How can we connect when we find ourselves locked in disagreement? How can we engage in dialogue if we come from different perspectives? These are among the questions that Shankar Vedantam asked when he was the speaker during the second installment of the new program ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Open Network on Dialogue. Vedantam, journalist, author, and host of the Hidden Brain podcast, had visited ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ before in 2023 when he was a recipient of a Doctor of Letters honorary degree. 

Facilitated by Charles Nero, Benjamin E. Mays ’20 Distinguished Professor of Rhetoric, Film, and Screen Studies, and Elena Maker Castro, assistant professor of psychology, the conversation built upon Vedantam’s focus on human behavior from a behavioral and psychological perspective. In his podcast and in his talk on April 2 in Olin Arts Center, Vedantam emphasized the ways that our brains work, pointing out that most anger has its basis in fear. 

“It’s a useful thing to keep in mind,â€� Vedantam said, “because I think so often when we have conflict, it’s very easy to see ourselves in a position of vulnerability. And it’s very difficult for us to acknowledge that our opponents might be coming at a discussion from a place of fear, from a place of vulnerability.â€�

Vedantam moved beyond understanding and framing toward action, when Nero asked him for strategies to call upon in difficult conversations across differences.  

“One technique that is useful is to start with saying, ‘This is actually what I’m afraid of,’â€� Vedantam said. “And you will find that if you actually are able to articulate what it is that you’re afraid of, the thing that you are worried about is something that the other person can relate to.â€�

According to Vedantam, we communicate across differences constantly, and often manage it well. But when it comes to issues that we deem controversial, we have set up the wrong model. Most of us learn debate in high school, where the goal is to win — even if your assigned perspective doesn’t align with your values. 

“There’s a difference between debate and dialogue,â€� Vedantam said. 

This idea is at the very heart of ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Open Network on Dialogue (BOND). Leana Amaez, vice president for equity and inclusion, described BOND as “a two-part program that promotes dialogue across differences, creating opportunities for meaningful discussions outside of the classroom, where students, staff, and faculty can discuss relevant, timely topics while building empathy, challenging assumptions, and deepening our understanding of one another.â€� 

Following the discussion in Olin Arts Center, which included robust Q&A (where every question was posed by a ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ student), guests were invited to come together in Commons for a dinner and dialogue facilitated by Nate Menifield, equity and inclusion program manager. 

A group composed of students, staff, faculty, and community members gathered to talk more about the ideas that Vedantam had stirred as he spoke about understanding “the complexity of how our minds work and the errors and the filters that are embedded inside our heads� as we strive toward dialogue. Menifield began by outlining the structure for the evening’s small group discussions, taking place at each table. Leading the groups through three brief rounds of discussion, Menifield framed the approach for each round from a new angle. Participants were encouraged to “take space and make space,� with attention to the engagement of everyone at the table. This awareness shifted some tendencies in how we interact and aimed to invite more voices into the conversation.

Kika Stump, assistant director of Institutional Research, Analysis & Planning, attended the talk and the dinner, drawn by “concepts of dialogue and communityâ€� at the heart of the BOND programming. At her table, Stump talked with three students, two community members and three other staff members, following Menifield’s guidance. 

“As someone who often speaks and feels obligated to keep dialogue ‘going,’ it was welcome to have a practice that encouraged more voices to be heard and put time limits on my own,â€� Stump said. 

One idea that came up at the dialogue following Vedantam’s talk was the tension between the optimism that dialogue can bring us together and a distrust in our potential to connect in such divided times. Consensus was not necessarily the goal of the BOND session; instead Menifield led the group to focus on empathizing with and deeply listening to other perspectives.

Colleges can play a critical role in connecting across differences, and programs like BOND offer a research-driven approach to a facilitated dialogue with the goal of expanding understanding. 

“One of the great values of college is that you’re coming into contact with people who are different from you and you’re forming bonds with them,â€� Vedantam said. “And hopefully some of those bonds will persist as you go through your life, and you might become a Republican, they might become a Democrat, but down the road you’re remembering back to the time that you are freshman year roommates and you ask yourself, ‘Can that bond hold you together when you have these things pulling you apart?’â€� 

From Assistant Professor of Theater Cliff Odle’s perspective, the artifice of theater is often the best way to expose the truth of the human condition.

In the case of the play The Luck of the Irish, which he and his students spent the first part of fall 2021 mounting, it’s also providing a history lesson in redlining, American racism, and a challenge to the audience, to ask their own questions.

“Theater works best when it is that sort of mirror, not so much to answer questions, but ask them and ask them consistently in a way that stays with people,â€� Odle said during a recent campus panel discussion about racial justice and housing inequity, inspired by the student production. “And so there’s a lot of questions here to ask.â€�

The Luck of the Irish, a 2013 play by Kirsten Greenidge, alternates between 1950s and present-day Boston, and focuses on two families and their conflict over a house. Located in a majority white upscale neighborhood, the house had been occupied by the Taylors, an upwardly mobile Black family. It’s their home, and they paid for it, but there is a dispute over its ownership.

At the time of the purchase, Boston neighborhoods were kept segregated through redlining — a practice where the federal government would refuse to insure the mortgage on a house due to perceived risk — and myriad other racist practices, so the Taylors paid the less-wealthy Donovan family to ghost-buy it for them. Decades later, the Taylors’ granddaughters can’t find the deed to the house is missing, and the Donovans insist that the house belongs to them.

