Professional Development Plan
June 2003

Duchess Harris, PhD
American Studies
and Political Science
Macalester College
St. Paul, MN

No Place Like Home, American Studies

I am an interdiciplinary scholar trained in American Studies. My general area of interest is Twentieth Century African American political history. Within that broad subject, I am specifically interested in the organizations of the Civil Rights Movement, the contributions of women of color to feminist theory post-1970, autobiography, and critical legal studies.

Because of the interdisciplinary nature of my work, I have taught courses in both African American Studies and Political Science. My contributions to the Political Science Department are in the areas of Political Theory, Race, Ethnicity, and Politics, Legal Studies, Women and Politics, and Public Policy. All these courses are informed by my personal philosophy that societal conditions will only improve with the intersection of theoretical analysis and hands-on experience.

During the Spring 2003 semester, several of my colleagues and I developed a proposal to create a new interdisciplinary Department of American Studies to house the formerly independent but closely connected programs of African American Studies and Comparative North American Studies. The Department will offer a major in American Studies, and minors in African American Studies and Comparative Race Studies. In bringing together multiculturalism, civic engagement, internationalism, and academic excellence, the Department will reinforce the ongoing commitments of the College.

Our vision of American Studies is driven by a concern for, and a dedication to innovative pedagogy, civic engagement, public scholarship, and academic excellence. We see American Studies as a rubric that inspires collaboration and healthy debate about the borders and boundaries of citizenship, responsibility, and intellectual work. During the 2003-2004 academic year I will be the first person to Chair the Department.

Scholarly Agenda

In my written work, I combine political and social history with a feminist perspective to claim a place for the political voices of Black women within American Studies scholarship. My intellectual interest in this subject matter was inspired by my undergraduate experiences at the University of Pennsylvania. My activism in college has been written about in Wayne Glasker's, Black Students in the Ivory Tower: African American Student Activism at the University of Pennsylvania, 1967-1990. Glasker writes, "In April 1990 Duchess Harris was elected chairperson of the Undergraduate Assembly (UA), becoming the first African American to lead the predominately white undergraduate student government." (p 168) What Glasker does not share is that my experience of being the first Black woman to lead a student government in the Ivy League, while simultaneously being mentored by Mary Frances Berry and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, inspired me to wonder how the stories of ! Black women's activism are told. As my mentors in the Mellon Minority Undergraduate Fellowship Program, Professors Berry and Higginbotham encouraged me to consider a methodological framework informed by oral history and archival data. Their direction has influenced my scholarly agenda.

My first book project, Doubting the Democrats: Black Feminist Politics from Kennedy to Clinton is a book length manuscript that attempts to answer two questions: "What did feminist identified Black women do to gain 'political power' betweeen 1961 and 2001 in America, and why didn't they succeed? For the purposes of my research I define 'politics' as grassroots organizing, electoral politics, cultural politics, and presidential appointments. This book is an attempt to document a political history of Black women who identified as feminists, and what they have done to centralize their voices. I cover this material by looking at: Dorothy Height's relationship to John F. Kennedy's Commission on the Status of Women; the political organizing of the National Black Feminist Organization and the Combahee River Collective; the negative responses to Ntozake Shange's play For Colored Girls, Michele Wallace's book, Black Macho and th! e Myth of the Superwoman, and Alice Walker's The Color Purple; and finally the rejection of Black women in President Clinton's Administration such as Dr. Joycelyn Elders and Lani Guinier. What makes this mauscript unique is that it examines the following:
-The relationship between Black feminism and traditional party or presidential politics
-The impact of Black feminist movements on post-civil rights political culture and
-The extent to which the Black feminist movement has influenced the political behavior of Black elected or appointed officials

This book develops what has previously been largely unmined political history.

My second book project, Race and Poverty: Wrongs and Policies (co-edited with john a. powell), is a collection of essays that provide a conceptual and theoretical overview of the issues of race and poverty and their impact on communities of color. Literature concerning the subject of race and poverty as separate and distinct social issues certainly does exist. However, what is unique about this collection is the in-depth theoretical framework from which the authors and editors magnify the intersection of race and poverty. The reader can not examine one without the other. My chapter, "Where the Men Aren't: The Feminization of Poverty in America's Urban Core" will discuss the plight of Black women in "urban ghettoes" and examine the significance of single parent household at the intersection of race and poverty. My specific contribution will outline a national policy agenda for government officials, and people outside of government, closely associated with ! those officials.

