On March 13, students and faculty from Bay Area schools attended the Student Diversity Leadership Gathering, hosted by Harker and led by Rodney Glasgow, head of school at Sandy Spring Friends School in, Sandy Spring, Md. A well-regarded speaker and facilitator in the areas of diversity and social justice, Glasgow delivered a keynote at the start of the event, detailing the ways in which his identity as a Black man changes both how the world sees him and how he sees and acts in the world.
He spoke on how the mask he wears as a precaution during the pandemic has hidden what he feels is his best feature, his smile, which he said puts others at ease. When wearing his mask, he said, “No one can really tell who I am. I’m suddenly every Black man at once. They can’t see that I’m a head of school. They can’t see that I’m an Ivy League graduate. They can’t see that I’m smiling. They can’t see that I’m kind. They can only see that I’m Black.”
Glasgow recalled instances in which he found himself centering his identity, such as when he was interviewing for a job and received half-hearted greetings or was grilled with questions in private to verify that he had graduated from Harvard. “This is an identity moment,” he said. This is not actually a Harvard moment. I’m sitting in a Black moment. I’m sitting in a poor moment. I’m sitting in a you’re-too-close moment. I’m sitting in a is-that-a-mask-you’re-wearing moment.”
In one powerful moment, Glasgow told the story of a Black parent who was detained while waiting with his daughter for the bus to arrive outside the school. After seeing the officer pass by once in his vehicle, he told his daughter to be ready, because he sensed the officer would return. “Could you imagine living a life where the police slowly creep by you and you don’t think, ‘thank goodness they’re going on to solve a crime, thank goodness they’re going on to keep the neighborhood safe,’ you’re thinking, ‘let’s just get ready because I think they’re coming back?’” Glasgow said.
Although the situation was resolved, the parent was upset that none of the other parents present during the encounter checked on him or his daughter. “When we unmask identity, all that’s really sitting there in the center is this deep, deep humanity,” Glasgow continued. “It’s this sense of, they didn’t treat me like a person; they didn’t take care of my daughter like she was human. She had to get on the bus and wonder, do they still see me as the person they saw yesterday?”
Following the keynote, adults and student attendees were put into groups to discuss identity and conduct group activities around their feelings on their own identities and how they affect their perceptions of the world. The attendees later met as a group to talk about what they had learned and what elements of the attitudes displayed during the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol that they saw in their school communities.
Tiffany Liou ‘08, now a reporter with the ABC-affiliated WFAA in Dallas, posted a video yesterday in which she speaks about the yearlong wave of violence against Asian Americans, including yesterday’s attacks in Atlanta that left eight people dead, including six women of Asian descent.
“I am angry, I am sad and I’m scared,” Liou says in the video. “I’m scared because I don’t want my family to become the next target.” She also shares personal experiences, such as a recent encounter at Target where the cashier would not speak to her or take her money: “I felt like she was disgusted by me because of my race. I felt like she was disgusted by my husband, who is Asian as well.”
Affirming her commitment to stand up for Asian communities, Liou also implores people to speak out and get active. “I need you to stand with us too,” she says. “Rhetoric matters. Speak up when you see hate, use your platforms to denounce racism, and reach out to your leaders and your elected officials to pass anti-hate legislation.”
Last week, Simar Bajaj ‘20 gave a presentation to Harker students to expand on the points made in an essay he co-wrote that was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in January. In the piece, he and Dr. Fatima Stanford argue that distrust of COVID-19 vaccinations among Black Americans is the result of decades of systemic racism built into the medical profession, and that too much attention is focused on well-known incidents such as the Tuskegee syphilis study to explain hesitancy among Black Americans to accept the vaccines.
While the horrors of these incidents should not be forgotten, Bajaj said, “you know what challenges you’re facing through the health care institution if you’re a Black individual, especially during this pandemic, which has highlighted a lot of inequities.” Many studies have shown that Black patients are misdiagnosed and are refused treatment and painkillers at much higher rates.
“If you are a Black man in the emergency department and the doctor … is not giving you your painkillers, even though you’re visibly in pain,” Bajaj said. “In those moments … perhaps you are thinking about Tuskegee and historicizing your frustrations there, but perhaps more likely you are thinking about the racist doctor that’s not giving you your painkillers.”