“It’s a story about people dealing with these things and how these things affect these individual people,â€� Odle said. “This particular play comes out of a long tradition of plays about African Americans looking for space, looking for a place to belong.â€�

The story is also a representation of what scores of Black families have gone through historically: a system that works against their fundamental human right to house and home.

Faculty from ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ and Bowdoin College came together the week before the play’s Oct. 28 opening to discuss the history, legacy, and ongoing impact of racist practices such as redlining. Sponsored by the Department of Theater and Dance, the session was organized by Visiting Assistant Professor of Theater Elizabeth Phillips and Diana Zhou ’23 of Shanghai, and moderated by Phillips.

Representing a range of disciplines and interdisciplines — from philosophy, economics, and theater, to Africana studies, rhetoric, and film and screen studies —they challenged the audience and each other to ask questions about what we, as a society, could possibly do to fix the inequities.

Jessica LaVoice, an assistant professor of economics at Bowdoin, provided a brief overview of the history of redlining in the U.S. Research has shown that, among other harms, redlining effectively and systematically reduced the ability of Black Americans to gain wealth, solidifying racial wealth disparities in American cities during the Great Migration of the 1900s. 

For example, by the 1940s, t more for a home to move into a primarily white neighborhood, but once they became owners, their home value would decline by 10 percent, eroding Black wealth.

These housing injustices, LaVoice said, were of course only part of what Black families suffered. “I don’t want to oversimplify the complexities and the interactions between all these different sources of discrimination and injustices across many other aspects of American life,â€� LaVoice said.

Theater’s Role

For Odle, the theater and the arts can offer the beginning of a solution by opening eyes.

“What I do is I impersonate people that don’t exist. I tell people to be people they’re not, I write stories that don’t exist,â€� he said. “Why do I do this? Well, the artifice of course, is in order to expose the truth of the human condition: who we are, where we are, why we are.â€�

The Luck of the Irish, like the iconic 1959 Lorraine Hansberry play A Raisin in the Sun, “deals with this idea of belonging, this idea of home ownership, something that we all kind of take for granted or have taken for granted,� Odle said.

“Now we have generations that are in a situation where they’re not doing as well as their predecessors,â€� Odle continued. “I think my generation, Gen X, was one of the first to really not do as well as our fathers and mothers. I’m not — I can’t afford a house.â€�

And as his fellow panelists pointed out, the effects of housing insecurity go beyond not having a “place� to be; they also affect the social experience of the individual, and can depend on not just race or social class, but also factors like gender.

Paul Schofield, an assistant professor of philosophy, said he believes that “if you are housing insecure or if you’re experiencing homelessness, you’re excluded from society and from participating in our major social institutions in ways that are different from simply not getting your fair share of the pie.â€�

“Additionally, I think it’s significant that those who are housing insecure often are unable to afford the social bonds that you would expect people who have a stable household to form,â€� he said. 

“They’re often separated from their families and their friends and their children, and those who are Black disproportionately are separated from their children. Black women often have their children taken away from them at a much higher rate,â€� Schofield added.

All Systems Are Not Go

Charles Nero, Benjamin E. Mays Distinguished Professor of Rhetoric, Film, and Screen Studies, said that the systems supporting the inequities can — and need to be — challenged.

“I think it’s important to know that white supremacy is created by and sustained by public policy. And so it is public policy that must constantly be critiqued and addressed.

“Public policy takes place at local levels, national levels. And we have to be present, or at least encourage presence at all of those levels with no guarantee of a win.â€�

Redlining and Reparations

Michael Murray, the Charles Franklin Phillips Professor of Economics, studies federal policy around low-income housing. He pointed out that the benefits of economic and social status are passed down through the generations, and so is the harm: sustained socio-economic inequity including education.

“When you look at racially segregated cities in the U.S., African American children end up with less education than in less racially segregated cities. So the housing discrimination is translating into shutting down the education channel for managing to accumulate wealth over the generations.�

But what about when a government has both created and historically maintained the policies that built those inequities?

In contemplating that painfully twisted reality, Murray had to compose himself for a moment. “There’s a legal principle that when government harms citizens, the government has an obligation to remedy those harms,â€� Murray said. “We need to be looking for suitable remedies.â€�

But how can we as a society can repair the damage done by centuries of racial segregation, economic, and social inequity, and by systems built and sustained on the exploitation of groups of people?

That’s the type of question that Susan Stark, an associate professor of philosophy who works in moral psychology and social philosophy, has pondered — specifically, what reparations for institutionalized racism might look like.

“Usually when we’re talking about reparations, we’re talking about actions that we all could take today, or our government can take today in order to repair wrongs that were done in the past,â€� Stark said.

That means taking moral responsibility for something that happened long ago.

But many people can’t wrap their heads around that. A familiar refrain heard among white Americans is that while “my ancestors may have hurt your ancestors, I didn’t hurt you today, so I don’t owe you anything.â€�

Indeed, said Stark, peoples’ ordinary thinking is “that I am only morally responsible for the things that I have control over, things that I do. If there’s an earthquake that happens far away, I’m not morally responsible for the occurrence of the harm that resulted from the earthquake. Because I didn’t cause it, I didn’t have anything to do with it.â€�

Race and Responsibility

The issue of reparations opens a whole new discussion about race, responsibility, and, not surprisingly, identity.