My third book project, Racially Writing the Republic: Racists, Race Rebels, and Transformations of American Identity (co-edited with Bruce D. Baum), explores different aspects of US racial formations between Jefferson's Notes on Virginaia (1773) to James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time (1963). This project re-examines the racial writing and re-writing of American national identity. The collection of essays that we have solicited examine the racially divided legacy of what it has meant to be "American" up until 1963. We argue that post-1963 is the "modern moment" for subaltern identities. We track this history through representative historical figures--racists and race rebels--who helped constitute and transform the racial character of what are key historical junctures. My contribution to the book will be entitled, "Sally Hemings and Blackness as Property." This essay insists that Jefferson's well-documented relationship with Sally Hemings is a t! ext worthy of analysis in relationship to his political writings. Recent commentors such as Kwame Anthony Appiah have written about the "contradictory" nature of Jefferson's racism as a metaphor for continuing contradictions about race in America. I will take these ideas and merge them with Cheryl I. Harris' notion of "Whiteness as Property" to argue that Hemings' children who were simultaneously Black and Jefferson's property, provide a case study for intellectual reparations that provide a place for Black Americans in the political history of our nation.

All three of my book projects, as well as my other publications, have been shaped by my clasroom experiences. At Macalester I have learned how to integrate my scholarship and teaching to benefit the students while simultaneously providing a more 'seamless' professional life for me.

Innovative Pedagogy

My pedagogical efforts were encouraged by two grants during the 1999-2000 academic year. I received a Bush Faculty Development Grant on Race and Diversity, and I attended the Association of American Colleges and Universities Pedagogical and Course Development Summer Institute at Brown University.
During the 2000-01 academic year, Macalester College implemented a pilot program, "Pluralism and Unity"--funded by the Hewlett Foundation--to provide thirty first-year students with both an intellectual framework and direct experience with important social concerns facing communities of color in the Twin Cities. Along with two other faculty members I developed monthly events for students to join Friends of the College in discussing local politics, theater and the arts, neighborhood organizing, public health, and community advocacy. Participating in this program helped me to refine my concept of pedagogy.
Race relations will improve only with the blending of theoretical analysis and hands-on experience. Teaching makes this connection. As college professors, we use the classroom as an opportunity to model "critical thinking" and to focus closely on complex issues, such as the emergence of race as a modern category of hierarchy and subordination. Pedagogy is not only an area of ongoing research but also a form of social practice and a life-long, hands-on learning project. Pedagogy is not a simple matter of improving academic preparation. Pedagogy must be informed by our sense of possibility for the world beyond the classroom.

To think critically is to be immersed in a "culture of critical discourse." Being critical in this sense does not mean always taking a negative approach but instead requires naming positive alternatives and presenting desirable options to conventional, and therefore unexamined, ways of thinking and doing. For example, in a society shaped by intersecting categories--that is, race, class, gender, sexuality, and so on--the dominant logic is to celebrate multicultural differences without asking how and why those differences came to be. Developing a critical discourse about multiculturalism requires unveiling the tendency of our consumption-oriented society to turn diversity into a framework that justifies new types of inequalities.

A practical example of how this works would be in a course I offer on Critical Race Feminism. Critical Race Feminism is a new genre that is part of an evolving tradition within the legal academy that began with Critical Legal Studies (CLS). Adrienne Katherine Wing characterizes CLS as an intellectual tradition that embraces postmodern critiques of individualism and hierarchy in modern Western society. A primary method of analysis for critical scholars is deconstruction, which entails analyzing supposedly neutral concepts to show the true nature of the contingent power relations they mask and conceal. The major players in this movement were "radical" white men. Their organizing was followed by the Feminist Jurisprudence and the Critical Race Theory movements. These movements were led by, but not exclusively made up of, white women and Black men, respectively. Wing writes, "Fundamental to Critical Race Feminism is the idea that women of color are not simply white women! plus some ineffable and secondary characteristics, such as skin tone added on." My fascination with teaching, researching, and publishing in the area of Critical Race Studies is inspired by Kimberle` Crenhsaw's observation that the theoretical erasure of Black women in legal scholarship leads to their actual erasure in the law.

