By invitation, I give talks to student groups around the campus of North Carolina State University.  A couple of weeks ago, I gave a presentation to students in our university-honors village. 

    It was one of those laid-back, get to know the professor kind of gatherings.  My job was to let the students in on my history as a research-scientist.  To do that I had to walk them through my life from my Navy experience on because it was in the Navy that my personal and scholarly interest in race-relations and diversity really came to life.

    I brought the gathered students up to date including my creation and teaching of my “Interpersonal Relationships and Race” course. Letting them in on my why I created the course, I said something along the lines that

     “…we have eliminated the immoral laws of racial segregation. What’s left now, our greatest challenge, is learning to interact with each other as equals. You see, we live in a time when contact with people who do not look like or even sound like us is unavoidable.  So we struggle with the neo-diversity question, who are the ‘we’ and who are among the ‘they’.  But as I tell my students, everybody on our campus is a ‘we;’ everyone in your classes is Wolfpack. Our challenge today is to accept and live in that reality.”

    After interacting with the students for about an hour and a half, I headed home.  That evening I got this email from one of the students who attended.  A freshman, she wrote:

     “I just wanted to thank you for sharing your experience and perspective on diversity with us at the Honors Colloquium. I attended a large public high school, where the bottom line was “diversity is good”. However, I’ve often asked myself what exactly is diversity? and why is it such a big issue? Your perspective and the whole idea of a “we” has given me a much deeper understanding of diversity and why it’s so difficult (especially for Americans) to find peace with it. It’s not necessarily about putting Chinese people, African Americans, Whites, etc. into a room together, it’s about developing understanding and acceptance. As you said, I think this interpersonal connection is a societal necessity that a lot of people do not understand and therefore do not strive for.”

    Turns out, we continue to do a lousy job of teaching young people about diversity and why it is important in America. We continue to offer only sound-bites, “…diversity is good.”  Having been given no substance, our most academically capable young people leave high school confused about diversity.  And too often those young people end up at colleges and universities where that confusion continues because there too they get nothing but “…diversity is good” sound-bites. 

     But what the email from that young woman tells me is that young people want substance; college students, at least, are looking for a real understanding.  That email and what I see happen to students in my class tells me that once students come to understand that the real challenge today is interpersonal, they feel better, calmer, and more prepared to live, go to class, and eventually work within a diverse community.

    It was a hell of a time.  It was a complicated time.  It was the time of the civil rights movement.  It was the movement for black equality in which some white Americans were foot soldiers. 

    In this memoir, Dick J. Reavis tells us his story of being a white civil rights foot soldier during the summer of 1964. His mother and father objected.  His father said to him that yeah Dr. King wants you down there but don’t you see why; “…If white kids die, then this Dr. King will get more publicity.”  Still Dick Reavis left Texas to go South to Georgia and then Mississippi. Reavis become a worker for SCOPE (Summer Community Organizing and Political Education) a project sponsored by the SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference).

    A Texas white boy, Dick J. Reavis had a lot to learn about the civil rights movement and about interacting with African Americans.  He learned that SCOPE represented a shift in the goals of the movement:

    “Always before… the Movement had in many ways pleaded… for whites to accept blacks.  The shift towards community organizing meant that the Movement would henceforth demand not a seat next to whites in a diner, but the seat at which the whites were sitting: it was [now] a struggle to take from whites the seats of power and patronage. …the Movement was not asking for acceptance, tolerance, or love; it was demanding power.”

    That made things complicated.  But even a young and motivated white boy could find a way to wrap his mind around that. More difficult were the lessons that were to come from interpersonal interaction mistakes. One of the things that made it a hell of time was the push to transition from a racial-caste system where being white made you right, and being black meant you had to get back, to a system where black and white people would have to interact with each other on equal terms.

   Problem was the caste system still existed. That meant that even an attempt to prevent a negative racial incident could go bad interpersonally for those on the same side. 