Looking at the many cultures and ethnic groups harmed and disenfranchised by American colonization, genocide, racial segregation, and historic social and economic inequity, the responsibility for reparations would land on white America. 

But you need to define “whiteness� to define who bears responsibility. And defining whiteness can be “slippery,� according to Nero.

“It is the very elasticity of whiteness, which is by design how whiteness defines itself. Is whiteness race? Is whiteness ethnicity? Whiteness is everywhere and nowhere, simultaneously,� Nero said.

“I wonder about how something like that figures into a discussion about who is white and who has responsibility,� Nero added. “And whether or not even the capacity to do that is an indication of just what whiteness is. It is to name whiteness, and to specify whiteness.�

The surge in popularity of DNA tests and ethnic heritage mapping has introduced another complication to the conversation, and that is who can “claim� Black or Indigenous heritage, and therefore perhaps divest themselves of the responsibility of making reparations.

“I’ve had friends who are like, ‘Oh, I’m 3 percent black,’â€� Odle said. “‘Therefore I suffer too.’ And there really does need to be a definition of what this sort of whiteness thing is, and who, and how your experience in this sort of thing sort of plays into it because it is kind of a slippery thing.â€�

But when this “slippery� whiteness has been the cultural default for creating laws, housing, and privilege for generations, defining what it is proves tricky, Nero said.

In this conversation, it’s vital that whiteness not be the focus of the conversation, according to Stark.

“I think the important thing is to figure out a way for white people to take responsibility for the wrongs of the past, without somehow centering themselves,� Stark said.

This is why it’s so important that the conversation around racial justice and housing inequity include different voices, from different backgrounds. And why a play performed on a college campus in Maine might generate that essential conversation.

“I will go out on a limb and say by itself, a play, or the arts in general, isn’t going to change things,â€� Odle said. “Exposure opens up the possibility for change, and that is what we need. We need audiences that are not the same audiences, audiences that don’t normally go to see theater, audiences that know normally don’t normally go to see art. Those are the audiences that we need to come in and see this, because those are all the audiences that can become those change agents. 

“Art is not going to do it by itself. It’s not designed to do that, but it is designed to get people to think, is designed to get conversations happening. It’s designed to open up doors that people will hopefully go through.â€�

Billions in box office sales tell a Hollywood tale: Movies about Black and white buddies teaming up to defeat bad guys have been a crowd favorite since the 1940s.

Whether it’s Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder foiling kidnappers in Silver Streak, or Eddie Murphy and Nick Nolte taking down a depraved killer in 48 Hrs., the experience of watching interracial buddy films — “good guys overturning the bad ones” — gives us pleasure, says Charles Nero, Benjamin E. Mays Professor of Rhetoric, Film, and Screen Studies.

Audiences expect to see, and man do they get, rousing displays of “manliness, cooperation, love, and affection between males,� however chaste and non-sexual. In these films, like In the Heat of the Night, Philadelphia, and Men in Black, eradicating evil, whether racism, homophobia, or aliens from outer space, is simple, Nero says. “As simple as black and white men becoming friends.�

Of course, that’s not just simplistic, but “a lie,� says Nero.

The recipient of the 2021 Kroepsch Award for Excellence in Teaching, Nero delivered his wide-ranging insights into the popularity and problems of interracial buddy films during a recent ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ talk, culminating with an analysis of why Spike Lee’s 2018 BlacKkKlansman is an “awesome and subversive takedownâ€� of the genre. 

Established in 1985, the Kroepsch Award honors faculty for their performance in teaching. A member of the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ faculty since 1991, Nero specializes in film, literary, and cultural studies. He is the longtime chair of the college’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Day Committee and a member of the Africana program.

Held in Keck classroom and streamed live via Zoom on Sept. 27, Nero’s Kroepsch Lecture drew Zoom questions from several of Nero’s alumni students, including one from Nero’s earliest years as a ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ professor.

The interracial buddy film dates to the Cold War after World War II. Hollywood had joined the fight against the perceived Red peril, in the film lot through blacklists and on the screen, producing movies with anti-Communist themes. 

The first few, such as 1949’s Home of the Brave and 1951’s The Steel Helmet and Bright Victory introduced a familiar trope, the “multiracial, multifaith, and multi-ethnic troupe of American soldiers who bond with each other to combat and defeat a Communist enemy.â€� 

A pivotal moment occurs in Steel Helmet when a Communist North Korean army officer (Harold Fong) asks the Black soldier (James Edward) why he’s loyal to racist, Jim Crow America.

“The response Edwards gives is one about patience,� Nero explains. “The African American soldier professes loyalty to an American exceptionalism. America as a nation will eventually abandon its white supremacy and become a welcoming place for him. The African American man just has to be patient because America is destined to become better.�

With interracial buddy films, Hollywood discovered a way to “secure Black American loyalty in the fight against Communist appeals to people of color in the U.S. and abroad,� explains Nero. Forget the “fierce urgency of now�: Hollywood was telling Black Americans to just wait.

With that message, Hollywood had laid the groundwork for a new genre.

