Temple University students and faculty talk about race

The cliche about race is that it's the elephant in the room no one discusses.

At Temple University last week, students and faculty sat the elephant down, stood nose-to-trunk with it, and spent two hours engaging the beast in a wide-ranging talk about race and the presidential election.

In the end, if no startling truths were unearthed, at least people had a sense that they took the measure of the behemoth, openly and honestly.

"I talk about race all the time with my friends," said student Kadiah Belle, 20.

"Race is an everyday issue that's not going away," said Nadine Mompremier, 21.

Minority students were in the majority on the 16-member panel of campus leaders, collected along with four faculty members for a town-hall meeting on race.

About 150 students attended the forum, and 75 of them were given electronic devices called clickers to instantly answer polling questions periodically flashed on a screen.

The result was a multi-media, multi-generational, multi-tiered conversation that ranged beyond politics to the intensely personal.

To start things off, Temple journalism professor Karen Turner said that her students typically tell her that Barack Obama's race is not an issue to a younger generation used to seeing people of color in powerful positions in government, universities and the media.

"But," Turner went on to ask the panel, "do your older relatives feel the same way?"

"My mother is African American and Irish and my father is Puerto Rican," said Kylie Patterson, 20. "I sometimes ask, is race white privilege or black tax? Depending on what family member I'm with, that tells me how to talk about race or not."

She went on to say that her father is a Vietnam veteran who will vote for John McCain, while her mother says she benefitted from bills passed by Democratic presidents.

"My father and I will not be voting for the same candidate," Patterson concluded.

Latavia Alexander, 21, an African American, said both her parents are from the South, and carry with them the scars of prejudice.

"But I don't struggle with race like that," she said. "I don't see black or white. And even though Obama is a black man, to me he's an educated man and a family man first.

"I don't think he's trying to be the first black president. I think he's just trying to bring change."

Weighing in with his own trans-generational view, David Harrington Watt, a history professor, called himself a "grumpy old white guy" whose evangelical Christian family from Alabama has a hard time with Obama.

"Their belief is they're white and Christian and they want the leader of their country to be [a] white Christian," Watt said. "They believe that people who aren't white should defer to people who are."

Then, echoing Turner's observation about race among differing generations, Watt added, "Most of my family has never been in a situation where the boss or the teacher was black."

Students had no trouble accepting Watt's thesis that racism lives, rancid and strong, in much of America.

"Behind closed doors, racism is fair game," said Steven Okoye, 20. "Even after the election is over, you're going to hear some drama about race, whether Obama wins or loses."

"Well," answered Kyle Mimms, 19, "if you're from a family where prejudice gets passed down, you have a choice to accept it or not."

Among the 75 people surveyed in the audience, their data broke down this way:

Most were aged 18 to 20. And 63 percent were Democrats.

To the question, "Are people of your generation color-blind in terms of race?", it was hard to discern a definitive finding. The leading answers were: "some are" (40 percent) and "not the majority" (24 percent).

Asked whether Obama was color-blind, 49 percent said no. Asked about McCain, 68 percent said no.

Asked to what extent race has been addressed in the campaign, 38 percent said "too much," while a nearly identical 37 percent said "not enough."

Trying to place Obama's presidential nomination into historical context for his young charges, history professor David Farber said that a black person getting this far in an election "means something. It is significant."

But with the last word, theater professor Kimmika Williams-Witherspoon reminded the young audience that when it comes to the elephant in the room, the country still has far to go.

"Much of America has yet to confront the legacy of enslavement, founded on the stigmatizing of a whole group of people to exact free labor so a small cadre of landowners could acquire wealth."

She exhorted students to reflect on the meaning of blackness, on white skin-color privilege and on prejudice.

Though evidence of the racial divide is important, Mimms said that in the end, he'd like to think about role models. Specifically, he said, his parents lamented the lack of a strong African American leader after Martin Luther King.

"My family felt nobody had stepped up to the plate to fill the void," Mimms said. "And now it's the greatest feeling to share Barack Obama with my parents."