CCNY’S WHITE LIBERALS AND THE PUERTO RICANS

At a meeting with several professors and bilingual education majors, one of the students who had recently arrived from Puerto Rico tried to make the point that there were many Puerto Ricans who were doing very well in school and were very successful individuals, and to focus only on the ones who were not doing as well was to present a distorted picture of a very complex society, including its colonial situation. A white professor -the same one that at at later date, chronicled in this blog, sabotaged a conference held with indigenous peoples and organized, strangely enough, by a Puerto Rican colleague- kept bringing the issue as to why the Puerto Ricans were failing in schools. As some African American intellectuals have suggested -not to be black explained to them-, the white liberal professor specialized in multicultural education could not stand the idea that a member of a community she was using -yes, using- as her research subjects, and also, to feel powerful, caring and supportive, would present a different picture of the situation that served as her reason to be. What the professor did not realize was that some Puerto Ricans were studying her.