    A movement meeting was held in the backwoods outside Demopolis, Mississippi; although a SCOPE worker and a driver, Reavis was not allowed in because he was white.  Reavis and Jerry, a black movement spokesperson, left that meeting to head back into Demopolis.  Just as they made it to town, the car lost power. Reavis pulled over and just then two uniformed white men pulled up to see “…what are you boys doing here?” Thinking only of getting both himself and Jerry out of this unharmed, Reavis acted as if Jerry was a “…boy” who worked for his dad.  As part of that act Reavis handed Jerry some money and said to Jerry, “There, boy, go get us some oil.”  The ploy worked; the two white men left, but…

    “…Jerry didn’t speak to me for the rest of the day, and I don’t believe that he ever spoke to me again, though for a month or two, we lived in the same house… It took me years to understand why.”

    Young Dick Reavis was approaching all his interactions through the lens of strategies and getting the work of the movement done.  He had never felt the negative, heavy end of the racial caste system and so had not felt how everyday that system demeaned the humanity of African Americans.  So to save him and Jerry from going to jail he used what he knew of the caste system to play out the role of a white supremacist, using the appropriate language.  What he didn’t understand was that “…Jerry would have preferred risking jail to the insult… however well-intentioned…”

    One of the points I teach in my “Interpersonal Relationships and Race” course is that racial language has a history that still carries into the present use of words.  One cannot avoid that history by saying, “I didn’t mean it like that.”

    Writing with honesty and grace, in his memoir Dick J. Reavis tells us of encountering and failing at a number of these interracial interaction dilemmas.  Here again is a small story of what was going on in the everyday march of the civil rights movement.  Whites were involved and struggled to learn how to interact racially.  At the same time, blacks were struggling to learn how to interact interracially, and making mistakes, but mistakes that were not even seen as such. 

    All those mistakes influenced the successes and failures of parts of the movement, because the movement was complicated and “…a struggle against all kinds of odds.”  Looking back Reavis says, “While we accomplished some of what we set out to do, in the main, I believe we were defeated, and that our hopes now fairly or unfairly devolve onto the generations that will come after us.”

    That is all the more reason that it is time for stories like this one, from the foot soldiers, white and black, to be told.  Reavis makes this point too.  He writes: “My only hope is that in reading this work, members of a younger generation will see what I and my peers did not accomplish, and will do what they can for the cause…”

    We must never forget that it was a hell of a time.  Today, it is still a hell of a struggle. Now we see that this was not and is not just a black and white struggle, but a struggle to find respect for our common humanity; racial, ethnic, gender, religious humanity. All who care must be forever vigilant.

    At the time, I was North Carolina State University’s Vice Provost for Diversity and African American Affairs.  I was living through the kind of hell that comes when doing diversity work and finding resistance to change from all sides. Foggy, eerie… that was my experience.  In my memoir (Making Gumbo, p. 153) I wrote about that day. I wrote:

   September 11… 9/11… morning drive… radio news… what did they say?… some fool has hit the World Trade Center… small plane I guess… how funny… bagel and coffee filling… tasted good… office… did you hear… what… airline jet… World Trade Center on fire… TV in basement… oh no another jet hit… oh no… buildings burning… collapsing…  have to teach today… walk from administrative office to teaching office … preparing to teach but… won’t be a normal class… I begin class… “No man is an Island” I recite… “a day that shall live in infamy” I say… 200 students… anyone have anything they want to say I ask… student dismay- who did this… why… student fear- what will happen next… fear and sadness- I can’t get a hold of my father in NY… student anger- let’s nuke them… student balance- nuke who… shocked… dismayed… weakened… students’ sense of a new existence- I don’t feel like the world is safe anymore… that night… me… I called Mom…  I watched the images… over and over… too much… couldn’t stop… had to stop…

    9/12… morning… slow, sluggish, heavy… coffee and muffin… office… Provost needs you Rupert… wants help with speech… in three hours… all campus community event… talked with Provost… got idea… theme family… writing… conferring… editing… writing… done… walking to event… Chancellor speaks… Provost speaks… my words… spontaneous applause when the Provost said… we had argued about that line… unnecessary, he said… I said most necessary… reluctant he kept it in… loud applause when he said… we will not tolerate any person or group directing anger at anyone in our, in the Wolfpack family…We are a family… we are still the Wolfpack…

    Today, September 11, 2011, ten years past, we remember.

    I remember the hell of it all and the moments of grace.

   August 2005, when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, neo-diversity anxiety led to a social tragedy.  I am not talking about what happened at the New Orleans Superdome.  I am talking about what happened to a New Orleans family of longstanding; the Zeitoun family.

