social justice

Former K Professor Wins Prestigious Award

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Gary DorrienGary Dorrien, a former professor of religion and chaplain at Kalamazoo College, was named the recipient of the 2017 Grawemeyer Award in Religion for his book, The New Abolition: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Black Social Gospel. Gary is the Reinhold Niebuhr professor of social ethics at Union Theological Seminary and a professor of religion at Columbia University. Gary is an Episcopal priest and a recent past president of the American Theological Society. He is a prolific scholar and has written 17 books.

The Grawemeyer Award, spearheaded by Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary and the University of Louisville, pays tribute to the power of creative ideas, emphasizing the impact that a single idea can have on the world.

In The New Abolition Gary describes the early history of the Black Social Gospel from its nineteenth-century founding to its close association in the 20th century with W.E.B. Du Bois. He offers a new perspective on modern Christianity and the civil rights era by delineating the tradition of social justice theology and activism that led to work and achievements of Martin Luther King Jr.

The Grawemeyer carries a $100,000 cash award which will be presented to Gary during an award ceremony early next year. Congratulations, Gary! Kalamazoo College adds its good wishes to those that appeared in New York City’s Times Square (see photo).

MLK and “Our Moment”

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Danez Smith
Danez Smith

What does the annual celebration of Martin Luther King Jr.–his achievements and his ideas–mean for the present moment, what K students’ might term “our moment?” How should his spirit apply–in imagination, in word, in action–to their now and their future?

These are questions posed by and to students by and to the College’s Intercultural Center. The answers to those questions (both continually developing) will inform Kalamazoo College’s 2017 Martin Luther King Jr. Convocation on January 16, 2017.

As in the past, K’s activities will be part of various city events on that day. The 2017 MLK celebration Kalamazoo-wide theme is “The Transformative Power of a Unified Dream.”

Director of Intercultural Student Life (ISL) Natalia Carvalho-Pinto and students worked together to shape a celebration that creates opportunities to “consider what transformative power and resistance mean for new generations,” says Carvalho-Pinto. The ISL theme for this year’s K events is “Transformative Power and Resistance in the New Century: What Does ‘The Dream’ Look like Today?”

The day will feature four events, beginning with a convocation address by poet Danez Smith (10:50 a.m. in Stetson Chapel). The title of his talk is the same as the theme for K’s events, and it is free and open to the public.

Smith is the award-winning author of [insert] Boy (YesYes Books, 2014) and hands on ya knees (Penmanship Books, 2013), and he is a founding member of the multi-genre, multicultural Dark Noise Collective. His writing has appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, Beloit Poetry Journal, and Kinfolks, among others.

His poems focus on intersecting matters of race, class, sexuality, faith and social justice, and it is characterized by a power, rhythm and imagery that invites and demands a reimagining of the world.

Smith then will lead a poetry workshop (12:30 p.m. Hicks Banquet Room, lunch provided) that is open to K students only. The workshop–titled “Future Tense: Poetry as Blueprint”–will explore the use of poetry to imagine realistic utopias in the not so distant future, and how those futures can allow us to reverse engineer the steps we would need to take to make them. “By looking at speculative worlds of some of today’s young poets of color,” says Carvalho-Pinto, “the workshop will inspire us toward change, possibility, action, dreaming and building the worlds we deserve.”

At 4 p.m. (gathering at Red Square) K students, faculty and staff will join their counterparts from Western Michigan University to walk to Martin Luther King Jr. Park in downtown Kalamazoo. Transportation back to K’s campus will be provided.

The afternoon’s poetry workshop will culminate at 6:30 p.m. with a reading in the Intercultural Center (Hicks). Students will share relevant writings and reflections–their own and that of others, some perhaps written that day during the workshop–about the day’s theme and celebrations. “The potential power of this event is extraordinary,” says Carvalho-Pinto. “We did this at Ferris [State University], and it was one of my favorite events.” The reading is open to the entire Kalamazoo College community, as is the film that will follow at 7:30 p.m. ISL has tentatively scheduled a screening of The Rosa Parks Story (starring Angela Bassett).

“We’re very excited about this year’s events,” says Carvalho-Pinto, “especially their potential to get us thinking about how what we celebrate on this day should infuse our present and future. And I’m particularly thrilled that Danez Smith will be a part.”