In Stanley Kramer’s The Defiant Ones, Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis received Academy Award nominations for their roles as convicts on the lam, chained together. “Initially they hate each other — Curtis’ character was a working-class racist,â€� Nero explains. “But since the two were chained together, they have to work together to evade capture, as the movie endlessly shows us.â€�

The messages sent by The Defiant Ones and subsequent interracial buddy films are both simplistic and untrue because they reduce racism and white supremacy to something “one-dimensional, an internal state,� explains Nero, when we know that racism and white supremacy are institutional and systemic, not internal.

Which brings us to Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman, based on the true story of a Black police officer in Colorado Springs, Colo., who sets out to infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan in the 1970s, helped out by a white undercover officer.

“It has the appearance of an interracial buddy film,� says Nero, but instead, Lee delivers an “awesome takedown� of the genre. One tipoff that this isn’t your father’s interracial buddy film is a scene showing KKK members watching and cheering D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation.

Birth of a Nation suggests that interracial friendship (between a Northern abolitionist and his mixed-race protege) will create a national catastrophe that only the Ku Klux Klan can solve. 

By including the scene, Lee is “exposing the lie about interracial friendship in the national narrative. Birth of a Nation’s message about interracial friendship — that it will create catastrophe — is a lie just as the buddy film’s message, that interracial friendship is a “godsend that will end racism and white supremacy,� is a lie.

Though Lee forewarns viewers that lies are afoot and that he’s out to disrupt a familiar genre, BlacKkKlansman seems to “end� in the familiar way. “Black and white men as friends. They can all sit down as friends and enjoy a beer. All is right in the world. The wicked have been punished. Order is restored.�

But no, it’s not over. 

Using one of his cinematic trademarks, the double-dolly shot, Lee creates a “surreal moment,� in which two Black characters, Ron Stallworth and Patrice Dumas, with guns drawn, seem to float down a hallway and into the future. They see a cross is burning. The KKK is still around. There’s a rally, real scenes of the 2017 Unite the Right white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., reminding us of the endless cycle of racism.

Their passage down the hallway “evokes the , from which enslaved Black people left the European fortresses of West Africa for America,� Nero says.

It’s an “exhilarating moment of cinematic realism� as director Lee “stamps the Black experience onto the interracial buddy film. In this Black experience, Lee evokes capture and Middle Passage, enslavement and white supremacy in America, as a never-ending cycle.�

During the post-talk Q&A, one question came from Adam Gaynor ’96, a student of Nero’s from, as he said with a chuckle, “the last century.â€�

“Oh gosh! Adam!� Nero exclaimed, clearly pleased, after hearing that Gaynor had asked a question. “That’s great.�

Gaynor asked Nero his thoughts about why the film would have the character Flip Zimmerman be Jewish when in real life the white cop was not Jewish.

Without going into Spike Lee’s motivations, Nero noted that Zimmerman being a Jew makes his entry into the KKK more interesting. Zimmerman “is passing,� Nero said. “He and Ron have a conversation about what it means to be Jewish. Ron has to think about his own identity.�

Asked about his interest in watching Nero’s talk, Gaynor said, “I wouldn’t miss an opportunity to listen to Charles lecture — he’s one of a kind.”

Gaynor has spent most of his career in education, and is now a founding partner of Plan A Advisors, a consulting firm for nonprofits. He earned his doctorate from New York University in education and Jewish studies. Speaking from that breadth of experience, Gaynor calls Nero “an educator, scholar, and mentor par excellence.â€�

At ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, Gaynor was deeply involved in confronting anti-Semitism, homophobia, and white supremacy. “ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ and Maine were anything but welcoming to students of color and Jewish and LGBTQ students,â€� he recalls.

“A core group of faculty of color, including Charles, invested time and energy in mentoring vulnerable students, ultimately helping ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ to retain many of us.”

Gaynor recalls taking Nero’s course “Sexuality in the Era of AIDS.â€� The course’s “extremely challenging materialâ€� demanded that students step “far outside of our comfort zones,â€� Gaynor recalls. 

Nero was there every step of the way, including taking students on an overnight, off-campus retreat, where he facilitated exercises and discussions, “punctuated by family-style meals and activities.�

The experience “enabled students to know one another more deeply and to feel more comfortable engaging with the material through trust and vulnerability. It completely transformed the class dynamic for the remainder of the semester.â€� 

And when it comes to engaging with a film, Nero says it’s possible to watch our favorite films, whether BlacKkKlansman or a more typical interracial film like Shawshank Redemption, with a critical eye and without having to push aside feelings of pleasure. 

Watching with a critical eye means asking ourselves questions about our pleasures: Why do we enjoy the things we do? Why do interracial buddy films perfectly scratch that itch for so many of us?

“Film is a solicitor of pleasure,� Nero says. “One of my jobs, as an educator, and I take it very seriously, is I want to encourage us, not to reject pleasure, because, you know, I’m a queer person, and I was told that that was just wrong. So, I don’t want you to reject pleasure, I want you to ask questions about your pleasures.�

And one of the questions we can ask is about the racial implications and dynamics of the movies we enjoy so much.

“I think the question is, do we ask ourselves, ‘How does something like race play out in what I find pleasurable in what I’m going to enjoy?’� Nero said. “Too often, we don’t have those moments to interrogate.�

After a summer where endless rounds of pandemic planning and announcements seemed to define the college enterprise, ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½â€™ Opening Convocation on Sept. 1 offered welcome reminders of what we’re all about.

