Last night I watched a History Channel film about the African American flyers
from Tuskeegee, and their long struggle to be allowed to fly in the American
airforce. There were two aging survivors of that long effort, in which Eleanor
Roosevelt played an interesting role at one crucial juncture.
It reminded me of the ongoing discussion of gender inequalities and biases and
the fact that even more unbalanced in this community of practice, if that is what
xmca is, than the feeling of many female participants that they are not listened
to or treated as equals is, as Mary pointed out in her early note, the absence
of voices from African American and Latino, or for that matter Asian American
scholars.
There are a lot of reasons for such a situation. One is the fact that there are
so few scholars of color in the academy and in that part of it which would find
this list relevant. There isthe ongoing exploitation in their home institutions
of such scholars so that they have to work twice as hard at institutional work
than the rest of us -- the rewards of tokenism.
Once upon a time, LCHC was allowed to conduct doctoral and post-doctoral
training programs which supported a great variety of scholarship by people of
color as well as women and people from other countries. Reagan and the quite
justified concern that people of color were not in charge of their own training
programs put an end to that so that by and large the ethnic variety at lchc
arises from a constant stream of people from other countries.
Is anyone doing better in promoting this kind of diversity than we at UCSD? In
a recent faculty meeting, after hiring someone of European descent to a position
involving multiculturalism in this state, the faculty wracked its brains about
how to diversify itself along lines of ethnicity, but the search for solutions
founders on the "small pool of available applicants."
mike
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