    I fell in love with that family reading Dave Eggers nonfiction book, Zeitoun.  If I could find a woman like Kathy, the wife of Abdulrahman Zeitoun (Zay-toon), I would find some way to sweep her off her feet and make her mine.  If I could have as a friend a man of integrity and moral strength like Abdulrahman, husband of Kathy, I would work very hard to keep that friendship strong. If I could spend time with this family, I would do so every chance I got.

    The Zeitoun family’s story is part of the tragedy of our nation’s gross mishandling of Katrina.  But the brilliant move by the writer is to not rail in anger against the obvious; about the stupidity of what we allowed to happen.  Instead, with a stroke of writing genius, Dave Eggers gives us the story of the relationship between Abdulrahman and Kathy and how our mishandling of Katrina entered and almost destroyed their life together.

    That should explain how I fell in love with this family. Learning about their backgrounds, their struggles, their finding each other; she a native of Baton Rouge, a white Southern Christian convert to Islam, he born to Islam in his native Syria. In New Orleans they together have a well-respected, thriving building and construction business.  Hurricane Katrina is coming.  Kathy takes the children to Baton Rouge; Zeitoun stays in New Orleans to watch over their house and the other homes and buildings they own.

    After the storm passed and the levees broke, using his second-hand canoe, Zeitoun spends time going around to check on their various properties; he also helps rescue people and brings food to dogs trapped in houses.  Zeitoun sees and hears that much is out of sync in the city, so he is careful.  Kathy, now in Arizona with friends, is very worried and keeps trying to convince him to leave the city.  He tells her he is safe and feels like he has a purpose for being in the city at this time. Then one day, standing in one of his properties with three male acquaintances, he and those acquaintances are arrested by men who cannot be identified as belonging to any particular policing agency.

    Arrested, not read his rights, not allowed to make one phone call, forced to live for a time in a make-shift prison in the bus station, eventually moved to a real prison. Two weeks Zeitoun is unable to speak with his now frantic family. Given all the bad news and rumors coming out of New Orleans, Kathy begins to believe he is dead. Meanwhile, Zeitoun is being called a terrorist.  “You’re Taliban,” a guard sneers at him.

    That was the neo-diversity anxiety driving all that happened, from the arrest onward. Being Muslim had now become wrapped up with the military takeover of New Orleans after Katrina.  After going through what no American would ever expect to go through, Zeitoun and Kathy learned some things about the psychology of the arresting officer and the officer who took Zeitoun to the bus station prison.  Both said the same thing.  Despite the evidence that Zeitoun showed them of his identity and business, they ignored that evidence and to themselves said, “…these guys are up to no good…” “…they’re up to something.”  Where was this feeling coming from?  To the reader it becomes obvious that it came from the fact that Zeitoun and one of his companions was Muslim.  That was it… in the midst of the chaos, with the policing force scared and filled with anxiety, these Muslim guys… they had to be up to something.

    Zeitoun got out and is back to work, but it’s still not all straightened out.  Much was loss; buildings, homes, Kathy’s health and trust in government.  In her thoughts, she said:

    “…knowing that Zeitoun’s ordeal was caused… by systemic ignorance and malfunction—and perhaps long-festering paranoia on the part of the National Guard and whatever other agencies were involved—was unsettling.  It said, quite clearly, that this wasn’t a case of a bad apple or two in the barrel.  The barrel itself was rotten.”

     Yet in the face of his own ordeal, Zeitoun himself has faith.  His thoughts reflect that faith:

    “It was a test, Zeitoun thinks.  Who among us could deny that we were tested?  But now look at us, he says. Every person is stronger now. Every person who was forgotten by God or country is now louder, more defiant, and more determined. They existed before, and they exist again in the city of New Orleans and the United States of America.  And Abdulrahman Zeitoun existed before, and existed again, in the city of New Orleans and the United States of America.  He can only have faith that [he] will never again be forgotten, denied, called by a name other than his own.  He must trust, and he must have faith.  And so he builds…”

    The Zeitoun family’s story is the story of an American failure and tragedy.  But it is also more than that.  It is the story of a real relationship and a real family that we all should know about and will (if you read the book) admire, and acknowledge as real Americans.

    I love this family.