***
if you press your ear to the dirt
you can hear it hum, not like it’s filled

with beetles & other low gods
but like a mouth rot with gospel

& other glories. listen to the dirt
crescendo a boy back.

come. celebrate. this
is everyday. every day

holy. everyday high
holiday. everyday new

year. every year, days get longer.
time clogged with boys. the boys

O the boys. they still come
in droves. the old world

keeps choking them. our new one
can’t stop spitting them out.

-from “summer, somewhere,” by Danez Smith, Poetry, January 2016

Social Justice Fellows Named

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Kama Tai Mitchell (left) and Lillie Wolff
Kama Tai Mitchell (left) and Lillie Wolff

The Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership (ACSJL) has announced the 2016-17 Regional Fellows. The program helps leaders in Kalamazoo County clarify the core values they want their work to exemplify, increase their effectiveness, and bring a stronger social justice focus to their work.  Fellows will engage often with the ACSJL for eight months, attending training and coaching sessions while laying the groundwork for their projects.

Names of the fellows and a brief description of their projects follow.

Jesselyn Leach is the creator of #Gang4Change, an initiative explores how art and social justice can work together. The project will work with Kalamazoo teens and young people, providing them the opportunity to connect with their artistic selves in music, spoken word poetry, slam poetry, cyphering, and other creative genres.

BlackOut, a project of Maxwell T. Isaac and Lexington Everson Fate, is designed to lay the foundations of greater visibility and sovereignty for the Black community of Kalamazoo. BlackOut is comprised of parts: the Living Narrative and the Living Action. The former will increase the visibility of Black stories as told by their authors, sharing their experiences with injustice in Kalamazoo. The latter will fortify leadership and community ties through community awareness events and trainings.

Movement for the Movement is a collaboration created by Kama Tai Mitchell and Lillie Wolff ’04. It will examine and address the systemic barriers that impede people with marginalized identities from accessing and benefitting from healing arts spaces and resources. When shared equitably and accountably, healing arts practices, such as yoga, can aid in transforming the harmful and dehumanizing effects of oppression and privilege.

Remi Harrington‘s project is called City Schools and BMFA (balancing motherhood for the future of America). Her work will promote parental engagement and community integrated education for the purpose of dismantling the cradle to the prison pipeline. The work will create intercultural spaces in neighborhoods to support academic mastery through industry centered, project based learning. These spaces will also develop employable skill sets and will build an infrastructure for a sustainable community.

Chris Wahmhoff is a creator of the Edison Ducks in a Row, a project that began in April of 2015 after two ducks were adopted and Edison neighborhood kids began to take interest. The program helps educated kids and young adults about farm animals and basic urban farming techniques. The eventual goal is to transition public school food sources to local farming in the Edison neighborhood.

Profile of Courage

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David FranceIn May of 2013 alumnus David France ’81 returned to Kalamazoo College’s campus to present his Oscar-nominated documentary “How to Survive a Plague.” David has recently written and published a book of the same title, How to Survive a Plague: The Inside Story of How Citizens and Science Tamed AIDS. On November 21, the New York Times published a rave review of the work by writer and former editor of the New Republic Andrew Sullivan.

“A question has always hung over the reaction of gay men to the plague that terrorized and decimated them in the 1980s and 1990s: Why did they not surrender?,” writes Sullivan. “David France’s remarkable book tries to answer that question.”

The answer, David articulates in his history, is a courage that not only ended a plague but also revolutionized medicine, a kind of courage as remarkable as it is rare in human history.

After graduating from K with a degree in political science, David moved to New York City to study philosophy at the New school. A mysterious disease was killing many people around him, and no one was writing about it. So he began to investigate.

“I had only one science class at K, and I had to take it twice,” he told Elaine Ezekiel in May 2013. “Suddenly I’m interviewing bench researchers trying to see if their work offered any hope.” David trained himself about the virus and about the bench and clinical procedures as well as the federal bureaucracy involved in the development of medicines. He also relied on what he learned as a news editor for The Index.