Bajaj said an approach known as “barbershop-based intervention” could help build trust among Black Americans. These interactions, in which Black patients are cared for by Black health care professionals, provide racial concordance that has had very positive outcomes. In one study, barbershop-based intervention brought the blood pressure of 64 percent of Black men to normal levels, compared to just 12 percent of the control group who continued to visit their primary physician. “Barbershops are often forums of camaraderie for Black individuals,” Bajaj said. “There’s this relationship between the barber and those getting their hair cut that is very close.”
He also cited research performed by Dr. Stanford that demonstrated an increased interest in seeking information when COVID prevention messages were delivered by Black physicians. “There’s a lot of information being thrown at us during the pandemic, a lot of which is incredibly important to understand and lot of which can impact health literacy,” Bajaj said. “So you can see the implications here.”
Lay press coverage that zeroes in on Tuskegee and other historical atrocities, Bajaj said, can also further the damaging idea that racism in medicine is mostly in the past. “I found it incredibly frustrating when I would read these lay press articles where they’d try to [explain that] Black individuals don’t trust the vaccine because of Tuskegee or because of J. Marion Sims or because of this or that,” he said. “And I thought such a framing is incorrect and harmful.”
Love noted the importance of designating February as Black History Month “to honor the history and creativity and brilliance and love of Black people,” adding that “This is a very interesting time to be having a conversation about Black history and justice in a pandemic after the summer we’ve had,” referencing the massive wave of protests and unrest that took place following the police killing of George Floyd in May of last year.
One part of Love’s presentation displayed Norman Rockwell’s famous painting of Ruby Bridges on her way to school after the passing of school integration in New Orleans, escorted by U.S. Marshals, with a racial slur scrawled on the wall next to her. “What we don’t talk about is that Ruby Bridges is 66 years old,” Love said, illustrating the point that images of the racial segregation and oppression do not represent ancient history. “This is not a long, long, long time ago. This is one generation removed.”
Love used the example to show that racism is a structure still alive and well in American society, and that Black Americans continue the fight to make Americans realize their humanity. As examples, she pointed out that white medical students believe Black patients have greater resistance to pain, and that students at historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) pay more for student loans, a situation she called “educational redlining.” Black COVID-19 patients are also dying at higher rates, which some have attributed to pre-existing conditions. “What if I told you that racism is a preexisting condition, and your country makes you the most vulnerable?” Love countered, citing that Black Americans have had their access to well-paying jobs, education, housing and other aspects of what she called the “social safety net” severely limited.
“When there’s a global pandemic and you need all of those institutions to work … if you are not allowed all of those things, you are not allowed a social safety net,” she said. Love also recapped Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s fight to redistribute wealth and political power in his multiethnic Poor People’s Campaign. “What we have done is not only try to free ourselves but try to free everybody else as well,” she said.
Repeated exposure to incidents of vicious racism being visited on Black people can be very traumatic. “We are living in a world where every solution is punishment,” she said. “We are murdering children’s spirits.”
Love also emphasized the importance of realizing that “Black folks’ lives are more than just trauma, more than just oppression,” and to recognize “how we try, how we get knocked down, how we get back up, with swag.”
Black Americans have learned to adapt and innovate largely because “we’ve studied this place so well. [As a Black person], you know you can’t go through the front door and you can’t go through the back door. You have to know every angle.”
To reinforce her point, she quoted poet Nikki Giovanni, who said, “Style has a profound meaning to Black Americans. If we can’t drive, we will invent walks and the world will envy the dexterity of our feet … if given scraps, we will make quilts … take away our drums, and we will clap our hands. We prove the human spirit will prevail.”
In order to create a just society, Love proposed that a radical transformation is necessary and not just a reforming of the current system. Her concept of abolition involves first instilling “an imagination to create a world without oppression. It is a radical framework that asks us to look deeply at our institutions, and not try to reform them, but to build something new,” she said. “We are trying to go to the very root of oppressions. We have to look at the very structures that create prisons, the very idea of jobs and education.”
