CU Boulder turns focus to diversity at two-day seminar

Imagine posing for a group photo.

The first thing you’d do once you received a copy of that photo is look for yourself. Now imagine that every time you pose with a group, you can’t find your face in the subsequent photos because you’ve been digitally erased. Imagine how you’d feel.

Beverly Daniel Tatum — best-selling author, president emerita of Spelman College and expert on race in education — used that analogy when speaking about the importance of affirming identities on campus during a conversation with University of Colorado Chancellor Phil DiStefano Tuesday to kick off a diversity and inclusion summit. The Boulder campus is hosting the two-day, system-wide summit.

“If we think about our campus environment like a big photograph, people step into that photograph and they want to see themselves in it,” she said. “When they don’t, they wonder either: ‘What’s wrong with that place?’ or ‘What’s wrong with me?’

“You don’t want either one of those questions asked. We want everyone to find themselves in the picture, so we have to get in the habit of asking, ‘Who’s missing from this picture?'”

It’s important, she said, that people in the campus community see themselves reflected in the students, faculty and staff, curriculum and programming.

Tatum also encouraged CU officials to foster an environment in which students engage with others who are different from themselves.

“It is necessary, I think, to acknowledge that most people come to a university, this one included, with limited experience engaging with people different from themselves,” she said, adding that the country is still rife with residential and public school segregation.”… What we have to do in our institutions is create opportunities for that cross-engagement to occur.”

Tatum is the author of the best-selling book “Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?” She said that was a question school administrators often asked her when she visited schools as a faculty member who also was teaching a course on the psychology of racism in the 1990s, but the more accurate question to ask is, “Why are all the white kids sitting together?”

She explained to DiStefano, and the assembled crowd of hundreds, that as students of color become adolescents, they begin to notice how people respond to them differently, and they turn to peers with similar experiences to process those experiences with race and racism.

Those same students are more likely to emerge in leadership roles and engage across campus once their social support needs are met, she said. However, she said, the same is not necessarily true of white students, who are more likely to remain in their homogenous social networks.

Universities need to have in place the infrastructure to encourage students to engage with others and do what is unfamiliar to them. It is an essential part of universities’ duties as they cultivate future leaders, she said.

“If you as a student leader get in the habit of asking who’s missing from the picture while you’re a student, you’re going to ask who’s missing from the picture when you’re deputy city manager or running for senate or leading the corporation or being an effective leader in your community as a volunteer,” she said.

Tatum addressed other issues, including how educators can facilitate conversations with younger children about race and how schools can improve the ways they teach about race and the country’s history. She also explained how diversity and inclusion differ: Diversity is inviting everybody to the party, whereas inclusion is ensuring that everyone enjoys the experience and is part of the celebration. Both are needed, as is equity, she said.

After Tatum’s presentation concluded, Rebecca Buchannan, Zainab Hashem and Kim Rodriguez took a photo with her before settling in for the next session. All three are seniors at CU Denver, studying education and student-teaching in Denver Public Schools classrooms.

They’re reading Tatum’s book as part of their seminar class, they said, and they appreciated that CU brought her to campus.

“These are conversations that we need to be having in our school and our communities right now,” Hashem said.