CCNY: RACISM, HOMOPHOBIA AND POWER

After working for over thirty years at CCNY, I spent my last year as a lecturer and director of a teacher education scholarship program; organized an international conference on multilingualism, the education of indigenous groups, and speakers of “minority” languages. Representatives from indigenous communities and educators working in the northern part of Quebec and in the Yucatán region of Mexico were invited to speak to students and faculty. It was my last year at the College (am I glad I left that place!). To my surprise, one of my colleagues in the Bilingual Teacher Education Education Program decided to ask the scholarship students to attend a conference given by an European linguist at a different university.

To be undermined in my role as director of the special teacher education project -my own history in the Bilingual Education Program completely ignored by the arrogant progressive white multi nada feminist. For the white multiculturalist feminist, working with the mostly minority students was less important than her "very progressive" limited understanding of what diversity was/is all about, and her obvious racism: the people of color dismissed without any sense of shame or reflection upon her actions. 

Students were also asked to break one the commitments made when accepting the scholarships: to attend its related conferences and extracurricular activities. I could have stopped them from getting the financial assistance but chose not to. They were placed in the situation and sadly enough, chose to follow the white professor's request. "Colonization" lingers after the colonizers leave. 

It seemed as if for her diversity had to do with students' ethnicity in need to be "educated" and not with speakers identities, languages and historical experiinces or the role of minority administrators, much less with an out of he closet Puerto Rican gay man. Had I been white and straight, my sense is that she would have acted quite differently.  For the colleague, listening to the European speaking about minorities was more important than the direct educational experiences and ideas of "Indians" from Mexico and Quebec. 

As a gay Puerto Rican at CCNY I had my share of both explicit and implicit race related ideas and actions, but this time I was not only undermined by a white colleague but the students were told that it was more important to listen to some European speaking about minority languages than to some colored peoples' ideas and experiences. Racism and homophobia can take very strange forms, even disguising themselves as academic discourses or as obvious stepping stones for "arribismo académico".  Sad, very sad indeed.

(This piece was written around a decade ago, and posted again to counter the impression given by one of the participants in what was, according to my interpretation, a racist and homophobic act: she thanks me in an article for my support in her work as a bilingual-progressive educator. Bilingual she was; progressive she was not; and I have the evidence to prove it. She might have done the talk, but did not do the walk. An adjective used by the Jíbaros in Puerto Rico best describes her: "farfullera")