The students in this course were brought to a ceremony for women graduating from Genesis II for Women, Inc. Genesis II is the first community based corrections program for women in the state. The program includes some women who particpate in lieu of a prison sentence and women who are part of a probation plan. Many of the women in treatment had young children whose lives had been devastated by their mothers' problems. Furthermore, many of the women had never learned to parent, which led to a structred parenting education component to the treatment plan. After the students read, "Punishing Drug Addicts Who Have Babies: Women on Color, Equality, and the Right of Privacy" by Dorothy E. Roberts, we took them to see reformed drug addicts unite with their children. This experience inspired me to think about the politics of health care and to develop my course, "Policy Analysis: Health Care in the United States."

Health Care Policy

I taught my Health Care course for the first time in Spring 2000. I designed the syllabus during the 1998-1999 academic year when I was a Policy Fellow at the Humprhey School of Public Affairs, at the University of Minnesota. My area of specialization was Health Care, and in order to earn certification I had to fulfill three requirements:
1) Write a position paper with my three colleagues on the uninsured, long-term care, Medicare and Medicaid, and managed care. I was responsible for managed care.
2) Meet with the Secretary of Health and Human Human Services, Donna Shalala in March 1999.
3) Participate in the Ramsey Medical Society (RMS) Internship program.
This internship allows community leaders to spend two business days with four different physicians. The objective is to experience an Emergency Room rotation, surgery, family practice, and a specialty so that future policy makers can understand the complexity of health care in America. The first day of my internship began with me "assisting" an orthopedic surgeon. That afternoon I went to United Hospital Emergency Room. The next morning was spent in the operating room observing a tonsilectomy. I ended my "rotation" at Health Partners with an Internist. This experience was so informative that I arranged for Dan Hornbach, Provost and Dean of the Faculty and Roger Johnson, CEO of the Ramsey Medical Society to meet so that we could establish an internship for the students in my course. At the time, the RMS had been doing this program for twelve years with only "adults" in the community such as city councilmen, but they agreed to let the undergraduates shadow the physician! s and the Provost agreed to host two receptions with the medical experts.
The first reception was for the students to meet with the physicians to learn their expectations and to recieve lab coats and their schedules. The second reception was for the students and the physicians to discuss what they learned from this experience. Although I was pleased with how this exchange occured the first time I taught the course, I took advantage of a Mellon Technology grant to fine tune this aspect of the course. The students were required to track MN Health Care Legislation on the internet, and when I first taught the course I was not able to guide them with their powerpoint presentations. When I taught the course the second time, the students were able to visually demonstrate the status of the legislation that they had chosen. I also made several other changes; 1) To familiarize myself with the Minnesota Legislature, I attended the Minnesota Medical Association Legislative Affairs Committee when the House was in s! ession. 2) I required the students to attend Pediatric Day at the Capitol. While attending these meetings I met Robert W. Geist, MD, a Clinical Professor of Urology at the University of Minnesota. We found that we shared a mutual interest in the future of health care and subsequently co-authored, "The American Health Insurance Landscape: From Self-Insurance to Subsidies, Rationing and Turmoil," in Minnesota Medicine: A Journal of Critical and Health Affairs Volume 85/Number 1 and "Medical Inflation: New Systems for controlling it." in Minnesota Physician: The Independent Medical Business Newspaper Volume XV, No. 9.
I am currently participating in the Partners in Policymaking program sponsored by the Governor's Council on Developmental Disabilities. I am using this continuing education program hosted by the Government Training Service to introduce a unit on learning disabilities in the course. I took my success with experiential learning and technology to develop a course on the African American experience in Paris.

