The College of the Redwoods Board of Trustees and I have publicly stated our commitment to support the college community’s discussion about institutional racism following the death of George Floyd. After reading our commitment at the last board meeting, I received several positive messages from colleagues and community members expressing their appreciation for our willingness to engage in an honest conversation about possible systemic racism at the college.

However, I also received a few unenthusiastic comments. Some people expressed real doubts about whether systemic racism really exists at CR or, more broadly, in the county at large.  Some of the negative comments coalesced around that notion that we have come a long way over the years—evidenced by the fact that the US elected a black president.

I agree that we have come a long way both in the nation and in Humboldt County. We did elect Barak Obama to two terms as President of the United States and both of our county’s institutions of higher education are currently led by black presidents.

So, yes, progress has been made; however, we cannot deny the fact that racism exists. With a history such as ours, how could it not? Strands of racism are woven into the fabric of the American psyche. We can point to several government policies - the enslavement of black Americans, the systematic and deliberate genocide of indigenous populations, the establishment of the American Indian Boarding Schools, the forced expulsion of the Chinese in California, and the establishment of isolated internment camps for people of Japanese descent in the mid-1940s - as examples of how we have institutionalized racism.

The protests, counter protests, and violence we see playing out on the streets of our cities and towns and the toppling of the statue of Father Junípero Serra by a group of indigenous activists gathered in downtown Los Angeles show us that we—as a nation—have not adequately addressed the festering wounds caused by racism.

So, how do we find our way forward out of the divisive rhetoric and the chaos of racism and tribalism? As I mentioned in my previous column, as an educator, I believe that the answer lies in education. Every faculty member and administrator at CR believes in the power of education and the value and inviolability of critical thinking and civil discourse.

CR’s faculty constantly model and teach students how to have calm, balanced conversations about controversial issues. They ask our students to be extraordinary—to do something that many people appear unable or unwilling to do in our fractured present—to look deeply at a problem, listen and strive to understand all sides of an argument, and to discuss it together to see what solutions might work. I am immensely proud of the fact that all of our faculty hold, as an inalienable principle in their teaching philosophy, that students must think critically and demonstrate civil discourse skills. These skills are especially needed now with the increasingly heated political, racial and polarizing rhetoric.

I do not believe the events we see playing out in the mainstream and social media are indicative of who we are or who we strive to be as a people. I am confident that a majority of people want an America that will, as Martin Luther King, Jr. described in his I Have a Dream speech, “rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed.” I believe people want an America to be the shining city on a hill described by Ronald Reagan in his farewell speech to the nation in 1989 “[I]n my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, windswept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace.” I do not believe that the divisive rhetoric we hear—or participate in in some cases—is indicative of who we genuinely are as a nation. And I believe our students, equipped with open minds and the critical thinking skills inherent to the CR experience, will be instrumental in getting us to the place these men dreamed of."

I am thankful that CR’s Board of Trustees has taken the courageous step in encouraging us to have the hard conversations necessary to make sure that we take a critical look at ourselves and remove any vestiges of systematic institutional racism that may exist at the college. As Martin Luther King, Jr. said “And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead. We cannot turn back.”

In early September, Alia Dunphy will convene and chair a student equity committee consisting of faculty, administrators, community members and a Trustee to identify inequities and structural racism on our campuses and advise me on substantive institutional responses.