Our Beginnings-Vandy & Colber
Vandy and I are really good friends and colleagues but it did not start that way. Here we share our beginnings.
This post is a bit different. It includes four think pieces that are separated into two categories. The first category is Fear. Vandy and I share our fears around race and discrimination. The second category is Wokeness. We share our process of becoming racially conscious.
Vandy’s Fear
I have been a school administrator for over 35 years, both in secondary schools and higher education. I broke gender barriers in high school administration as a female assistant principal and head principal in two suburban, comprehensive high schools. In Higher Ed, I directed academic support and disability programs and later spent 13 years as a Vice President and Dean of Students at a small liberal arts college. Of course, all of those positions within a stressful, predominantly male settings, provided anxious moments for me, but as I reflect on those experiences, I separate them into two categories of fear. The first were those in which my position, professional reputation, and ego were on the line, versus those in which the very safety of students was threatened, and I was the responsible one in charge.
The first category, though perhaps less noble, is nonetheless important if one hopes to ever influence anything. Truly, you must establish and maintain a reputation for competence and effectiveness, and as a woman in an executive position, I had to learn to dance like Ginger Rogers, i.e., “ backwards and in high heels”. No one was there to teach me the steps, and unfortunately there was always someone, often another woman, waiting for me to trip. And, yes, it was terrifying at times.
The second category of fearful experiences occurred during campus crises that threatened the safety and peace of the campus community and our students. And, frankly, a good administrator should feel every bit of the fear and chaos that can occur in high risk situations on a campus, and she must calmly address every aspect of the crisis with efficiency and effectiveness. The weight of that responsibility is heavy, and a false step can be disastrous. I recognize that sense of dread and fear from my 35 plus years of school events including bomb threats, fires, drug searches, suicides, active shooters, targeted threats, assaults, deaths of students and staff, protest demonstrations and so on.
A long time ago, I confronted what to me is the fundamental question for anyone in educational administration: “What will you go to the mat for”? Where is your ‘line in the sand”?” At the time and throughout my career, the answer has remained steady: student safety. Period. My mission was to strive everyday to create and maintain spaces and an environment where students feel safe from threat, comfortable, and among friends.
So, campus racial unrest, when it occurred on my watch, was a bodyslam because it tripped both of my fear categories; challenging my very competence as an executive, and forcing me to acknowledge that a significant segment of our students faced daily a threatening, unsafe environment. Yes, I was terrified, faced, on one hand, by an senior executive team, including the President, telling me to “handle it”, and on the other hand, a young, Black, student leader who had found his voice in the crisis and was not about to go away quietly. I was terrified, with little understanding of the issues and few tools with which to work.
-Vandy
Colber’s Fear
Like many first generation college students I feared a lot about leaving home for school. I chose a small liberal arts school in East Tennessee. I was afraid of leaving home, which was South Florida. I was afraid of being on my own and having to navigate the world without my close friends and family. I also feared failure. I feared not being successful on the football field and not doing well in my classes. I was terrified of the thought of returning to Florida because I couldn’t cut it. These were fears that I thought about and could name, but another fear emerged that I couldn’t articulate. I felt it in the midst of my other fears but I couldn’t name it. As time went by this fear grew and became more prominent; so much so, it is still with me today. And sadly, more than likely I will die with it.
You see I grew up within the Haitian/Haitian American community. I also grew up with others who had roots in the Caribbean, South America, Mexico, India and other places where the population were predominantly people of color. I knew white people but they were not the majority in most of the spaces I occupied. Therefore, living in Tennessee was the first time I experienced being a racial and ethnic minority for long periods of time. And as I attended a college in a state that was 78.7% white, I began to experience that fear I couldn’t really name.
Growing up I had heard stories and seen news headlines about black people being hurt or killed by white people. My fear of the possibilities of these things happening to me became much greater while living in Tennessee. I wasn’t in South Florida anymore, and I began to fear my environment and the majority who lived in it. I had never felt this type of fear before. And in addition to this fear, I was being treated and perceived differently in ways I hadn’t really experienced in my former communities. At the same time, I could also tell that some whites feared me just because of my race. This wasn’t based on who I was or what I was about but on negative imagery conjured by the white imagination, which is constantly cycled and perpetuated in our society.
As time went on I guess I learned how live….or….cope with this fear. I’m not sure which of the two it was. By my junior year I was taking classes in my major, which was history, and immersed myself in Black Studies. This fear became even more pronounced because I was learning the past atrocities that whites committed against people of color around the world. In my studies, I felt some of the pain my ancestors, and using the historical perspective, I began to find parallels from the past to the present. I didn’t have to look for or wait long to see how the evils of oppression show in our current day. By my junior year, my campus was flipped upside down by numerous incidents of racism which not only confirmed my internal fears but manifested them externally. They were there when I woke up every morning waiting to keep me in a state of panic and paranoia.