Love ended her talk by communicating the importance of being a co-conspirator instead of an ally, by calling out forms of oppression and actively working to avoid creating systems of injustice, imploring people to “live your everyday life trying to make this world better.”
Ron McCurdy, a professor of music at the University of Southern California, gave a presentation Tuesday on the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s. His appearance was the first in a series of four planned for the upper school’s spring semester. McCurdy, who previously served as a professor of music and chair of the Afro-American Studies Department at the University of Minnesota, is also the creator of the Langston Hughes Project, a live multimedia performance of Langston Hughes’ “Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz,” which will be performed during McCurdy’s fourth appearance in April.
The presentation began with a brief history of the arrival of the first Africans on the American continent in the 17th century, their enslavement by European settlers (at the persuasion of rich European landowners), the Emancipation Proclamation (which McCurdy said was an act of “economic and political expediency”) and the 13th Amendment, which formally abolished slavery but contained a massive loophole: that people guilty of criminal behavior could be placed back into bondage.
“So we know that with the 13th Amendment being enacted, that almost any aspect of African-American life was somehow criminalized,” McCurdy said. One of the most flagrant abuses of the loophole involved the crime of vagrancy, in which a person was unable to produce papers proving they were employed. This criminalization of Black life, McCurdy said, continues today. “It is no accident … that even though African-Americans make up less than 30 percent of the population, we represent more than 50 percent of the population in prison,” he noted.
During the migration of Black Americans from the South to the North and Midwest, “an amalgamation of doctors, lawyers, teachers, dentists, gangsters … you name it,” arrived in Harlem, McCurdy said. This also included a great number of artists and intellectuals, resulting in what has become known as the Harlem Renaissance. “The Harlem Renaissance was probably one of the first times in our country where white America began to take notice of African-American culture,” said McCurdy. Before then, Black Americans were judged only by the amount of labor they performed.
Artists from many disciplines – including music, poetry, painting and literature – created works that chronicled Black life in the 1920s. McCurdy covered several of the key figures during this period, including Hughes, whose work delved into the contradiction of the idea of America as “land of the free.”
Harlem also had its own successful baseball and basketball teams. The New York Renaissance basketball team (often shortened to Rens), was based in Harlem and would play exhibition games against the Boston Celtics, who they frequently defeated. The Rens were paid in checks, which would often bounce. The two teams befriended one another, and the Celtics later demanded that the Rens be paid in cash.
Black musicians in the 1920s, many trained at top American musical schools, had difficulty finding opportunities in America and frequently performed in Europe. These included singer Marian Anderson, who toured successfully in Europe before returning to America. After being denied the opportunity to sing at Washington D.C.’s Constitution Hall by the Daughters of the American Revolution, she gave a now-famous concert at the Lincoln Memorial. Singer and actor Paul Robeson also became popular for his theater performances, particularly of the song “Ol’ Man River,” which he repurposed later in his life as an anthem against oppression. In the 1940s he was blacklisted for his sympathies for the Soviet Union and stances against American imperialism and could no longer travel abroad to perform.
The Cotton Club began operation in Harlem in 1923, employing Black entertainers whose performances at the whites-only venue helped launch their careers. Due to the popularity of minstrelsy and later vaudeville in the early 20th century, African-American performers “were expected to comport themselves in a very subservient way.” McCurdy recalled a conversation he had with trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, who held little respect for Louis Armstrong as a boy “until he understood the history. And that way of comporting yourself was a defense mechanism. It was a survival technique,” McCurdy said. “Because if you came across as an African-American man with any degree of arrogance or too much confidence, that could get you killed.”
The growing popularity of jazz brought with it new dances such as the Lindy Hop and the Big Apple. As an art, dance began “moving away from the Victorian style of living, where everything was pristine and carefully done,” McCurdy said. “Now many of the Black dances … these were all dances that found their genesis in the Black community.” This style became popular with white youths, who were “having themselves a ball, much to the chagrin of their parents,” McCurdy remarked.
McCurdy’s next appearance will take place in late February, in which he will examine jazz performance practices and how they are similar to leadership, using examples by Duke Ellington, Miles Davis and Benny Goodman.