Presented via livestream, most of the event’s speakers delivered their remarks from otherwise mostly empty Olin Arts Center Concert Hall. 

At the lectern, there was President Clayton Spencer, using the moment as a bully pulpit to affirm the power and purpose of the liberal arts in the face of rolling national crises. 

Two student leaders, Perla Figuereo ’21 and Lebanos Mengistu ’21, shared the stage, from a safe physical distance, and spoke candidly to their fellow students about how to be their best selves at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½.

Professor Stephanie Kelley-Romano and Professor Charles Nero, two senior members of the faculty, shared personal stories and hard-earned wisdom in service to the institution and its students.

And, at the end there was a gentle reminder of the daunting shared challenge ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ faces this fall as Multifaith Chaplain Brittany Longsdorf, told the community that “we are called to care for one another and this ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Community in ways never asked of us before.â€�

President Spencer

In past years, only rain has driven Opening Convocation indoors. This year, the pandemic drove the event not only inside, to the Concert Hall, but its viewing audience to their laptops, phones, and desktop computers around campus and the world.

Spencer offered greetings to faculty and staff, thanking them for months of “extraordinary work…to adapt literally every aspect of life and work at the college.â€�

To returning students: “We have missed you terribly.�

And to the Class of 2024, she shared a “fervent hope that when you graduate in May 2024, we will all be gathered in person with your families and loved ones on a glorious sunny morning on the Historic Quad.�

“If we substitute ideology for expertise, we lose our bearings.”

Then it was on to brass tacks: “the liberal arts in the age of COVIDâ€� and her thoughts on a summer that confronted us all, “repeatedly and relentlessly, with police killings of Black people and the ongoing devaluation of Black lives.

“These are deeply distressing times for anyone who cares about our country and our fellow human beings. But these are particularly heavy times for the Black, Indigenous, and Brown students, faculty, and staff who are members of our community.�

The stumbling national response to the pandemic, she said, has forced us to learn yet again, “through bitter experience, that if we don’t get the science right, we won’t get the economics right. If we substitute ideology for expertise, we lose our bearings. Without a commitment to facts and evidence, we abandon the fundamentals of discourse, debate, and meaning making.�

“This causes us to get policy wrong and hurt people. It causes us to substitute violence for persuasion. Dealing with the challenges posed by the wicked problems we are up against depends on highly specific expertise, but it requires, in equal measure, the ability to take in information from various domains and form integrated frameworks to guide policy and action.�

Charles Nero and Stephanie Kelley-Romano

Reflecting tradition, the faculty speakers at Opening Convocation are selected by the prior year’s graduating class. It’s a “gift from the Class of 2020 to the Class of 2024,� said Spencer, adding that the 2020 graduates “chose brilliantly.�

Both members of the Department of Rhetoric, Film, and Screen Studies, Nero is the college’s Benjamin E. Mays ’20 Distinguished Professor who studies race and American cinema, queer studies, and African American literature. Kelley-Romano is an associate professor who studies television, conspiracy theories, and presidential campaign rhetoric.

Delivering a recorded Zoom-style talk (Nero from his Pettengill Hall office, Kelley-Romano from home), the pair spoke about the importance of being able to pivot in challenging times, “with adeptness or adroitness� said Kelley-Romano.

Nero described his own pivot as a student. He was drawn to speech communications, specifically rhetoric and public address as he came of age in the American South in the era when the Civil Rights and Black Power movements “transformed the meaning of citizenship for African Americans.”

“White supremacy and anti-blackness metaphorically slapped me in the face every semester.�

Yet, he recalled, he was guided away from elevating Black voices by teachers while he was doing graduate work. A “leading professor of American public address and oratory asked me, ‘Why are you interested in writing about Blacks? Hasn’t everything been written about them?’�

Another professor discouraged Nero from writing about African Americans in 20th century progressive politics because “he was only encouraging his graduate students who were ‘mainstream and central.’�

Seeing how the traditional field of speech communication was aligned with “white supremacy and anti-blackness…metaphorically slapped me in the face every semester.â€� 

Nero pivoted away from traditional speech communication studies, “to African American studies (he is a member of the college’s Africana program) and, especially toward literary and film studies. I embraced Audre Lorde’s famous pronouncement that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.�

Though he never left speech communication completely behind — “I still believe that language and its performance are crucial for a democracyâ€� — democracy also requires a commitment to social justice that strives to be inclusive and equitable. “The majors I have been most involved in here at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ emphasize social justice as crucial components for an undergraduate education.â€�

Kelley-Romano talked about her experience as a first-generation college student and feelings of shame that initially haunted her during her journey.

“In high school, my guidance counselor told me I was ‘not college material’ primarily, I think now, because my family didn’t have the ‘means’ of many of my classmates. So, my academic journey started in community college.�

“Maya Angelou has a quote: ‘We do the best we can with what we know, and when we know better we do better.’  But at that point, I didn’t know any better.â€� 

Like Nero, Kelley-Romano “did a lot of pivotingâ€�: away from sports, away from one major to another and then another. “I made myself dizzy pivoting between loving lip-gloss and all things pink and simultaneously hating the mass-mediated messages about how I ‘should’ behave and what I ‘should’ want as a woman.”