A Stroll Through Black Paris

Between 2000 and 2003 I have travelled abroad on eight occasions to consider the relationship of Black Americans to the world. I had the opportunity to visit the University of Capetown in South Africa and wrote an article that argued that the regressive state of sexual politics for Black women in South Africa can be compared to the situation of Black American women at Seneca Falls. I also visited Miyagi University in Sendai Japan. After this trip I wrote an article that challenged the idea that Black US/Japanes relations have changed in the last decade. In this article I outline the manifestation of the Black "Other" in responses to changes in the Japanese social and political-economic landscape. My particular interest was in the stereotype of the Black male rapist and the fact that Japanese contemporary discourse on Blackness not only decontextualizes Blackness, but depoliticizes it. After looking at less-hopeful situations, I was i! nspired to teach a course about a nation where some Black Americans felt at home abroad. My course "The Politics of Exile: Blacks in Paris" is just one example of my desire to frame an issue--political exile--in terms that demand an understanding of the complex interactions between and among history, global relations, intellectual commitments, and identity. The international community at Macalester has encouraged me to think about Black identity globally.
In my Blacks in Paris course we looked at the relationship that Blacks have had to France in the Twentieth Century. The students were able to participate in a one week walking tour of Black Paris, or publish a "home page" about a Black female literary expatriate.
Half of the class did a one week study tour in Paris. Our first tour "Jazz, Big Band and Bebop in 1920s-1930" was in the 9th District (Montmarte/Pigalle). We walked along Rue de Clichy where the first Jazz in Paris was played at the Casino de Paris for the 369th Harlem Infantry Regiment. We also saw where jazz musicians Sidney Bechet, Bud Powell performed. We also explored Rue Fontaine which was considered the Black section of Montmarte where the singers Josephine Baker and Bricktop performed. Our second tour, "Writers, Artists, Intellectuals" was in the 5th and 6th Districts (Latin Quarter/St. Germain-des-Pres). We saw where Chester Himes wrote La Reine des Pommes on rue Git-le-Coeur, the homes of James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Gertrude Stein, Henry O. Tanner, Meta Vaux Warrick, Lois Mailou Jones, Palmer Hayden, Hale Woodruff, and Archibald Motley. Our third tour, "Africans in Paris" was in the 18th District (Barbes). This section of Pari! s is the north-end Goutte d'Or area and is where many African immigrants still reside. We also met with an African American expatriate painter, visited the African Art museum, The Musee Dapper, and attended a lecture at the Sorbonne by Professor Michel Fabre.
The other half of the class worked with Voices From the Gaps. This is a World Wide Web project that focuses on the lives and works of women writers of color in North America. The Voices project is made possible through an ongoing collaborative effort between faculty and students in the Program in American Studies <http://cla.umn.edu/american/american.html> at the University of Minnesota <http://www.umn.edu/tc/>. In addition, this site relies upon students and scholars from around the world to contribute author "home pages" for women writers of color. Each author page presents biographical, critical and bibliographical information about the writer as well as images and quotes pertinent to her life and works. Each page includes, in addition, links to other resources on the World Wide Web which contain significant information about that writer. Author pages are organized along a set of four indices: by na! me <authorname.html>, place of birth <authormap.htmIn addition to the author pages, which represent the heart of this website, there is a list of Related Sites on the World Wide Web <WWWSites.html> which points to general (i.e., not particular to a single author) Web resources that relate to the study of women writers of color.

Curricular Objectives

The Voices project was designed primarily to serve as an active learning component in the classroom where the works of women writers of color are read and studied. Thus, not only can students access the information provided on this site; they can also participate in shaping the site by contributing a page on a writer of their choice. In this way student work, rather than ending up in a file drawer or the wastepaper basket, becomes part of the wealth of knowledge that is accessible to anyone on the World Wide Web. And students who perceive that their labor matters in a concrete way will have a greater stake in the work they do.
In addition to the curricular component discussed above, the Voices project is also meant to provide a supplementary informational resource to students and readers. Although there are a number of online resources that focus on particular women writers of color, there was, before the advent of Voices From the Gaps, no single World Wide Web site devoted to this field of study. The material on this site provides a context for better understanding an author's work. These individual contexts, in turn, combine to help the reader understand the larger social context in which women of color have come to voice in North America.
To date the Voices project has been used successfully in a number of classrooms at the University of Minnesota. On April 15, 2003 I received a $3600 Got Syergy? grant from the College's Center for Scholarship and Teaching to launch this program at Macalester. The Got Synergy? grants are for faculty who are exploring a new way of integrating scholarship and teaching. My use of this project in my Blacks in Paris course fits into my commitment to public scholarship.