David also had experience with the need to summon courage. He and his friends had established the College’s first gay and lesbian support group. “It was a dangerous time,” he said. “We had to meet off campus. There were constant threats of violence.” For an Index article that interviewed friends about what it was like to be gay at K David had to use pseudonyms to protect the sources.

Sullivan suggests the combination of David’s qualities, contacts, breadth of expertise and curiosity make him the indispensable author of this profile of extraordinarily persistent courage.

“It took years to gain traction, but the courage of the resistance turned out, over time, to be as persistent as the virus itself,” wrote Sullivan. “And the merit of this book is that it shows how none of this was inevitable, how it took specific, flawed individuals, of vastly different backgrounds, to help bring this plague to an end in a decade and a half.”

Sullivan lauds David’s passion and fairness.”You wonder, of course, how many of those deaths could have been avoided. France makes a strong case for the staggering insouciance of government at all levels, especially in the early years. He’s brutal about bureaucratic incompetence and political cowardice. And yet he is also fair enough to show that the science of disabling a dazzlingly resilient retrovirus was fiendishly difficult and that by 1982, 42.6 percent of gay men in San Francisco and 26.8 percent of gay men in New York had already been infected. The community’s own adoption of safer sex — and the vital gains activists made in pushing for cures and treatments for various opportunistic infections — made the most difference in preventing further catastrophe. But in the end, science takes time. Some made it over the line before the war ended. Many never made it. Some of us live lives still haunted by that distinction.”

Photo of David France by Ken Scheles

Conference Honors K Student’s Research

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Sarah Bragg discusses her research during a poster session at the inauguration of President Jorge Gonzalez.
Sarah Bragg discusses her research during a poster session at the inauguration of President Jorge Gonzalez.

Sarah Bragg ’17 won an award for her poster detailing research on barriers to HIV testing. She presented the poster at the Annual Biomedical Research Conference for Minority Students in Tampa, Florida, this month. Her work was awarded in the conference’s Behavioral Science and Public Health category.

Sarah conducted her research during 12-week summer internship at Morehouse College and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for HIV/AIDS, Viral Hepatitis, STD and TB Prevention. She plans to expand the project she completed (titled “Barriers and Solutions to HIV Testing Among College and University Students”) and make it the basis of her Senior Individualized Project. That project will compare the prevalence and contexts of HIV testing at public and private institutions of higher education. During all four years of her undergraduate experience at K, Sarah has served as a Civic Engagement Scholar in the College’s Center for Civic Engagement. She has worked in a weekly mentoring program with young women. She also has worked with Assistant Professor of Psychology Kyla Fletcher on her three-year NIH study on daily HIV risk reduction behavior in African-American partner relationships.

Sarah is earning her bachelor’s degree in psychology with a concentration in community and global health. She plans to pursue a career in public health and, after graduating this June, to apply for a one- or two-year fellowship with the CDC. About the work she did during her summer internship, Sarah wrote: “I was able to use the skills that were cultivated at Kalamazoo College, especially through my work at the Center for Civic Engagement.” The CCE stresses the connection between effective social change and work that applies a social justice perspective. “We do not strive to save the world,” explained Sarah. “We collaborate with communities in an effort to find solutions that are suitable and that ensure the dignity and respect for the community.”

“Without Borders” Conference Imagines World Where All Life May Thrive

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Without Borders ConferenceThe tension between what is politically possible under the world’s current political and economic systems and what is ecologically necessary exposes an urgent need for change, said journalist and activist Naomi Klein, keynote speaker for the conference, “Without Borders, Post-Oppression Imaginaries and Decolonized Futures.” The conference was sponsored by the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership at Kalamazoo College and attracted several hundred activists and social justice experts from across the country.

According to Klein, even though the recent Paris climate change agreement looked like the beginning of the end of the fossil fuel era, the treaty is neither legally binding nor sufficient in its goals to avert ecological disaster.

“Fossil fuel frontiers have to be closed if we have any hope of a future,” said Klein. “Politicians have absolutely no plan to do this.”

Adequately addressing climate change has failed since the late 1980s, emasculated by a neoliberalist interpretation of capitalism that promotes privatization, fiscal austerity, deregulation, free trade and reductions in government spending to enhance the public sector. Such policies have created in people a profound sense of hopelessness about climate change, said Klein.

