Faculty Summer Research Grant Recipient of the Center for “race” Lecture Opening Remarks By Jonathan Lightfoot (February 28, 2018)

Good Afternoon Hofstra! My name is Dr. Jonathan Lightfoot and I am the Director of the Center for “Race”, Culture and Social Justice. My remarks will be brief as I welcome you all to our first public lecture for spring 2018. Dr. Kristal Brent Zook answered our call for faculty summer research grant proposals designed to promote campus inclusion and enhance the scholarship and research profile of the Center. Her work on the multiracial student experience speaks to the struggle many students face as they navigate construction of their racial identity in a nation where the black-white binary often requires them to make hard choices. For all faculty who are interested in submitting a proposal for the 2018 Summer Research Grant of the Center for “Race”, you have until May 1. The call for proposals can be found on the Center’s website.

For those who are curious as to why the word “race” is in quotes, I encourage you to visit our website too, where we credit the American Anthropological Association Statement on Race for providing a concise explanation of how the idea of “race” was conceived to generationally perpetuate slavery, servitude and oppression in colonized settings. A hierarchy of white superiority and black inferiority was essentially woven into the fabric of America and eventually spread beyond our shores to become a worldview. The socially constructed, illogically conceived and incoherent conception of “race” has no basis in science. The growing popularity of DNA testing seeks to locate your ancestral heritage on the globe, not determine your “race”. Even though anthropologists have helped us to understand the mythology of “race”, we are still challenged to deal with the reality of the racism that is the result of social stratification based on skin color and other phenotypical human traits. How many “races” are there? Answer: one, the human race; because we are all cousins born from a single African mother.    

I must thank the Center associate directors, Dr. Benita Sampedro and Dr. Santiago Slobodsky, who are both on sabbatical this spring and a special thanks to Dr. Veronica Lippencott who graciously stepped in to continue the important work of the Center. She is doing an amazing job. I also commend President Rabinowitz, Provost Simmons and Vice Provost Dr. Bob Brinkman for their commitment to the work of the Center. Finally, many thanks to Cultural Center Director Athelene Collins, our student fellows Ian Guzman, Ja’Loni Owens, Maryam Qureshi and Genesis Rivera, and the entire advisory board for their support and promise to make sure the Center is successful and sustainable as we move toward making Hofstra a more welcoming and inclusive campus community. In addition to our web presence, and our email address at RaceCultureSocialJustice@Hofstra.edu, I encourage you to stop by our physical office located in 203 Roosevelt Hall.

Please stay tuned for upcoming programs and initiatives that the Center is actively pursuing such as developing a sustainable campus-wide diversity and sensitivity training program. We want everyone from administrators, faculty, staff and students to participate in this effort in the various formats we envision, be they in-person or on-line. Our second and final public lecture of the semester will be given by our Director of Foreign Language Education, Dr. Mustapha Masrour on Wednesday April 4 during Common Hour. His winning faculty grant proposal explored the struggle to bridge the cultural divide among international students.   

On this Civil Rights Day at Hofstra and at the end of a very busy Black History month when many invoke the names of Black leaders who dared to speak truth to power, struggled for freedom and equality, and dared to dream of a better day when they and their children could enjoy the many civil and human rights promised them by their citizenship and their humanity. Well, I too have a dream that Hofstra’s new Center for “Race”, Culture and Social Justice can be a beacon of hope on a campus that prepares socially conscious students to courageously enter a world full of war and strife and a nation that celebrates division instead of unity.

I have a dream that Hofstra’s Center for “Race”, Culture and Social Justice can be a sanctuary for those in the campus community who suddenly feel threatened, unwelcome, unsafe, insecure and unsure of their status as citizens or immigrants. I have a dream that Hofstra’s Center for “Race”, Culture and Social Justice can help the Hofstra campus community make sense of an out of control presidential administration that is hell bent on reversing much of the progress we have made as a nation. More than 100 years ago at the dawn of the 20th century in his seminal work The Souls of Black Folk eminent scholar, Dr. W.E.B. DuBois, prophetically proclaimed: “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line—the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea”. His words proved prescient because here we are well on our way into the 21^st century still grappling with the problem of the color-line.

Without further ado, allow me to introduce our speaker of the hour: Kristal Brent Zook is a journalist and author who has written about social justice and culture for more than twenty years. Her work has appeared in dozens of outlets, such as The Village Voice, the New York Times Sunday Magazine, Vibe, the Source, Columbia Journalism Review, the Nation magazine, the Root. She is a former contributing writer for the Washington Post, Essence magazine, and National Public Radio, and she has appeared on CNN, MSNBC, C-Span, MTV, Fox, BET, PBS, and TV-One among other networks.  Prof. Zook is the author of three books and a professor of journalism at Hofstra, where she has taught for 11 years. Please welcome Dr. Kristal Brent Zook!