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Posted 09/24/01
Living and Learning in Dodge: Reflections on Life at Dartmouth
September 24, 2001
I would like to thank President Wright for inviting me to address this body today. I am deeply honored. I would also like to acknowledge my friends and colleagues in the audience from History, AAAS, WS and LALACS, as well as my parents. I must offer special thanks to Profs. Deborah King and Mary Kelley whose brilliance, insights and genuine friendship have helped me to be a better scholar and person.
I would like to share with you some reflections on my time at Dartmouth.
To be honest, I came to Dartmouth under some duress. Dartmouth was my father's first choice. To add hurt to injury, he also insisted that I attend a special summer program. As a result, the excitement of graduation and performing with the late jazz trumpeter, Dizzy Gillespie, at the Newport Jazz Festival quickly dissipated as I headed north on Amtrak two days after the jazz concert.
I had two main goals when I arrived in Hanover. First, I was never going to speak to my father again. Second, I was determined to dislike this place. I quickly failed at my first goal due to a very severe case of homesickness. I spoke to my parents at least once a week for my entire four years at Dartmouth and together we contributed significantly to the shareholders of AT&T.
To a certain degree, however, I met my second goal. In our vernacular of the day Dartmouth was Dodge, the quintessential frontier town in the mythology of the American west. And I, like so many of the black students I knew, could not wait to get out of Dodge.
Like most historians, I am sensitive to the power of words and the power behind words, and yet until I began working on this address several weeks ago, I never examined the associations behind our popular use of this reference.
Why Dodge? Well, there was a certain frontier quality to the Dartmouth of the late 1970s.
Kegs flowed after a hard day of riding the chairs and roaming the stacks.
Assaults of the verbal and physical kind were weekly if not daily occurrences, while sheriffs -some in jeans, some in tweed jackets- patrolled the intellectual, class, racial and sexual boundaries of the day.
Some challenged the idea of equal access for men and women and made "save the quota" their rallying cry.
Some made sure that gay students did not feel comfortable enough to be open about their sexual orientation.
Some saw to it that black and native American students were aware of the fact that they were only 'guests' of the college.
While others felt it was their moral duty to insist that admitting students of color lowered the academic threshold and that learning about the cultures of these students threatened the foundation of knowledge.
Many of the students of color of my day felt extremely marginalized and beleaguered by the atmosphere. When things got to be too much, we protested; but our most fervent wish was to leave.
Yet, frontiers are not only spaces where the rough and ready tumble, and where peoples of different cultures inevitably clash.
They are also spaces where cultures are shared, and where new ideas and ways of conceiving one's world and one's place in it also emerge.
Frontier life at Dartmouth offered those opportunities as well. As I look back over my time as a student those opportunities for sharing and learning had the greatest impact on my life.
There was the student from Ghana, Alfred, who regaled me with stories of Kwame Nkrumah, the first President of Ghana.
My friend Michael spoke so glowingly of his term in Jersey City as a Tucker Intern that I couldn't wait to sign up for that program.
Darlene, who grew up on the Shinnecock reservation on Long Island, regaled me with such exciting stories about winter carnival that like her, I wore a shoulder-less gown in the middle of February.
Fellow New Yorkers, Carol and Sabrina refined my bid whist skills as we shared Kaluha milkshakes and reminded each other that failure was not an option. If the worst did happen, the plan was to escape to Canada.
Together we created moments of genuine comradery and fun, explored national and international politics and encouraged each other to hang in there.
We also shared information about classes. In fact, it was a friend Paul, who encouraged me to take "Educational Issues in Contemporary Society", the course that completely changed my life.
After I took that course, I knew Education would be part of my academic concentration. The problem was in figuring out the other part. I thought of biology, music, French, art history, english, and history. I took courses in all these departments, but inspiration escaped me.
When Sophomore Spring rolled around and I had to declare a major, I was, of course, in a panic. I presented my dilemma to my adviser, Prof. Bill Cook in the English Department, and he asked me a very simple question - What do you like? That was easy to answer - I liked African and African American Studies (or AAAS) and Education. In those days you couldn't major in AAAS, but with his help I created my own major, a Special major in AAAS and education.
Bill Cook's support made all the difference in my undergraduate experience, because I can quite honestly say that I loved my major. My education courses forced me to think about hidden and open agendas in the educational enterprise, the inequities in our systems of education, the ways in which privileges of race, class and gender are reinforced in the resources available to schools and even in the curriculum.
My courses in African and African American studies gave me an appreciation of world history and helped me to understand the historical currents that had shaped my life until that point.
Until I was ten I lived in Harbor View, a community near Kingston's Normal Manley Airport. My neighbors were all Jamaicans, and we reflected the rich complexity of Jamaican society. Most of us were of African descent, but some of Lebanese, Chinese as well as Indian ancestry. Colonialism, slavery, indentured servitude, independence and varying degrees of social mobility had brought our families to this neighborhood.
In my parents' case, both were born into poor rural families during the inter-war depression. Both were intellectually gifted, but their families could not afford the school fees necessary to send them to secondary school. Work in Jamaica's nascent textile industry, ambition, support at critical moments from thoughtful individuals and opportunities created by the rising nationalist movement opened spaces through which my parents could enter and begin to create the life they desired.
But even at the end of the 60s, those spaces were not very wide. Race, color and class were still the barometers of success, good education required school fees, unemployment stood at 25% and the high levels of poverty inspired the rebellious music that would become world famous as reggae. Concern about their ability to help their children create a better future led them and many other people in our neighborhood to move once again. This time to north America.
My parents selected New York City. Within a year, we purchased a house in Queens and seven years later I was in a little town called Hanover.
Even though I came to Dartmouth at my father's insistence, my formal classes and informal education helped me to appreciate the factors that made it possible for me to be at Dartmouth. Certainly, my hard work was central, but it was only part of the picture. The rest was filled in by the Dartmouth students and faculty who fought for co-education and diversity, the civil rights struggles that helped to undo decades of segregation, the women's movement that challenged gender discrimination and the union struggles that demanded living wages and benefits. These movements made it possible for my parents to find work, to move into a neighborhood that was experiencing white flight, and to send me to Stuyvesant high school and Dartmouth, institutions that had once been all male and virtually all white.
My studies allowed me to move from the personal to the structural and from the micro to the macro. The intellectual journey was at times overwhelming and provocative, but always stimulating. It was also deeply politicizing. The richness of that intellectual journey made it possible for me to thrive at Dartmouth despite the marginalization I also experienced, and encouraged me to return as a member of the faculty.
The specifics of your experience will differ from mine in significant ways. You are negotiating a student body that is larger, gender balanced, more ethnically and racially diverse AND also more committed to idea of building a community.
You are also entering in the wake of a tragedy that has touched us all and whose consequences are still unfolding. The historical events that frame this moment are different from the ones I faced as a first-year student, but they don't diminish the value of the educational experience ahead of you. In fact, they heighten the value of what Dartmouth offers because you will need the rich grounding in history, cultural and social analysis, problem solving and critical thinking to understand why these events occurred and to chart a future course of action that will bring genuine peace and security to our global community.
The quality of your Dartmouth experience will be determined ultimately by the energy, empathy and creativity that you invest. At the end of that process you will know yourself better, you will have begun to clarify your values and your politics, you will have cemented life-long friendships, and you will be armed with knowledge, and hopefully, the desire to make a positive impact on this world we share. These are your years; Make of them All that is possible.
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