Public Scholarship

In January 2003, I spent 16 days traveling throughout the Southern United States teaching about the Civil Rights Movement, under the auspices of the Higher Education Consortium for Urban Affirs (HECUA). This consortium of 16 colleges and universities that provide off-campus study programs. My course was an intensive, field study that focused on the African-American civil rights movement.

To prepare for this course I participated in the Gustavus Adolphus College Faculty Development Program entitled, "Service Learning for Social Justice--Northern Ireland: Democracy and Social Justice" at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland Queen's University in Belfast in Northern Ireland, UNESCO School of Education, University of Ulster at Coleraine.

The reason why I participated in this seminar is because Nationalists in Northern Ireland have identified with Black American civil rights activists for years. Ties between the two struggles go back for over a century, from the time escaped Black slave Frederick Douglass arrived in Ireland in 1845 to campaign for support for the antislavery movement in the U.S. Douglass addressed a political meeting with Daniel O'Connell at Liberty Hall in Dublin, and rallied support for the abolitionist cause in Tipperary, Wexford, and Belfast. By the mid-1960's, many young Nationalists in Northern Ireland drew parallels between their struggle and the push for civil rights by Blacks in the United States. In many ways the two movements have faced similar challenges--both grappling with the limits of non-violence.

Protestors at the first filmed civil rights march in N.Ireland, Derry on October 5, 1968, echoed the demands of Black Americans in calling for police reform, in chanting "One Man, One Vote," and in singing "We Shall Overcome." Two weeks after Bloody Sunday in 1972, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, founded by Dr. Martin Luther King, dispatched the senior officials to Belfast to take part in protest marches and to speak at a Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) meeting. Bernard Lee, a veteran of the Atlanta sit-ins and a close associate of Dr. King's, was part of the group which included Juanita Abernathy, wife of the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, another key King confidante. Juanita Abernathy told the NICRA conference that "the struggle for Irish freedom is the same struggle as that going on in the U.S." I wanted the students to learn that The Royal Ulster Constabulary and their tactics of violence have been likened to Bull Connor and George Wallace in Alab! ama during the Civil Rights movement.

I taught the course using the HECUA pedagogical model. There are four elements to this model. The course is interdisciplinary, meaning that I drew from the fields of history, political science, literature, the arts, and legal studies to make sense of the Civi l Rights Movement. Secondly, the course treated theory and practice as interrelated concepts. In addition to this, the course was experiential and the students met with social justice practitioners. Finally, the course was holistic in that I asked the students to think of the history and consequences of the Civil Rights Movement and to think of themselves as citizen learners and actors upon history .

On January 2, 2003 I met with nineteen students from the Universitry of St. Catherine's, St Olaf College and Macalester College of Minnesota, and Williams College of Massachusetts. The students were undergraduates who represented all four classifications. They were 4 white male, 11 white female, 2 African American female, one Latina, and one Philipina. The students were required to read Anne Moody's Coming of Age in Mississippi. On the first day I gave a 90 minute lecture that covered Reconstruction, and The Age of Jim Crow up to Brown v. Board of Education. I found that the students were quite knowledgeable about Reconstruction to the Harlem Renaissance, but across all four colleges they lacked knowledge about the urban north in the 1920s other than Harlem, and had very little knowledge about the New Deal. After a guest lecture about narratives we watched Freedom Song. The next day Chuck McDew one of the five remaining original founders from SNC! C who consulted for Freedom Song spoke to our class. I then took the students to Wilson Library at the University of Minnesota for a library class to assist them with their comparative press analysis assignment. The students were required to compare and contrast how their group's assigned events were written about in the international press, the mainstream US press, and the "Negro" press. The purpose of this assignment was threefold: First, students would increase their skills at library and document reseacrh. Second, students would analyze the role that different media outlets played in informing the public about the events of the Civil Rights Movement. Third, the students were asked to analyze how different ideologies and interests are represented in media sources. We asked them to articluate the "lens" or perspective that each pres is writing from and how they tell "history." The students were broken into groups and were allowed to pick one topic. They were given five choices.

