Like I said (see “Another Racial Graffiti Storm” April 12, 2011), at the end of the busiest semester of my twenty-three -year career as a professor (Fall 2010), something new and important was starting.  When I returned to campus for the Spring-2011 semester, that something new and important was waiting for me. 

    I had promised to pull together a planning committee to keep the Wake Up! It’s Serious movement going.  Taylor Elkins met with me to begin that task.  We came up with names, and she sent an email out to those students.  Nothing happened… and I realized that I had to give the weight of authority and commitment to this effort.  I sent an email and seven out of eight students responded. 

    Lo and behold we held our first meeting on January 22, 2011.

    To start that meeting, I asked each student to introduce themselves.  Then I asked each to say something about “…why do you want to be part of the Wake Up! It’s Serious Movement?”

    Taylor, a white female said she wanted to learn to be an advocate for diversity.

    Natalia, of Columbian heritage, talked about living in the international dormitory, and seeing the power of diversity.

    Hayat talked about her traditional Middle Eastern, Arab-American parents and growing up in Cary, NC, and the hurt of the jokes she heard after 9/11.

    Mario, an African American male, said that for him the idea of the movement was about moving himself and other people up through education.

    Komal, of Turkish-Indian descent, said that as a resident-advisor she had seen that when the Free Expression incident happened, no one on her hall wanted to talk about it. That disturbed her and motivated her to want to work for change.

    Melody, an African American female, said she had seen too much stubbornness among her college peers about addressing racial issue, and wants to be part of a movement for change.

    Christie, a white female, said she came from a small, mostly white town, where race was not discussed in any positive way.  She said that she thought that it would be different in Raleigh, at N.C. State, but found the silence was even worse in a way.  She wants to be part of a movement to get people talking about race.

    Brittany said, “I’m white as they come; no I’m really white.”  She went on to say that as a resident-advisor, when she talked about how much the racial graffiti and anti-gay slurs offended her and something needed to be done, students laughed and asked her “…why do you care?”  She wants people to come to understand that these kinds of things hurt us all.

    Sascha, a white male, of German-Jewish heritage, said, he wanted to be part of Wake Up because “…silence in the face of intolerance is worse than the intolerance itself.”

    Why were they here, at this first meeting?  In a word the answer was… passion.  Passion for change, passion to do something about the neo-diversity problem of negative language and messages aimed at fellow students; fellow citizens of our campus. With that passion, focus, and good humor we had the neo-diverse core group we needed to get things going.

    In that first meeting, I introduced the goals of the committee; strategic planning.  I know… that sounds so bland and typical.  But our goal was to do strategic planning through action.  Yes the first two meetings involved planning, but that was to set us up for action.  I promised that we would develop concrete ideas for activities, with priorities, and that we would never meet for more than an hour and a half. 

    With that, we immediately began to put together our mission/vision statement.

    America; 9/11/2001. 

    On that 21^st century “…day that shall live in infamy,” at 1:30 p.m., I was to teach my 200 student section of Introduction to Psychology. By that time of that day, all air travel had been halted, both towers had collapsed, and no civilians knew for sure the whereabouts of the President of the United States.

     Rather than go through with my scheduled lecture on “Research Methods In Psychology,” I opened the class with John Donne’s “No man is an island.” Then I said to my students, let’s talk about what has happened in our world today. Some students revealed that they had family in New York City who they had been trying to, but could not reach. From there the discussion in the class period was somber, angry, fearful and sometimes bizarre.   

    One exchange between students was intense. “I think we should nuke ‘em,” a student yelled out. 

      It was the case that in that class, five or six of the students, who often came to class in uniform, were in the U.S. Marine Corps ROTC. When the “…let’s nuke ‘em” exclamation was yelled out, immediately one of the young Marines threw up his hand and without waiting for my acknowledgement turned in the direction of that voice and said,

  “…nuke who? You don’t know what you’re talking about! Who do we aim nuclear weapons at; were we attacked by another country today! That’s just silly!”

     It was a blistering exchange and critique. Yet all of the complexity of the mood in the room was captured by the students’ who said:

    “I don’t understand how the world works anymore.”

    “I don’t feel safe anymore.”

     Osama Bin Laden’s attack of America on 9/1/01 did not change everything.  What that terrorist attack did do was jolt us into paying attention to the many social changes that were already going on around us; change in the racial mix and rules, change in gender roles and rules, change in the ways we can communicate with each other, and change in our international relationships. With that jolt, and sudden new awareness, came anxiety; neo-diversity anxiety.

     Osama Bin Laden’s death will not eliminate that anxiety. But his death at our hands can serve to help we Americans be less vulnerable to that anxiety. My hope is that we manage this moment of emotional release. That we recognize that Osama Bin Laden was only one of the things that has been haunting us, and that the other changes are not to be feared; that we cannot “…nuke ‘em.” If we can use our emotional release in that way, we will become less vulnerable to the charlatans who try to use our anxieties to keep us fearful so that they can manipulate us to accomplish their selfish goals.