Making a Difference

University Students of Color Speak Out

Edited by Julia Lesage, Abby L. Ferber director, The Matrix Cent, Debbie Storrs, Donna Wong

Publication date:

28 May 2002

Length of book:

224 pages

Publisher

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Dimensions:

233x144mm
6x9"

ISBN-13: 9780742500808

Students of color relate their first-hand experiences with educational systems and campus living conditions. Their narratives provide an insider perspective useful to anyone working on diversity issues who is trying to improve institutional culture and policy. The book is a user-friendly guide. The first section focuses on the voices of students of color and draws on the power of personal narratives to reveal alternate perspectives that illuminate and contest the dominant cultures often hidden beliefs about race, culture, institutional goals and power. Following the narratives, contextualizing essays and a lengthy appendix provide further valuable resources and concrete tools, such as websites, lists of associations, a bibliography, and videography of autobiographical videos by people of color. This book should be read by faculty members and students (both white and non-white), parents of college students, college administrators, and executives and administrators of other institutions and businesses. The contextualizing essays following the student narratives are written by academics and student affairs professionals who draw links between issues of institutional access, recruitment and retention of students and faculty of color, curriculum changes, teaching strategies—especially for teaching whiteness and racial identity formation, campus climate, and the relation between an individual institution's history of dealing with race to developments in public policy.

Chapter 1 Preface: Genesis of This Project
Chapter 2 Acknowledgments
Chapter 3 Introduction: Conceptualizing Diversity
Part 4 University Students of Color in Their Own Voices
Chapter 5 School, Language and Identity
Chapter 6 Hopes and Coalitions and the Realities of Campus Life
Chapter 7 Reframing the Educational Process and the Community as a Whole
Part 8 Race and Ethnic Relations in Higher Education
Chapter 9 The Tellers, the Tales, and the Audience: Narratives by Students of Color
Chapter 10 Diversity in Higher Education Nationwide
Chapter 11 A Historical Look at Students of Color at the University of Oregon
Chapter 12 Hate Crimes, White Backlash, and Teaching About Whiteness
Part 13 Conclusion: This is Only the Beginning
Chapter 14 Appendix: Checklist Method for Measuring Diversity
Chapter 15 Resources
Chapter 17 Index

Especially at a time of increased racial profiling and a massive government assault on hard-won civil liberties, Making A Difference raises important issues for the future of democratic social life, including the question of whether or not we are to have one at all. Making A Difference is a profoundly moving collection of personal narratives that intersect with numerous social justice agendas, creating a vital nexus of collective social activism—a praxis—so important today in the midst of capital's grinding attack on the public sphere. Provocatively unpacking the ideological nature of the dominant culture's 'commonsense' language about race and racial differentiation, Making a Difference offers a powerful critique of educational institutions and workplaces throughout the United States. These first-hand accounts of the lived experiences of students of color provide crucial lessons for white readers who have been culpably inactive in anti-racist struggles but who are willing to enter the dialogical spaces of this book. Everyone who reads this book will benefit in important ways, if only to share this critical pedagogical tool with others.