Her identity, or what she called the performance of her identity, was under scrutiny by multiple audiences “and for the life of me I could not get it right. Maya Angelou has a quote: ‘We do the best we can with what we know, and when we know better we do better.’  But at that point, I didn’t know any better.â€� 

It wasn’t until graduate school that this shifted. Studying rhetoric and the power of language “prompted me to pivot my attention to critique not only the consequences of calling someone a ‘victim’ vs. a ‘survivor’ but the larger systems and their entrenched histories that put the onus on girls to ‘not distract’ boys with tight clothing, to act ‘like a lady,’ and accept that ‘boys will be boys.’�

Looking back, she said, the ability to “pivot between text and context, between exigence and audience, has made me a better scholar, teacher, and citizen.�

Kelley-Romano also spoke as a person in recovery, who has cringed “watching the invariably oversimplified depiction of alcoholism and addiction on television and in film.�

But over the years, she’s seen and continues to track the role of language in reframing addiction, “from a ‘moral weakness’ to ‘chemical dependency’ and now to ‘a person with substance mis-use disorder.’â€� Each iteration of naming, she said, “redefines the agent and attempts to decrease stigma.”

As they concluded their shared talk, Nero and Kelley-Romano offered a Convocation staple: advice to the first-years. She urged the Class of 2024 to get out of their comfort zones, while Nero told them not to be afraid of getting messy as they venture into the unknown.

“Messiness is the beginning of what the late Congressman John Lewis called ‘good trouble,’â€� Nero said. “We know you have been taught how to write the best five-paragraph essay ever. We know you can recite facts and follow formulas. But now we want you to follow your heart, informed by your head to create new ways of thinking and being in the world.â€�

Perla Figuereo ’21 and Lebanos Mengistu ’21

“We want to address how difficult this year has been for many folks,â€� Mengistu said. “Especially for Black people. We want you all to know that we see you, we hear you, and we stand with you. The injustice that Black folks have faced and continue to face is a challenge on and off campus.”

Student to students, they gave advice.

About academics: “Take a class that interests you, one that you could have never imagined yourself taking,â€� said Figuereo. 

About social life: “Although it can be overwhelming at first, try to connect with your classmates and peers. Try to learn something from everyone you meet. Everyone has a story,� said Mengistu.

And about personal life: “Be comfortable with failure,â€� said Figuero. “Seek a balance. Be OK with saying no and yes to things when you feel it’s right. Let yourself fall in love with the new things in your life.â€� 

Brittany Longsdorf

Whew. After all that advice and insight, it was time for the benediction and a “collective, centering breath, ” said Multifaith Chaplain Rev. Brittany Longsdorf. “Let us sense the sacred, deep togetherness that only pilgrimaging through unknown territory such as this can bring.â€�

Her final words:  “We are called to care for one another and this ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Community in ways never asked of us before. May we rise to the occasion with compassion and courage.

“May it be so.�

In 1876, just as the post-Civil War Reconstruction stalled and white politicians began to roll back the rights of formerly enslaved people, the Emancipation Memorial was erected in Washington, D.C.

The concept of emancipation is more complex than the Emancipation Memorial in Washington, D.C., might suggest, says ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ professor Charles Nero. (Photo by yeowatzup / CC BY 2.0 / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)

The history and ideology behind the word “emancipationâ€� are complex, ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ professor Charles Nero told an alumni audience at Reunion on June 7.

Did emancipation happen as depicted in the statue — as a white statesman benevolently freeing the slaves — or was it the result of a war of liberation in which black Americans won their freedom through their own struggle?

The Benjamin E. Mays ’20 Distinguished Professor of Rhetoric, Film, and Screen Studies, Nero approached his talk — on the life of his professorship’s namesake, civil rights icon Benjamin Mays — with the rhetorician’s attention to the power of words and images.

The 50th Reunion Seminar, organized by the Class of 1969, centered on Mays’ most famous quote relating to ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, from his autobiography, Born To Rebel.

Mays wrote, “ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College did not ‘emancipate’ me; it did far greater service of making it possible for me to emancipate myself and to accept with dignity my own worth as a free man.â€�

Mays’ description of his ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ education is “stylistically very elegant,â€� Nero said.

When Mays published Born to Rebel in 1971, he’d had many decades to think about emancipation. After graduating from ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ and earning a doctorate from the University of Chicago Divinity School, he served for 30 years as president of Morehouse College.

At Morehouse, Mays mentored future civil rights leaders, including the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., becoming known as “the schoolmaster of the Civil Rights Movement.”

Mays’ description of his ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ education is “stylistically very elegant,â€� Nero said.

ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ professor Charles Nero discusses the concept of emancipation and the life of Benjamin Mays during a 50th Reunion seminar on June 7. Nero is the Benjamin E. Mays ’20 Distinguished Professor of Rhetoric, Film, and Screen Studies. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

“He is rejecting this idea of emancipation, the idea of emancipation that is in this statue which surely he knew,â€� he added. “In other words, he is declaring his own agency, his own command of his future. ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College played a role in that.â€�

At the same time, “ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College is not Lincoln. That’s very important for an African American man to make a statement to that effect.â€�

Contained in Mays’ idea of emancipation, Nero said, were three additional heavy concepts: religion, gender, and citizenship — all of which Mays used to reject white supremacy.

