession of 2008 and as a consequence there's a great deal of economic anxiety and sense of uncertainty about the future we are a nation that rather than having a president say we should be having this conversation we are surrounded sometimes by people who are telling us that we should not have this conversation or that it's too hard to have this conversation and unlike in 1997 we are communicating not in dialogue groups as president Clinton was advocating but often in 140 characters or less on social media with people we may or may not ever meet and so I think it is a harder time one of the things that I say in the book and I know many people here have read perhaps this part when I talk about you know what does the world look like if you were born in 1997 I'm curious if we have anyone in the room who was born in 1997 or later okay so let's imagine let's imagine some of us are feeling old right about now but let's imagine you were born in 1997 if you were born in 1997 you were four years old and not when 9-11 happened and you might not remember that but certainly the climate has been shaped by the post 9-11 atmosphere you know of fear and worry about domestic terrorism terrorism on our soil and if you were born in 1997 you were 11 when the Great Recession happened the collapse of the economy in the fall of 2008 and 11 when President Obama was elected the first time which means that most of your adolescence we had a black president and the symbolic nature of that conveys one thing about the conversations as in the United States has overcome this racial barrier but on the other hand we have seen during the same time period a rise in hate group activity and recruitment on the part of white supremacist groups on college campuses and even though there's been starting in 2008 a conversation that was saying we're in a post-racial society in 2012 we have the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2014 we have the shooting of Michael Brown and others and the Ferguson eruption and the emergence of Black Lives Matter and all the anxiety and distress around that conversation about race particularly as it relates to the shooting of unarmed black people I point out in my book not just black people Native Americans actually are more likely to be shot by police than any other group in the United States and then we have in 2016 what I think many people would call the most divisive political season in recent history and the election of Donald Trump in 2016 followed immediately by the increased visibility of neo-Nazi and white supremacist activity and so it is a very different picture of social progress for someone born in 1997 then let's say somebody born the year I was born in 1954 the year of Brown versus Board of Education so when I was coming of age we were at the height of the civil rights era and you could see social progress happening before your very eyes I think today what we see more often is kind of a reversal of some of that progression and so I think it leads to a sense of confusion as to what is really going on here and what can we do about it a sense of discouragement that maybe there's nothing to be done but one of the reasons I conclude my book for those of you who haven't yet read it the spoiler alert there is a closing chapter entitled signs of hope, sites of progress and the purpose of that chapter is to really be clear that change is possible and it is happening in communities across the country because of the individual and collective efforts of people who are using their spheres of influence to make it happen one more question and then I want to move to the student question this is all across the nation campuses are struggling with how to deal with speakers who offer inflammatory impendence on race and gender proponents of these speakers claim that barring them amounts to an assault on freedom of speech while opponents point to the threat these speakers pose to the inclusion of students and faculty of color and those with other non-dominant identities to deal with this apparent conflict between two of their core values freedom of speech and inclusion so as it happens yesterday I was on a panel where this very topic was being discussed and on that panel was the president of the chancellor of UC Berkeley where of course they've been struggling with these issues and I was on the panel and the chancellor of the University of Wisconsin where they've also been having conversations about this and the president of PACE University and formerly now president of PACE, formerly the president of Oberlin College and you can imagine it was a lively discussion and of course private institutions have a little more control over who comes and who uses their space than public institutions do but all of that to say I think that whenever you have a speaker who offers a point of view that maybe felt as controversial certainly or hostile to certain parts of your population I like to say that the answer to controversial speech is more speech not to shut that speech down but to bring more voices to the table and engage the conversation one of the things that we talked about on this panel was the fact that often people come and I'm not going to name any names but we know that there are some people who come and their intention is really to be a provocateur to provoke others but if we want to hear a diversity of opinions if we want to hear a diversity of perspectives I think the best way to do that is to bring people together to have differing points of view and engage in dialogue not the kind of talking heads yelling at each other like we see on too many cable news shows but where you really have people making their arguments and engaging and having students prepare in advance so that they can ask challenging questions and raise critical issues but that kind of intellectual engagement I think is the best possible outcome that said I think it is also important for institutions to be very clear about what their values are if we say we want to have a community in which people are treated with respect where everyone feels welcomed where we are trying to create an inclusive environment and we find ourselves in a situation where something is happening that goes against our value system we ought to be able to say this goes against our value system and here's why we are concerned about it you may still decide you want to have the conversation but at least everyone should be clear about what your own standpoint is thank you it's very helpful we're going to bring our speakers our students to ask questions up now so while we get that ready I want to say a couple things these are first year students who are representatives from campus clubs and organizations and their questions were selected by a process of interviewing and reviewing the questions so they're more representative of