1) Bloody Sunday in Selma, AL USA and Bloody Sunday in Londonderry/Derry, Northern Ireland
2) The assassination of Malcom X and the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.
3) The 1963 Marh on Washington and the 1995 Million Man March
4) The 1964 Democratic Convention in Atlantic City, NJ and the 2000 Presidential Election
5) The 1965 Watts Riots and the Los Angeles Rebellion of 1992

With their primary assignment in hand, a foundational lecture, and a session with Mr. McDew who lives in Minneapolis/St. Paul, we were ready to depart on our 16 day bus trip. On the road we watch Volume one of the Eyes on the Prize Documentary series and held discussion sessions on the bus. On January 5 we arrived at the Highlander Center for Education and Research. On the 5th and 6th we dealt with the issue of social justice. We tackled questions such as, "What are the differences between nonviolence as a philosophy of life and nonviolence as a tactic?" I broke the students into four groups and told them that they were to outline the strategies of the Southern Civil Rights Workers in one of the following movements: 1) Misissippi voter registration, 2) Montgomery bus boycott, 3) the Little Rock desegregation and 4) the North Carolina lunch counter sit-in. They were to discuss what each movement's theory of justice was and where that theory intersected and/or compe! ted with the political theories from the Enlightenment that they had read about. On the evening of the 6th we met with Guy and Candie Carawan who sponsored "Sing for Freedom" workshops in the '60s. Our group learned lyrics to freedom songs, and learned the history of how changing the words to a traditional Gospel song such as, "I'm gonna sit at the Welcome Table" became a great luch counter song once a few of the words were cahnged. Candie Carawan spoke about her time as an exchange student to Fisk, and helped my predominately white group grapple withh the role of whites in the Civil Rights Movement. On January 7th we went to Atlanta and had a tour of Historicaly Black Clark/Atlanta University. The next day in Atlanta the students tour the Martin Luther King Center where "Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America" was on exhibit. This was one of the most difficult days of the course. Before we left Atlanta, the students were able to conduct research at the! Auburn Avenue Research Center which has holdings of "Negro" presses that are not available in Minnesota.

We then departed for Birmingham where students did what is called a DRIE exercise. In the pedagogical world of HECUA, DRIE stands for Describe React Interpret and Evaluate. After spending the morning in Kelly Ingram Park and the Civil Rights Institute, the students were asked to walk and observe downtown Birmingham between Noon and three pm. Their task was to stop and simply observe two specific points on their walk. I determined that "observation" includes talking to people. The students were instructed to choose a site (such as a barber shop) and to tell the citizens that they are students exploring exploring Birminham as part of a course on the Civil Rights Movement, and to try to engage the people in conversation. The students were then asked to report back to the group by describing, reacting, interpreting, and evaluating. As an African American faculty member who has always taught at a predominately white institution, this exercise was fascinating. I was amazed! to see what a difficult time the students had with approaching Black Americans in Black American spaces. Although this was a challenge, most of the students rose to the occasion, and realized what a politicized and informative space a barber shop can be. That evening we watched Spike Lee's "Four Little Girls."
We then travelled to Montgomery, Alabama. In Montgomery we attended services as Holt Street Baptist church. This was a site where the students could experience first hand that politics, music and religion intersect. If I were to do this study tour again, I would have assigned a reading that outlined the relationship of the Black church to Civil Rights Activism.

