The Express Path to Racial Equality
By Dr. Boyce Watkins
“The Express” is a new film featuring the great Ernie Davis, one of the most amazing college athletes in American History and the first African American to win the Heisman Trophy. He was also a football player for Syracuse University, the campus on which I teach.
I watched the trailer for the film with pride, feeling good about this man and what he accomplished. I saw all the ads, the banners around campus, the website pictures and other excitement as the city prepared for the film’s premiere. I then had a couple of thoughts.
First, I thought about the residual impact of historical racism. Most of the time, when liberal universities talk about racism, the context is one in which racism is something that happened “back then”, and “we are all better now”. The conversation is one of (relatively justifiable) celebration for just how far our nation has come in the fight for social justice.
What is most ironic about this analysis is that it forgets one important fact: the past is not something that existed once and then disappeared. The past is all around us. The present and past CANNOT be disconnected because the present is created by the past, and the past consistently manifests itself in the social infrastructure of our institutions. For example, in the days of Ernie Davis (not that long ago), African Americans were rarely allowed onto my campus (along with many others) and were certainly not allowed to be part of the decision-making bodies of these campuses. This led to a skewed inter-generational transfer of power that reflects itself in the vast degree of (in Georgetown University scholar Christopher Metzler’s words) “academic imperialism” that we see today. If you take a tour of most campuses, you see that there are few Black faces on the faculty, almost none of them tenured. Black students rarely have professors who look like themselves, as if their price of tuition is to embrace some degree of cultural dilution in their efforts to successfully assimilate. Black scholars are told that research on the Black community is “Ghetto scholarship” and effectively marginalized to departments that have little say in how the campus is run. The attitude is “This is our campus. History and tradition are everything here, and the tradition is that our rules apply and you need to just fit in where you can. We have no problem with you, as long as you remain grateful that we’ve allowed you into our house. Now, here’s a picture of one of our great black athletes to prove that we can’t be racist.”
The second thing I’ve noticed is what I call the “Old people effect” in dealing with historical racism. This effect is one that ideologically disconnects African Americans who attended college during the 60s and 70s from those who attended in the 90s and 00s. It is one where the campus shows tribute and respect to those who were mistreated 30 years ago, while simultaneously continuing the historical pattern of ostracism toward those who are the academic descendants of the older alumni. The “Old people effect” essentially says, “Yes, we will honor ex-athletes Art Monk and Ernie Davis, but they are nothing like the dangerous negroes Adam Banks and Boyce Watkins. Because we put a picture of Ernie Davis on our website, this clearly proves that we only hate the “bad” black men, which therefore justifies our desire to ostracize young African American scholars and students who choose to challenge our historical educational paradigm.” In other words, it’s like respecting the father of a family, but dishonoring him by beating his child. I am not sure there is any respect or honor in that. Also, one should realize that by honoring Davis and Monk but dishonoring their African American counterparts and intellectual descendants, you are effectively engaging in the historical act of celebrating well-behaved black athletes while demeaning progressive black intellectuals. The same can be said for the administrator who pats Carmello Anthony on the back while deliberately separating Anthony from the African American student activists across campus.
But truth be told, Syracuse is not much different from many campuses across America. The reality is that Americans are limited in our ability to fight racism, because many of us can’t even define it. We end up swinging at ghosts in the wind, believing that a more expensive Martin Luther King Celebration, attacking hate groups or inviting speakers from the Civil Rights era is our path to racial cleansing. The truth is that in order to truly fight institutionalized racism, you must be willing to engage in the painful act of surgically decomposing the subtle biases of your social, academic and economic infrastructure like a doctor committed to fighting cancer. The cancer of historical racism festers among us and, in some ways, has the greatest impact on those who truly believe they’ve been cured. Ineffective fights against racism (like giving a cancer patient the wrong drugs) lead to deformed efforts to fulfill Dr. King’s Dream, thus turning the dream into an even greater and more elusive nightmare for those under the thumb of such oppression.
It is my hope that “The Express” will inspire us to get off the express train for racial equality. 400-year old habits die hard, and it takes more than 25 years of good intentions to correct them.
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