An Evening with Lisa Delpit
My week ended with a lecture/discussion by Lisa Delpit held at Hampshire College on Thursday night. It meant giving up my writing group for the week, but this kind of work is so important to me. I’m currently reading Delpit’s books, Other People’s Children and The Skin That We Speak for my work with Project Outreach with the Western Massachusetts Writing Project (WMWP).
Lisa spoke most directly to the young college students about what research says about students of color in the college environment. Although students of color often enter college with higher academic levels than their white counterparts, they perform below their white counterparts once in college. She also spoke about the phenomena of students of color “disidentifying” with academic achievement as a result of feeling “invisible” and feeling their voice is not “heard.” She told a poignant story of her own daughter who went to a private school in Maine where students were encouraged to participant in the leadership and decision making of the school. During a phone conference with her advisor, the advisor told Delpit that her daughter needed to come to a faculty meeting and contribute which she hadn’t yet done. When Delpit spoke to her daughter, her daughter said, “Mom, I’ve been to three meetings.” And I’m invisible. Delpit told several stories about her own daughter and others whom she has worked with throughout the years. I think it was these stories that most invited the students to contribute their own in the question and answer period that followed. I was most struck and moved by the voice of a young African American man who shared his struggles moving between the two worlds of Hampshire and the Bronx. Although I’ve witnessed this struggle with my own students and with young people who left the Navajo Indian Reservation and went off to college and I’ve read about it–I haven’t heard anyone articulate it so meaningfully as this young man did. Delpit’s response was that it took her a long time to learn how to bring home what she was learning in academia to her home culture in a language that respected and honored the people and vise versa, bringing to academia the knowledge and voices of her home culture in a way that they could hear and respect them. The struggle was worth it.
Delpit also shared information about Bob Moses’ Algebra Project which I heard Moses speak about at UMass last year. It’s a powerful program from a powerful man. It was interesting how moved people were last year after this presentation. An email list was sent around and someone on the UMass faculty took the responsibility of bringing folks together to discuss the possibility of bringing folks together to make this happen. I put my name on that list. I haven’t heard anything yet. It’s been almost a year.
“No race possesses the monoply of beauty, of intelligence, of force, and there is a place for all at the rendez-vous of victory.” Edward Said
“Without struggle, there can be no progress.”
Frederick Douglass