This week, the lower school recognized the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. with a wide variety of activities and class sessions focused on his life and the lessons to be learned in his battle for civil rights. On Thursday, third graders attended a special assembly with musical artist Diane Ferlatte, who told stories and sang songs to celebrate King’s dream and accomplishments. She shared the story of abolitionist Harriet Tubman’s escape from slavery, recapped the events of King’s early life that led to his activism and shared stories from her own life.
On Friday, history teacher Tobias Wade led a discussion with his grade 4 students that covered how racist and discriminatory behaviors are learned and King’s use of civil disobedience, which included viewing portions of his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. Grade 5 history teacher Jared Ramsey recapped King’s life and accomplishments and discussed the roots of systemic racism in America, dating back to the English colonies. Grade 5 students also did activities such as solving math problems based on key events in King’s life. Vocal music teacher Kellie Binney led a discussion about the gospel song “We Shall Overcome,” an important anthem of the civil rights movement, and how different singers interpret the music differently based on the lyrics.
As we approach Martin Luther King Jr. Day this Monday, may we all find ways to honor his legacy and this national day of service. Further information on how to serve can be found at The King Center and AmeriCorps.
Harker has partnered with the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS) to conduct an Assessment of Inclusivity and Multiculturalism (AIM). The survey will be administered to all of Harker’s constituents in January and will “evaluate the culture of our school so we can create a strategic action plan based on the findings, to help us continue our work to ensure we are an inclusive and equitable community,” said Head of School Brian Yager in a message to the community.
Topics covered by the survey will include the climate of the school; its handling of issues related to diversity, equity and inclusion; and multiculturalism and multicultural education. Data from the survey will be evaluated by NAIS to create a report that will detail areas of potential improvement and the school will develop strategies according to these data points.
“We encourage the entire Harker community to participate to help us gather as much information as possible,” said Yager. “Your voices will help Harker continue to be the best it can be for our students and community.”
The group’s performance of Ysaye Barnwell’s “Spiritual” was recorded and posted to YouTube as part of the annual C# Harvest Concert, which took place virtually this year. The event is organized by CMU C#, the vocal club that oversees D Flat Singers and other vocal ensembles. “Since holding a live concert wasn’t an option this year, we decided to make it virtual,” said Banga. “The structure of the concert was the same as usual in that we had acts by C#’s performance groups and other CMU a cappella groups, and we also held auditions open to the entire CMU community for the smaller group acts.”
Adapting to the virtual format meant finding new ways to rehearse and put together a performance. “We meet regularly using Zoom, but the lag makes it impossible to sing as a group,” Banga said. “So, we spend most of our rehearsals talking about musicality, learning new techniques and giving individual feedback.”
To create the performance for YouTube, the singers each recorded themselves singing their parts along with the conductor’s recording. “Afterwards, the rest of the choir recorded themselves while listening to the section leader recordings,” said Banga. “This way, we could blend with each other even when we weren’t in the same room.”
The decision to support 1Hood stemmed from the wave of massive protests that took place this year in response to police killings of Black Americans. “The Black Lives Matter movement impacted us all so much this year, and like many others, we were extremely upset and frustrated by the injustices in our country,” Banga noted. “After a great deal of reflection on what we could do as an org, we realized that there is a tremendous lack of diversity in mainstream Western choral music.” As such, Banga and the D Flat Singers’ conductor decided to sing pieces by living Black composers for the entirety of the semester. “We’re currently working on commissioning a piece by a Black composer for next semester,” Banga said. “C# also committed to donating all proceeds from our concerts to BLM related organizations, and 1Hood was a perfect match since they’re a Pittsburgh-based organization that supports Black artists and activists.”
On Tuesday, Harker’s LIFE (Living with Intent, Focus and Enthusiasm) organization held a special assembly featuring speaker, singer and author Justin Michael Williams, who shared with students and staff his life story and offered insight on how meditation could help people “start living life on [their] terms.”
Originally from the East Bay city of Pittsburg, Williams recalled growing up in a poor neighborhood “in a home with gunshot holes on the outside of my house,” and frequently being teased for being Black and gay. Inspired by his grandmother, whom he called “Baca,” he worked hard to pursue his dreams of becoming a recording artist and attending UCLA.