The first week of our tour, lead to what I believed to be the highlight: Selma. Before we left Montgomery the students read, "Into Selma" and "Bloody Sunday" by John Lewis. As we rode on our bus (whuch had TV/VCRS) into Selma, the students watched Eyes on the Prize tape Volume 1 #6 "Bridge To Freedom." This tape is about SNCC worker John Lewis trying to get citizens to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in a protest for voting rights in 1965. As we are watching documentary footage of Civil Rights workers attempting to cross the bridge, we were driving into Selma over the bridge. We proceeded to take a walking tour throughout Selma that included historicla markers outside of Brown's Chapel, the only place that Malcolm X spoke in the South. We then toured the Voting Rights Museum which was "curated" by members of the community. The highlight of the day was meeting with the Mayor of Selma, James Perkins. Mr. Perkins was elected in 2000 and he is the first Black mayor of Selma. Th! e students were amazed to learn that he defeatd the segregationist Mayor of 36 years, Joseph Smitherman, who was in the Eyes on The Prize footage referring to Dr. King as Martin Luther Coon. The students were able to learn about the History and Consequences of organizing over a forty year time period.
This point in the trip was a turning point for the students both emotionally and intellectually. Before the trip began, the majority of the students were resistent to Black power. They interpreted Black Power to mean Black domination over whites as opposed to self-determination. After we discussed Malcolm X's speech at Brown's chapel and watched the documentary, Malcom X: Make it Plain as well as At the River I Stand, the students were prepared to travel to Memphis, cope with the assasination of King and learn about how SNCC evolved into the Panthers and saw themselves as the children of Malcolm. I was able to share my research with the students to help them undertsand this time period. In fact, I have published "From Kennedy to Combahee: Black Feminist Activism from 1960 to 1980" in African-American Women in the Civil Rights-Black Power Movement, Co-Edite! d by V.P. Franklin and Bettye Collier-Thornas, New York University Press.

For me, one of the most difficult points in the trip was visiting Andrew Jackson's plantation in Nashville. The Hermitage was one of the few places that I did not pre-site visit. I was excited about the archaeological aspects of the plantation but troubled by the cognitive dissonance of aesthetic beauty juxtapoed to an ugly history. My teaching fellow from Gustavus Adolphus, Elizabeth Baer was able to use Lucile Clifton's poem, "At the Cemetary" to sooth my psychological cacophony. Once we were in Chicago, I was troubled by the dichotomy that the students had posed: the Hermitage was bondage and that the Robert Taylor Homes were freedom. It felt more complicated than that. Finally, when we returned to the Twin Cities we met with one of the attorneys who had worked on the Minneapolis NAACP desegregation case of 1995-2001. This was a case that used Gary Orfield's research on the resegregation of American schools. We concluded our course by celebrating Martin Luther K! ing Day with Dr. Mary Frances Berry, seeing the "In the Spirit of Martin" exhibit at the Weisman art museum, and finally watching Spike Lee's "Get on The Bus". This was a nice way to close the course because we wanted the students to think about the legacy of the CRM as it relates to contemporary organizing in events such as the Million Man March and we could all relate to a very long bus trip.

Although I would consider the Civil Rights project to be my "signature course" I have begun to challenge the Black/white binary in my "Race, Ethncity, and Politics" course where I incorporate Puerto Rican, Chicano, Ojibwe, and Vietnamese stories to provide a more comprehensive understanding of America. To interrogate the notion of "whiteness" we discussed Susie Guilory Phipps, a Louisina woman who believed that she was white until she saw her birth certificate that indicated that she was Negro. Horrified by this concept, she spent thousand of dollars to sue to become white. Ms. Phipps "lost" her case and took to her bed and became ill.

When I first presented this legal case, the students assumed that it happened during the 1880s, as opposed to the 1980s. This sparked a discussion on race and whiteness. We asked ourselves, is there a difference between one's social relaity and one's legal reality when it comes to race? What exactly does it mean to be white, and why would social whiteness carry enough value for someone to reverse legal Blackness? These questions helped us think about Piri Thomas' notion of being caught between two sticks (Puerto Rican and Black identity), and how his "Latino" experience is different from Chicanos in the Southwest because of their geography, homeland, and political history. We viewed Incident at Oglala, met with Clyde Bellacourt, and tried to understand what it means for Native peoples to have a Nation within a Nation. After reading Southwind Changing Macalester alum and community activist Bao Phi '97 urged us to think about Vietnam as a place wiith people, as op! posed to a war. The students were asked to think about the differences between being an immigrant and a refugee. Finally, I took some of these students to Skyline Towers in St. Paul (one of the largest high-rise low-income housing developments in the United States) so that they could "witness" racialized poverty. Clearly, I can find a classroom on any street corner. In this course the students learned that theory without practice is like Susie Guilory Phipps without whiteness--paralysis in the end.