the larger questions that students have and if time allows we'll have some questions from the audience as well now following the conclusion of the event Dr. Tatum will be available for book signings which is upstairs and representatives from the campus bookstore have copies of the book available for purchase as well so let's bring up our students and please say your name and then tell us your question hi my name is Judith I'm a freshman the question is what do you think the national football league's response should be regarding the national anthem protests and what should they do next well let me just say I think we should be clear that the protest initiated by Colin Kaepernick is not a protest of the anthem right it's a protest of police brutality and so in that context if we are clear on that point then you know from my point of view I think it was a very respectful protest and in keeping with one's freedom of speech I know as we all do how this protest has been reinterpreted re-cast by some powerful voices as something other than what it is but if we understand it for what it is I think it should those who want to participate will participate those who don't want but I certainly think those owners have a good word actually but the people who are in charge of those teams should allow people to take that active conscience if they choose that's what I think it is an interesting observation that powerful people can change the meaning of these kinds of protests it's very important to be able to speak back at them and speak the truth to them what I have appreciated we were talking earlier today about the fact that I am a user of twitter I have a twitter feed I make my own twitter posts but it has been very interesting to me to read the postings of some coaches who really I'm thinking now and I have to say I'm not a big football person I don't remember all the names I read a posting of a white football coach who clearly understood what the issue was and was very articulate in his description of why he was standing in solidarity or maybe I should say kneeling in solidarity with the players who were making that choice and so some people get it and I think we should amplify those voices let's have our next question hi there I'm Elsa I'm a freshman my question for you is what can we do when we hear hate speech within our community so that's a great question I'm going to repeat it in case people didn't hear what can you do if you hear hate speech in your community and so I think there are two ways of thinking about this one way is you know if you are in the room right you know you're talking to another person and somebody uses hateful speech and I think it is certainly possible to say that person it takes a certain amount of courage right but I think it is certainly possible to say to someone you know a friend or a family member or someone with whom you are in relationship to say that language offends me and even if it's not about you in fact especially if it's not about you to say because it's harder sometimes if it's about you in your ally role to be able to say you know I find that language hurtful I would prefer if you didn't use it in my company and someone might say you're being you know it's just a word you're being oversensitive I mean people will say those things but there is a strategy which I want to share with the whole audience because it's a very useful one I call it the 3F method and if you're wondering what those Fs stand for I will tell you that it stands for felt, found, feel so let's imagine you're having a conversation and somebody uses language that maybe you used to use but you don't use anymore and let's imagine somebody says something or that you once believed but you don't believe anymore you could say something like you know I felt that way I used that language I told those jokes I felt that attitude you just expressed but then I found out I read this book I heard that talk I took this class whatever it is I got to know someone my roommate I found out I found out this and now I feel that I have to speak up when I hear this language and what you'll notice if you use the 3F method is that it's always about you you know I felt this I found out that I now feel it's never attacking the other person you're never saying you are an idiot you're never saying that but you are clearly letting somebody know what your journey has been now you might say well I have never used that language I never felt that way I never had that attitude in which case how can I say that 3F thing with authenticity it might be hard in which case here's a modification I know many people feel that way but I found out and I now feel and that that's sometimes a way of starting the conversation but I also want to tell you a very quick story which is when I was traveling I visited Texas A&M when I was working on the book I visited the campus of Texas A&M I was doing a conversation kind of like this and it just happened that a few days before I got there there was a racial incident involving hateful speech and the a group of black students had been visiting Texas A&M and a small group of white students started taunting them they were like some high school students on a tour with their teachers from school in Dallas and these white kids started taunting them using racial slurs and telling them to go home they weren't welcome it was very you know a bad situation the president of course was very upset about the behavior and went to the high school from which these kids had come apologized to them and the student government association president made a video about it and if you want to see his video you can find it on YouTube if you type in Texas A&M student government president 2016 it was in 2016 but anyway the student government association president made this video and in it he said something that I thought was very important first of all he said this behavior does not reflect our campus community this is not the aggy spirit this is not the kind of community we want to have those people were wrong to behave that way but the thing that I thought was most important but he said but if I'm honest I have to acknowledge that I've heard these words I've heard people say these things behind closed doors and when I heard it I didn't speak up I didn't say anything about it and then he said my silence created an environment whereby people felt like they had permission that it was acceptable to use this language and to speak about people in that way and I now realize that my silence is a problem that my silence is part of the problem and that I invite you to join me this is what he was saying to his fellow classmates I invite you to join me in speaking up when you hear this language to speak up when you hear these words because if we speak up collectively we create a community where we know that