The students -- both African-American women in Cornell’s Africana Studies and Research Center who have asked that their identities not be made public -- got to the event, at the University of Rochester, late. But they still didn’t expect that after their professor, Grant Farred, thanked them for making the unfamiliar two-hour drive, he’d briefly pause and then add, “When you came in, I thought, ‘Who are these black bitches?’ ”
Yet, that was the response they say they got from Farred, a professor of Africana studies and English. And, in the more than two months since the alleged incident on Friday, Feb. 5, the students and others contend, the Africana center and the university more broadly have failed to foster a public dialogue on the incident and to address deeper tensions involving the center and its role on campus.
I thought that universities such as Cornell and the University of Rochester were supposed to be liberal places and that liberals couldn't be racists. To make more than a cheap point, it think the incident show s again that race and racism in American is not longer essentially about color, but about something else, which makes the issue ideological, political and unsavory much like the one of autochtony in African and European countries. Of course, it is important to point out that I'm assuming that the story is true. I'm betting in case that the Professor of Africana studies thought that he was being funny and hip which is more telling.
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