-CP
Vandy’s WOKENESS
In 2015, after the horrors of Ferguson and Baltimore, reports of violence on young Black men had begun to roll toward us too fast and too regularly. I began to hear the term WOKE, and I immediately resonated with it as I reflected on my past decade as a college administrator. I also became familiar with the phrase “white fragility” and realized that, bless my heart, I had been the epitome of the fragile, un-woke white lady; progressive, moral, an old sociology major, for God’s sake, plodding along in my well-educated self righteousness, all on behalf of social justice. Seriously…I was requiring my college freshmen to read Peggy McIntosh 25 years ago! I was a seventies era college student who had gotten past color blindness, who understood post racial America. I was the Chief Diversity Officer on my campus, and I knew what I was doing! I GOT it, right?
But, no…I so did not get it, and here is why: I had never allowed myself to be weak and vulnerable with a Black person. I was living with a mind and soul cluttered with fifty years of stereotypes, implied bias, and not so subtle racism. And here was someone who could help me, but I had to first ask for help and then listen. For a woman who had always striven to be the smartest person in the room, this, THIS was a challenge. And so, Colber Prosper, was brought that day to my office by his mentor, Paula McGhee, my Diversity Coordinator. And courageous Paula looked me square in the eye and said, “Vandy, you need to stop everything you are doing right now and listen to what Colber has to say”. Wow. Just like that.
I worked hard to keep quiet, a real struggle for someone like me, and to, instead, ask questions and listen. I learned about how fearful and hurt our students and staff of color were, assuming that they would be misunderstood, accused. I learned about the institutional structures in our campus community that preserved and maintained bias and prejudice. I learned to recognize the failure of our campus to help all of its citizens call out daily examples of racism and prejudice. And I learned, over time, to use every ounce of good will and professional capital I had accrued on that campus to push my colleagues, faculty, staff, and students to learn more and do better. Mostly, I learned to trust a young, Haitian African American, Black guy, 30 years younger than me, to teach me a thing or two. And that, that, is where the fear began to dispel.
-Vandy
Colber’s WOKENESS
I remember as a child I would cry when people made fun of me or mistreated me. I remember crying numerous times in elementary school. My mom said I was sensitive with a caring heart. But like most boys in our society I was told that boys shouldn’t cry so I taught myself not cry. I rarely cry now, and there are times when I want to but I can’t. I can only cry when I’m beyond overwhelmed and feeling like I am unable to manage.
One of these times I cried was in college during my junior year. I was entering what Dr. William Cross calls the Encounter Phase in his Nigrescence Theory also known as Black Identity Development Theory. The Encounter Phase is when a black person finds out what it truly means to be black in this society. You begin to see this systematic design that was created to oppress Black people and other people of color. I remember crying in public (a big no-no) and again with friends when we spoke about these issues. I especially remember crying and talking to a friend, TA, on the phone about what was happening on campus and receiving his validation.
After the Encounter Phase is the Immersion/Emersion Phase. In this phase the individuals submerge themselves in learning and studying about their racial identity, and that’s what I did. I was a history major and I studied all things Black. I was also the President of BSA (Black Student Association), and I pushed my campus to better serve its students of color. These efforts brought me to Vandy’s office. Vandy was the Dean of Students and Vice President of Student Affairs.
I was talking to Ms. Paula, an advisor and mentor, about the recent incidents on campus, sharing with her how I felt. She told me to come with her, and she brought me to Vandy’s office. Vandy and I had talked some before but nothing like this. I just remember feeling so many emotions while I sat in the chair facing her. I was fighting back the tears while telling Vandy the experience of students of color on her campus. Her campus, not mine. I wasn’t claiming dem. I could tell she was uncomfortable and guarded but I didn’t care. I didn’t expect much from her or for her to do shit. Every day I was learning to trust white people less and less. So, I left after our troubling conversation and didn’t think much of it.
Things on campus got heated, and it felt like the whole campus was against BSA. We had to learn how to advocate for ourselves. So, while our white peers were studying for their classes we met in the evenings to learn about institutional racism and strategies on changing a campus climate. While our white peers went out to enjoy themselves socially, we were meeting in each other’s rooms consoling one another because somebody was mistreated by another student, staff and or faculty member.
Certain staff and faculty members joined us, and we were eventually able to push the campus to talk about these issues in an effort to change the campus environment. My run-ins with Vandy became more frequent as the difficult conversations increased and the college decided to create a strategic plan for diversity. But I wasn’t really stuntin her. In my mind the only reason the school was doing this was because of the bad press it got around these issues. As I awoke, I was building a critical consciousness that questioned the motives of white people. I was like, “How can you say you care about me but you maintain such a system?” Questions such as this and a slew more were the price of becoming woke. Going to sleep was not an option. In this new state of consciousness I learned it was better to cry on the inside because to do so outwardly would be wasting tears in a society where Black tears mean nothing!
-CP
