social justice

Greening Away Violence

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Green Dot-Trained Faculty and Staff at KThis spring Kalamazoo College is beginning to turn green from Green Dot, and that “greening” will create a campus where the likelihood of dating and domestic violence, stalking and sexual assault decreases significantly because everybody does their part.

Just last week some 29 K faculty, staff and administrators completed four days of Green Dot “College Curriculum” training.

Green Dot is a violence prevention program with origins in college and university settings. It is also being implemented across the entire U.S. Air Force, on installations across all other branches of the military, and in communities and organizations in all 50 states and internationally.

The program is designed to enlist entire communities in order to spread the work and the joy that comes with it. And it works! In a five-year longitudinal study, Green Dot was shown to reduce violence perpetration by up to 50 percent in Kentucky high schools. Other studies found a 17 percent reduction in colleges, and additional research is being funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to study the effect of Green Dot in communities and additional colleges.

The 29 trainers will contribute to the planning and implementation of bystander education sessions for students (the first is set for late April) and Green Dot overview sessions for faculty, staff, administrators and students. Bystanders are trained to safely use words and actions to address or prevent “red dots.” In the program’s iconography, a red dot is any person’s choice to harm another person with words or actions. In any environment, or map, enough red dots create a norm where violence is tolerated. Green dots are small actions to intervene when a red dot is occurring or to prevent the likelihood of red dots at all. Small as they may be, Green Dot words and actions draw their power from the large numbers of people who commit to speak or do them. Together, enough Green Dots can change “worlds,” small and large.

Small acts and everyone doing their part is the key to the program’s success. Last week’s faculty and staff training included an array of work lives and “spheres of influence” that nearly covers the campus map, so the Green Dot greening of K is off to a broad and excellent start.

Early participants and Green Dot educators included (l-r)–front row (seated): Ellen Lassiter Collier, Gender Equity; Liz Smith ’73, Library, Katie Miller, Athletics (Women’s Basketball); Leslie Burke, Library; Miasha Wilson, Business Office; Kenlana Ferguson, Counseling Center, Erika Driver, Counseling Center; Laura Livingstone-McNelis ’89, Theatre Arts; Brittany Liu, Psychology; back row (standing): Jessica Ward, Registrar’s Office, Morgan Mahdavi ’14, Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership; Jeanne Hess, Physical Education (Volleyball); Josh Moon, Educational Technology; Narda McClendon, Center for International Programs; Andrew Grayson ’10, Admission; Elizabeth Manwell, Classics; Bryan Goyings ’04, Athletics (Women’s Soccer); Jax Gardner, Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership; Heather Dannison, Counseling Center; Jason Lintjer, Athletics (Men’s and Women’s Swimming); Marcie Weathers, Facilities Management; Franki Hand, Media Services; Jay Daniels ’13, Athletics (Men’s and Women’s Swimming); Dan Kibby ’90, Computer Programming; Tim Young, Security, Karen Joshua Wathel, Student Development, Heather Garcia, Center for International Programs; Melissa Emmal, Green Dot, Washington, D.C.; Sirajah Raheem, Green Dot, Atlanta, Georgia. Not pictured are Stacy Nowicki, Library, and Jim VanSweden ’73, College Communication.

Funding for Kalamazoo College’s Green Dot efforts comes from the State of Michigan Campus Sexual Assault Grant Program.

Why Neibuhr? Why Now?

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Students Work with Former K Visiting Professor Jeremy SabellaSeveral students from Visiting Instructor of Art Danny Kim‘s videography classes had the opportunity to interview Jeremy Sabella, author of the companion book  of the new documentary, “An American Conscience: The Reinhold Niebuhr Story.”

The K students asked the questions and did all of the sound and camera work required for the interview. They focused on the reasons the filmmakers chose to tell Neibuhr’s story. Their interview will be featured on the film’s website in coming weeks. The documentary film is currently screening in select locations this spring and will air on PBS later this year. It features interviews with many internationally recognized historians and scholars, including former Kalamazoo College professor Gary Dorrien, the Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary and Professor of Religion at Columbia University.