Mays was a devout Christian minister, and his theology was similar to that of Latin American liberation theology, Nero said. In a 1966 edition of the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Alumnus, now ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Magazine, Mays recalled how, even as a child, he had decided that if God had made black people inferior to whites, he would not pray to that god.

Benjamin Mays (right), with Martin Luther King Jr., was known as “the schoolmaster of the movement” for teaching and inspiring a generation of civil rights leaders, including King, who called Mays “my spiritual mentor and my intellectual father.â€�

“He is going to reject white supremacy, and if it requires him to reject his faith, he will do that,� Nero said.

Resisting white supremacy also meant asserting his manhood, Nero said. Here, Nero turned to the writings of W.E.B. Du Bois and the sociologist’s famous definition of double-consciousness — the conflicting identities of black men as Americans and African Americans.

Du Bois wrote of feeling best when he could beat his white friends at school or sports. So did Mays — “I thought I would go north for college to compete with whites,� he wrote in the Bulletin. “If I do well there, that would be convincing proof that Negroes are not inferior to white men.�

At ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, Mays had the opportunity to read the Bible critically, in a way that supported his claim of equality with white men.

“I learned that God was no respecter of persons and that I was right in not believing what I had heard in my childhood — that Negroes were inferior,� he wrote in the Alumnus. He also excelled academically and graduated with honors.

A talented debater, Mays won an oratory award for reciting “Imaginary Speech of John Adams,� by Daniel Webster, a speech that emphasizes the divinity of the American push for independence. That Mays won an award for the speech was profound to Nero.

Benjamin E. Mays (middle, back row) poses with a 1919 debate team. (Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library)

“ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ allowed him the testing ground to demonstrate his masculinity, his manhood, his right to not be an outcast or a stranger in his own house — that is, to be a citizen of the United States,â€� he said.

Nero then asked his audience to consider emancipation as it related to their time at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½. How did the Class of 1969 grapple with racism and white supremacy?

The late 1960s was, of course, a time when social structures of all kinds came under scrutiny. The Vietnam War was starting to attract widespread protest, and the Civil Rights movement was accompanied by the brutal assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., and, earlier, the murders of Medgar Evers and four young girls in an Alabama church.

Depicting candidates Hubert Humphrey, Richard Nixon, and George Wallace, this uncredited political cartoon appeared in The ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Student the week before the 1968 presidential election.

Student publications that Nero projected showed deep engagement with the 1968 elections. The campaign of George Wallace, though unlikely to find a friendly audience in the liberal Northeast, advertised in The ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Student. Comedian and activist Dick Gregory, then running as a write-in candidate, appeared on campus.

Students and faculty also wondered how to contend with racism on campus, and how to make ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ more inclusive. Robert Chute, a popular professor of biology, wrote a thundering letter demanding radical changes in admissions, financial aid, and the curriculum.

Dick Gregory’s talk at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ in February 1968 was described as a “tour de force on civil rights today” by The ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Student.

One 1968 workshop, “ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College and the Disadvantaged Black Student,â€� raised questions about how African Americans were represented.

Chantal Berry Dalton ’69, a retired diplomat who was in the Reunion audience, was listed in the workshop’s program as a poetry reader. She said that, as the only black woman in her class, she went to many such workshops and conversations — and did not appreciate how black students were automatically assumed to be disadvantaged.

She said the institutional will to change was there, but it took a lot of work from her and other students of color.

“I spent a lot of hours in a lot of meetings talking about how we were going to change things at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½,â€� she said. “It was interesting. It was tiring.â€�

Chantal Berry Dalton ’69 recalls participating in many of ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½â€™ efforts to make the college more inclusive. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

Other, white, members of the Class of 1969 said they had little recollection of conversations about racism during their time in college. For some, the burgeoning women’s movement was more salient — at the time, women at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ lived under more restrictive social rules than men.

In fact, for a few, it was only years later that some white audience members understood how white privilege affected their lives.

“Was it your privilege as white people that made you unaware of the kind of labor that emancipation requires?� Nero asked them.

Many of those who spoke up during the talk agreed that emancipation, for ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, is ongoing.

Alicia Hunter Warner ’94 reminds the audience that questions of race and racism are not historical concepts. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

“Like many institutions and individuals, ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ is growing into its own aspirations in a lot of ways,â€� said Alicia Hunter Warner ’94, a member of the Alumni Council of the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Alumni Association.

“I think that there is hope for how we’re changing and what we’re doing as a community, but I do think that we cannot ignore what institutionalized racism in this country is. It is not just our institutions; it’s the fabric of the way we live and interact with each other that keeps self-perpetuating.�

Charles Nero talks with alumni following his Reunion talk on Benjamin Mays and the concept of emancipation. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

Sometimes, camp involves sitting around a fire eating s’mores. Or, here in Maine, it could be that family cottage by a lake or up north.

For ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ professor Charles Nero and other film lovers and scholars of queer studies, camp is also a style that focuses on the excessive and over-the-top — an aesthetic that has been embraced by LGBTQ communities since the mid-20th century.