we want to be inclusive we don't want to exclude people with hateful speech so it makes a difference you're welcome my name is Vanessa and I'm a senior here my question is I graduated from a high school in Providence which is one of the most diverse cities in Rhode Island yet most about 80% 90% of my teachers were white and although they were very empowering they really cared about being there was always that need of having like a teacher who looked like me a black person a black woman so what do we have to say about white students or white teachers who find themselves in those situations teaching in minority yes well I'm going to say what you said which is that it is certainly possible for white teachers to be supportive of students of color to have high expectations for them to empower their success as your teachers did at the same time I'm coming back to my affirming identity analogy we all want to see ourselves in the picture so when you say you know I have not had that experience or I didn't have it in high school I didn't have the experience of seeing a teacher who looked like me who in that sense could be a role model it speaks to that desire for that kind of affirmation to me it speaks to why it is important to have a diverse faculty we know that there are not enough teachers of color for every school to have that kind of representation we might like to see which is why it's encouraging to me when I meet a young person who says I want to be you know an educator I want to go into the classroom because I want to inspire young people who look like me but that said I think it is an important thing but I want to come back to what you said at the beginning because you know I have had over the course of my career with teachers in professional development a lot of that work in Massachusetts or in New England when I lived in this part of the you know in this part of the country and sometimes teachers would say well how can I be more supportive how can I connect across lines of difference it certainly is possible to do that but I think it's really critical to understand that racial identity development process one of the reasons I wrote my book in the first place was so that teachers could understand why it's such an important question for a young person like yourself to say you know this was missing I was looking for this you know in my high school experience maybe in my college experience you know it's a legitimate need and we should try to address it thank you hi my name is Kat and I'm a sophomore so do you find that because you are a black woman people expect you to focus on race issues you know that's a really interesting question and I think that there is often an expectation that people of color generally speaking African Americans in particular this person fairly Tatum sitting here will race questions of race because often in spaces majority white spaces it is often the person of color who raises the hand and says we need to be talking about this I have to say though when I was I'm a clinical psychologist trained as a clinical psychologist and when I went to graduate school it was not my plan to pursue this topic I was planning to be a therapist and you know I've got my degree in clinical psychology I got licensed as a clinician and I was planning to work with children and families doing therapy that was my plan so you might say well how did this happen and I will tell you that when I was 26 years old 1980 just finishing up my PhD I was asked to teach a class at UC Santa Barbara and that class was called UC Santa Barbara and I was somewhat naive and when I was asked would you like to teach this class I said to myself how hard could that be and so I needed a job and I said sure I'll do that and I started teaching that class and at the end of the semester and I don't know if you know anything about UC Santa Barbara but it is probably the least diverse of the UC campuses it is a majority white campus in 1980 there were very few students of color so I have a class full of not 100% white students but maybe in a class of 30 maybe there are 2 or 3 students of color everybody else is white and at the end of the semester my students wrote things on their evaluations that said things like this class changed my life everyone should take this class but I have to wait until I was a senior to have a conversation about race and the feedback was so powerful that I thought wow there's a real need here and it's a different kind of therapy in a way to create space where people talk about this topic that is hurting all of us and yet about which there is so much silence so I made a decision I still became a therapist for a while but it became clear over time that the best use of my time and talent was to focus on this topic so people might expect it of me I don't care it's what I chose to do thank you we have time for one more question and I see a young gentleman coming up hello my name is Anthony and you previously just touched upon this question but to further discussion what advice do you have on our minoritized students in predominantly white institutions that are struggling with being in white spaces that re-injure so one of the things that I would say is I did talk a little bit about the idea of finding deposits you know if you make withdrawals make deposits but I think it's important and this goes to the title of the book you know why are all the black kids or the minoritized to use your term kids sitting together in the cafeteria often when people ask that question they're asking it because they think there's something wrong with that and what I want to say is that there's value in connecting with people who are having a similar experience and finding support there and to the extent that you are able to do that it gives you it recharges your spirit so that you can continue to do the work of crossing bridges you know sometimes when people say to have affinity groups so we don't want kids to cluster together because surely we want them to you know disperse and get to know people different from themselves we want that but it's not either or it's often both and sometimes you need the opportunity to connect with people whose experience is similar to yours for mutual support and to strengthen your resolve or re-energize so that you have the energy to do the hard work of representing across campus in all the different ways you're asked to do that so that's what I would say find a circle of support make deposits and when it gets burdensome or feels like it is not working for you ask for help because there are faculty staff members in the community who can be a resource and sometimes don't take full advantage of the resources that are available Thank you Please join me in thanking Dr. Tatum for being with us tonight Thank you, thank you very much Thank you very much Thank you