Williams talked about dealing with his childhood traumas by becoming a “chronic overachiever,” becoming the class president, valedictorian and drumline captain at his high school on his way to earning a full-ride scholarship to UCLA. These achievements were impressive on the outside, he said, “but on the inside what’s happening is we don’t know to separate our self-worth and our self-confidence and our self-love from our achievements, what we do and our validation.” This in turn leads to people constantly comparing themselves to others and relentless self-criticism.
After a visit to a therapist, Williams was advised to try meditating. He was skeptical at first, but later found the practice to be transformative. Within a few years of practicing meditation, he had one of the Top 20 albums on iTunes.
Williams’ initial skepticism of meditation – practiced for centuries by indigenous people from across the world – was partly the result of it being “colonized, demonized, corporatized and sold back to us,” he said. In response, he released his own book on meditation earlier this year. He explained that one of many misconceptions about meditation is that it requires practitioners to stop thinking, which he countered. “We don’t want the mind to stop thinking,” he said. “What we want is to get our thoughts to work for us instead of against us.”
He then led the attendees in a well-received meditation exercise in which they visualized a future they wanted to see. This, he said, helped people find out for themselves who they needed to be instead of the steps they need to take. “You can check every box on your list,” he said, “but if you haven’t changed at your level of being, of who you are, then you cannot show up for the world differently and you cannot show up for your life differently and you’ll end up in the same cycles over and over and over.”
Key to the practice of meditation, Williams said, is to spread the energy captured in the self to other people to effect change in the world, highlighting the relegation of Black people in America to that of lower class citizens. “If we’re just focusing on ourselves, we’re missing the point,” he said, “because we’re all connected, we’re all responsible for being a good ancestor on this planet.”
Last week, the Student Diversity Coalition was formally established by seniors Brian Pinkston, Dylan Williams and Natasha Yen and junior Uma Iyer. The goal of the organization is to help create a more inclusive community at Harker and provide a forum for students to discuss issues related to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), as well as encourage students to work toward justice for marginalized people.
After attending the Student Diversity Leadership Conference in Seattle in December 2019, Iyer and Yen were inspired to draft a series of proposals for Harker administrators. They linked up with Pinkston and in July presented the proposals, one of which was the creation of the SDC.
Yen identified a course on race and society she took through the Global Online Academy (a selection of online classes offered at Harker) as key to her realization that Harker needed a way to facilitate similar conversations. “The GOA course not only consisted of students from other Bay Area schools, but also included students from across the country and world,” she said. “After having meaningful and personal conversations on the topics of race and identity with my classmates, I realized that Harker lacked a place to have these important conversations in our own community.”
Iyer, who started at Harker in grade 9, quickly realized that something was missing at her new school. “Unlike communities I was used to being a part of, Harker did not pay as much attention to DEI issues,” she said. “At first, I did not put much thought into this feeling, but when I came back from the Student Diversity Leadership Conference, I realized that Harker did not even have one student organization that focused on diversity, equity and inclusion.”
In addition to its own events, SDC will also support the work of the Gender Sexuality Alliance as well as the establishment of Harker’s Black Student Union and LatinX Affinity Group. SDC is already planning and organizing several community-wide events and activities, including a recent webinar with Christina Guzman, director of Santa Clara University’s Office for Multicultural Learning, and the placing of a land acknowledgement plaque in recognition of Indigenous American Heritage Month in November. SDC also plans to partner with Harker’s Black Student Union in February for Black History Month and put together activities in May for Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage month.
“Besides our cultural heritage month events, the SDC will hold open meetings that allow any member of the student body to join,” said Yen. These events will include roundtable discussions on relevant topics, such as the recent wave of racial justice protests. “As the SDC establishes a presence in the community, I hope to see that it becomes woven into the fabric of what it means to be a part of the Harker community!”
Iyer noted the sense of excitement felt that the SDC had been formally established, and expressed more excitement at the prospect of working with affinity groups. “I am very excited that the SDC will be working with the affinity groups because I feel that the affinity groups were a long time coming,” she said. “Not only do they give students a safe space to confide in other students who identify with them, but it also gives students the opportunity to explore their own identity.”