“We are told that selfishness and short-sightedness is part of human nature, which prevents us acting,” said Klein. “This is not true and it steers us away from an analysis of our system. In fact, the fight for survival is human nature.”

Many local, grassroots groups are advocating steps to address climate change because they see the issue’s connection to an unjust economic system that is failing for a vast majority of people all over the planet, she added.

Klein challenged the audience to work for “climate justice” by reversing the “extractivist” point of view of the Earth and promoting the “caretaking” of one another, an ethos that indigenous people advocate.

“It’s not just ‘energy democracy’ but ‘energy justice’ that we need,” said Klein. “This leads to clean energy projects and jobs.”

She also emphasized that service work like nursing, child care, public interest media should be redefined as climate work that sets out to create a “caring and repairing economy.”

“We need to embed justice in every aspect of our lives,” said Klein. “The people are hungry for transformational change, and we have to go for it on all fronts.”

The conference focused on four related themes: Afrofuturism, Decolonized Knowledge, Sustainable Futures, and Next Systems.

Text by Olga Bonfiglio; conference photo by Susan Andress

Public Lecture Explores Historic Treatment of Pueblo People

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Nora Naranjo MorseNora Naranjo Morse will deliver the annual Phi Beta Kappa lecture at Kalamazoo College on Tuesday, October 11, at 8 p.m. in the Mandelle Hall Olmsted Room. The event is free and open to the public. Morse Morse is a sculptor, writer, and producer of video films that look at the continuing social changes within Pueblo Indian culture.  Her talk, “Numbe Wahgeh,” focuses on the historical treatment of the Pueblo people and history retold by indigenous peoples.

An artist best known for her work with clay and organic materials, she has been trained in the Pueblo clay work tradition of the Southwest.  Her installation exhibits and large-scale public art speak to environmental, cultural, and social practice issues.  Beyond New Mexico, her work can be seen at the Heard Museum in Phoenix, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, Washington, D.C.

She studied at the College of Santa Fe, where she received her B.A. degree in 1980, and is the recipient of an honorary degree from Skidmore College.  In 2014 Naranjo Morse was awarded a Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Artist fellowship.  She is the author of two books:  a poetry collection, Mud Woman: Poems from the Clay, and a children’s book, Kaa Povi.

Morse will spend two days on K’s campus. In addition to her public lecture she will visit four classes and meet with various faculty and students.

Decolonization is a Medical Necessity

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Associate Professor of Anthropology Adriana Garriga-Lopez
Associate Professor of Anthropology Adriana Garriga-Lopez addresses a plenary at the 20th United States Conference on AIDS

Adriana Garriga-Lopez, associate professor of anthropology, attended the 20th United States Conference on AIDS where she was interviewed by MD Magazine on the response to HIV/AIDS in Puerto Rico.

That response has long been the focus of her research. Specifically she studies the social ramifications of epidemics and how those ramifications influence the public health system in Puerto Rico. Although she finds much to criticize about the public health response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic on the island where she was born and raised until the age of 16, she is quick to note the debilitating influence on that response of the mitigating circumstance of the unjust power dynamic between the United States and its “unincorporated territory” of Puerto Rico.

Her work also studies the responses of the marginalized communities most affected by the epidemic, and there is much in those responses that have overcome the challenges presented by the inadequate public health response and, despite those challenges, been highly effective.

Garriga-Lopez’s interview was divided into four chapters: What is the Focus of Your Research?; Did Your Heritage Influence Your Decision to Pursue Anthropology? (which explores how colonialism manifests every day and an approach to decolonizing public health); What Challenges Do You Face? (which includes a focus on States, Bodies, and Epidemics [the title of a class Garriga-Lopez teaches at Kalamazoo College] and the fact that because social injustice affects everyone, everyone has a responsibility to understand and address it; for example, an effective response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic begins with understanding that it is in fact comprised of multiple epidemics; and What Are Your Thoughts on Some Researchers Considering Zika as the New STD?, in which Garriga-Lopez articulates the need to inextricably link public health and a social justice conscience. The former must go much further than emergency management and act on the complex issues of the latter, such as lack of access to basic rights and basic needs as well as an unbalanced power structure that denies democratic participation in distribution of resources to persons in greatest need of those resources.