Action Research and a Post-Tenure Vision

Because I believe in a boundary-less classroom, I have sponsored numerous local internships. As a former Constitutent Advocate for the late Senator Paul Wellstone, I sponsored Emily Quackenbush '98 to work in his St. Paul office. My term as a Civil Rights Commissioner for then Minneapolis Mayor Sharon Sayles Belton helped me to direct my advisee Catherine Hetsko '01 to the Mayor's office. My role as the Chair of Governance at the Women's Foundation of MN placed Nimu N'Joya '02 with a paid position in development. I hope that my newest work with the Council on Black Minnesotans will lead to more student opportunities.
One possible post-tenure project would be to take students to the United Nations. I would collaborate with my colleague who teaches Global Governance which is a course that deals largely with the UN and other elements of the institutional architecture of global politics. Another major theme of this course is civic or democratic engagement -- particularly in the context of the evolving nature of both global civil society and the interface between global civil society and governance institutions such as the UN. I would like to add a 'practicum' or experiential learning component that gets our students out into the 'real' world of politics. This has always posed special challenges to the International Relations faculty, who simply don't have the option of having their students do an internship or service-learning course with a local NGO. I am thinking of adapting a UN/Spring break component into one of our existing courses or making it a stand alone J-term offering. I thi! nk that this is particularly relevant given our current political climate and the fact that Kofin Annan is a Macalester alum.

Administrative Leadership

I believe that my presence is felt on campus not only with students, but also with my colleagues. During the 2000-2001 academic year I participated in the Bush sponsored Teaching and Advising Seminar, the Hewlett Foundation Pluralism and Unity Program, Mellon Minority Undergraduate Fellowship Program, Hughes Summer Science Institute, and last but not least Coordinated the African American Studies Program. In this capacity I was responsible for organizing a National conference that had a key note lecture by Manning Marable. I also hosted a monthly lecture series that attracted students to choose this field of study as an academic minor.

After participating in this level of service I was pleased to take a year sabbatical (2001-2002) funded by the Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellowship Office to focus on my research. When I returned to campus I was ready to particpate in campus-wide governance for the first time. I was elected to the Resouces and Planning Committe and sat on the Task Force of the Budget and the Trustees' Committee for Advancement. I feel that these experiences have prepared me to Chair the American Studies Department.

Outside of campus, I have presented my research nationally at the American Political Science Association, within my region at the Midwest Political Science Association, and in my sub-field; Black Politics. As a member of the Executive Council of the National Conference of Black Political Scientists I have chaired the Women and Politics section, , and I edit the Newsletter, which has a circulation of 700. However, I consider my academic home to be the American Studies Association. I am Co-Chair of the American Studies Association's Minority Scholars Committee and in 2002 I was one of five members to draft a proposal to create a standing committee on Ethnic Studies.

Mentoring Scholarly Students to become Civic Leaders: Academic Excellence at Macalester

Our future colleagues are today's students. During the 1999-2000 school year, Adam J. Waterman '00 and I received a Keck Foundation grant. This grant enabled Adam and me to do summer research on the Revolutionary People's Constitutional Convention, a topic that would eventually become part of Adam's honors thesis. In the fall of 1999, as a senior, Adam and I co-authored an article that was published in the Journal of Intergroup Relations, and in March 2000 we co-presented this research at the Universidad de Sevilla conference on the Vietnam Era in Amerian Literature and Culture. In September 2000, Adam began New York University's PhD Program in American Studies. We have continued our intellectual conversations and have subsequently co-authored a book chapter on the the appropriation of Huey Newton's speeches by Jim Jones. We argue that Black participation in Jones' group, The Peoples Temple, was predicated upon their attempts to integrate a new cosmology! that responded to both the failures and the successes of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements in the United States. We also argue that they were influenced by the emerging post-colonial order throughout Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The Peoples Temple, as a spiritual and political project, helped to give meaning to the world that was quickly emerging, and to position collective agency as a lever for progressive change. My advisee Andre Carrington '03 will join Adam in New York University's American Studies PhD program in September. I look forward to helping both of them with their Professional Development Plan in a few years. Success as a member of the Macalester faculty can be measured by the next generation.