The Center for “Race,” Culture and Social Justice at Hofstra University

You wake up in the morning, the first thing you do is to check your phone. You have no Chinese friends, you know nobody from the Congo, but that’s where the minerals came from. Your phone was made in China, but the company is based in California. You drink water that you didn’t collect nor process yourself. You switch the lights on, but you didn’t do well in science, circuits baffled you. You look in the mirror as you brush your teeth, you know nothing technical of glass making, plumbing, toothpaste or brushes. You take a shower using black soap, you don’t know how it got to you or where it came from. Your towel was made somewhere, you dry your skin, reaching for the coconut oil: it says made in Brazil, but you have never been there.   Time keeps flying by as usual, you’re hungry now, throwing your clothes on. Labels are not a big deal to you, but they were made somewhere far from where you reside. Running down the stairs, you grab the handrail, wood from an area in America wher...

I was born and raised in a different country, one where diversity was the norm rather than the exception. I grew up meeting people from different places, with different accents, cultural backgrounds, and colors. I was taught that everyone is a person with a different story to tell. It isn’t customary for me to be surrounded by people who are exactly like me, but I find that this isn’t many people’s reality. In the past few months, I have found myself surprised by my friends’ comments on diversity. I hadn’t realized that my interactions with them were probably the extent of their interaction with diversity altogether. Some people pointed out that I was extremely diverse to them.   I wouldn’t say I am not diverse, but I hadn’t thought about it like that, because as I have mentioned, I tend to forget that diversity isn’t everyone’s norm. These experiences opened my eyes to the truth of diversity at Hofstra. The dejecting reality is that the university is still in the primary s...

My name is Benita Sampedro and I am a Professor of Spanish in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, as well as in the Latin and Caribbean Studies Program, here at Hofstra. I am also one of the Associate Directors of the Center for “Race,” Culture and Social Justice. I would first like to acknowledge my two other colleagues at the Center: Dr. Veronica Lippencott, also Associate Director, and Dr. Jonathan Lightfoot, who serves as the Director.   We have come here today to formally thank Dean Mark Lukasiewicz and Vice Dean Mario Murillo, of The Lawrence Herbert School of Communications, for being the pioneering unit on campus to offer a day-long Diversity and Inclusiveness training session for faculty; we hope this will serve as an example for the other schools to follow. We also thank Elaine Gross, President of EraseRacism Long Island and Dr. Sofia Pertuz, who currently serves on the Board of EraseRacism and the Advisory Board of the Center for “Race”, and m...

There’s this place by my apartment A “multi purpose center . ” A pretty old school kind of place, not that Fedex doesn’t still provide the services this place advertises . All i’m saying is the words “WEB CAFÉ” are painted in big bold red letters right on the window . And through it, you can see three computers . Flat screens, so not extremely ancient . Once, they were the objects that made the place into a ‘web café . ’ Now, even through the window you see –how funny time is— all they’re doing now is making the place into a storage room . I can’t honestly say I had any business going in there . There is just         a certain acquiescence to the place . The space around it felt like a boulder in a really short and narrow stream, the waves that take off a block away at the tracks of the ...