Neibuhr was one of America’s most prominent 20th-century theologians and political thinkers, noted for his unrelenting advocacy for justice and for the incisive clarity of his thinking and writing. Presidents from Barack Obama to Jimmy Carter have credited his impact on their thinking, as well as John McCain, countless historians, theologians, political thinkers, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who cited Niebuhr in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”.

Niebuhr’s books, Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932), The Nature and Destiny of Man (1941–43) and The Irony of American History (1952), continue to influence theological and political thinking. His insights into human nature and its relationship to political movements and social justice propelled him to speak openly, and often critically, to an America consumed by moral certainty. The documentary includes interviews with many prominent

The K “Sabella Interview” production crew included (l-r): Christine Cho, Kalkidan Amare, Mackenzie Landman, author Jeremy Sabella, Madeline Lauver, Ximena Davis and Blair Garner. Sabella is married to Sarah Koenig, visiting assistant professor in K’s religion department.

First-Year Student Wins Entrepreneurship Grant

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Kalamazoo College Student Mansi DahalMansi Dahal ’20 has a vision so impressive that the Michigan Colleges Alliance (MCA) has awarded her one of its Independent Innovators Network Scholarships. The scholarships recognize entrepreneurial concepts submitted by students from the 15 MCA schools. Mansi will receive a $5,000 scholarship in spring. The overall top entrepreneurial concept will be selected by MCA in the coming weeks.

Her goal after graduation in 2020 is to open a small clothing manufacturing business that employs women who have been physically, verbally and sexually abused. She envisions an operation–small at first–that incorporates design, production, marketing and advertising and sales. She plans to begin her business in Nepal, the home from which she matriculated to Kalamazoo College.

In addition to training and employment, her operation would provide housing and food for those employees who need it. The growth of her business will help ameliorate an important social issue. “Women who have undergone such trauma are often left jobless and without support,” wrote Mansi. With training, new skills and employment opportunities the women can regain power in their lives. Improvement in the lives of women has been a cause important to Mansi since her adolescence. At that time her first careers yearnings leaned toward medicine. And undergraduate study in the United States was not part of her plan. “Nothing happens according to my plans,” she says, “and I’ve been delighted by that.” When she first arrived at K, she was considering a major in economics. However, her first-year creative writing class has her thinking about a possible major in English.

She has a year before declaring a major (which happens in the sophomore winter term), plenty of time and opportunity to exercise her liberal arts spirit. Whatever her major ends up being, it will apply to the business idea she’s determined to bring to fruition–a business she hopes to expand to countries outside of Nepal. And the profits from that business Mansi plans to invest in its growth and to donate to organizations that promote sustainable hygiene and health for girls worldwide.

Kalamazoo College in the Ghostlight

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Ed Menta teaches a directing class
Ed Menta (right) teaches a directing class

Festival Playhouse of Kalamazoo College will participate in the national Ghostlight Project on January 19, 2017. The event will unite more than 500 theatres, ensembles and companies, and high school and university theatre programs in a pledge to stand for and protect the values of inclusion, participation, and compassion for everyone–regardless of race, class, religion, country of origin, immigration status, (dis) ability, gender identity, or sexual orientation.

On that day before the U.S. presidential inauguration, “we invite the public to gather outside the Nelda K. Balch Playhouse no later than 5:25 p.m.,” said Ed Menta, the James A.B. Stone Professor of Theatre at K. “We will enter the theatre together and then turn on our lights (a cell phone or flashlight) in solidarity, tolerance and ritual connection to theatres cross the United States. We are especially proud that class of 1983 alumna Lisa Kron is one of the developers of the event at the national level.”

Festival Playhouse will participate with other members of Theatre Kalamazoo, the consortium of theaters in Kalamazoo County. According to Ed, the symbolism is inspired by the theatrical tradition of keeping illuminated a “ghost light” in a darkened theatre. “We create light for the challenging times ahead,” he said.

“Theatre is never apolitical,” he added. “And throughout history–from Greek tragedy to the WPA’s Federal Theatre Project to the Market Theatre in Johannesburg, South Africa–plays and performances have helped create conditions for political and social change.”

The Nelda K. Balch Playhouse is located on the campus of Kalamazoo College, on the corner of Academy and Thompson Streets, near the parking lot between the Light Fine Arts building and the Dow Science Center.

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.”