Charles Nero teaches a session of a First-Year Seminar in August. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

“Camp focuses a lot on style, image,� says Nero, the Benjamin E. Mays ’20 Distinguished Professor of Rhetoric, Film, and Screen Studies. “Some people might say it’s an attention to detail that is excessive. At the same time, for queer people, it is something that allows us to recognize each other and build community with each other.�

So what qualifies as camp?

Think Broadway musicals, particularly classics from the 1940s and ’50s, with their “passionate depictions of love and romance and bursting into song as a way of expressing that passion.�

Or the Bette Davis classic All About Eve. “Every line in the movie is deliberate, intentional, and quite witty, a celebration of wit in the style of Oscar Wilde,� Nero says. “People are constantly glamorous and beautiful and saying smart things.�

Think performers, like Judy Garland and Barbra Streisand, who “have legions of queer people, both male and female, who adore them because of their ability to emote via song,� Nero says.

Margaret O’Brien and Judy Garland perform the song “Under the Bamboo Tree” in Meet Me In St. Louis, a film that Charles Nero says exemplifies the concept of camp. (Photograph by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Life magazine, Vol. 17, No. 24 [public domain], via Wikimedia Commons)

And why is camp important?

Think of the way film depictions of gay and lesbian love were taboo or outright banned for decades, how “Hollywood film was defined by an absence of queer people,� Nero says.

But, of course, queer people still watched movies or worked in the industry. So they “learned to recognize moments of style that felt queer to them, and they could talk about those with other members of their community and form an audience.�

Does camp have downsides?

It can — if, as Nero has, you associate camp and style with historic preservation in gay neighborhoods, associate historic preservation with access to wealth, and wealth with white elites and white gay men around historic preservation.

“It has helped remove people of color from communities, old people, poorer people, and has furthered gentrification,� Nero says. “Some gentrification has to do with style and camp.�

Featuring what he calls “community-based cinema,” the latest film from Craig Saddlemire ’05 follows four Lewiston families, including that of ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ professors Charles Nero and Baltasar Fra-Molinero.

The film, Household: Four Stories of Kinship and Curiosity, features an extended refugee family from Somalia, a single mother in a housing cooperative, a mother of six who has fostered nearly 50 children in her lifetime, and the family of Nero and Fra-Molinero, a same-gender married couple.

Filmmaker Craig Saddlemire ’05. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

In creating the film, Saddlemire used a participatory technique, inviting a member of each household to narrate what they see in the household of another family.

The result is a collage of viewpoints, rather than the filmmaker’s single perspective.

aired Thursday on the Maine Public Broadcasting Network and airs again at 11 a.m. on April 12.

Like his participants, Saddlemire is a Lewiston resident, and has been one since graduation. He calls what he does “community-based cinema,â€� where success is measured “according to the relationships it forms within a community rather than [by] the final product itself,” as he told MPBN’s in-house magazine, Experience.

“The stories in Household,” he says, “demonstrate the different ways that families in my life are creating family by birth, by choice and by circumstance.”

Professors Baltasar Fra-Molinero (left) and Charles Nero (right) are among the families represented in Household, the latest from documentary filmmaker Craig Saddlemire ’05.

A former member of the Lewiston City Council, Saddlemire returns to campus this Short Term to lead one of four new practitioner-taught courses, part of the college’s Purposeful Work initiative.

Along with Sarah Standiford ’97 and Aditi Vaidya ’00, he will teach Social Change Organizing and Advocacy.

While a student he started filming Neighbor by Neighbor: Mobilizing an Invisible Community in Lewiston, Maine, which documents downtown residents’ responses to a controversial urban renewal project.

Martin Luther King Jr. is shown at the White House after meeting with President Lyndon Johnson to discuss civil rights, 1963. Photograph by Warren K. Leffler/U.S. News & World Report Magazine Photograph Collection, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Spotlighting a less-known aspect of the work of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College will dedicate its Jan. 20-21 King Day programming to exploring issues of financial inequality and debt.

The theme of the observances is Debt and Inequality: The Relevance of King’s Forgotten Economic Message.

Never out of date, the question of financial inequality is especially pertinent now, given a national election season and “fiscal cliff� debate in which issues of economic fairness have been central.

Anthea Butler, associate professor of religious studies and African American studies at the University of Pennsylvania, offers a sermon and the keynote address at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½’ Martin Luther King Jr. Day observances. Photograph by Byron Maldonado.

Taking place Sunday and Monday, Jan. 20-21, ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½â€™ programming features films; workshops; two addresses by Anthea Butler, a theologian whose forthcoming book explores the connection between Sarah Palin’s politics and her religion; and performances including one by the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ student group Sankofa.

Sunday’s events include documentary films examining issues of corporate power and civil rights history, as well as the annual Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Service, featuring a sermon by Butler titled God and the 99 Percent.

On Monday the college presents Martin Luther King Jr. and America’s Bad Check: America’s Poor in the 21st Century, Butler’s keynote address; a debate between ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ and Morehouse College students; a play; workshops; and the Sankofa event.

• See a complete schedule of King Day programming at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½.
• .
• Learn more about Anthea Butler.
• Learn more about Sankofa.
  

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All King Day events are open to the public at no cost, but a few do require tickets for admission; see the complete schedule for details. For more information, please call 207-786-6400.

In selecting this year’s theme, “we wanted to call attention to the fact that the Rev. Dr. King’s vision included economic justice,� explains Charles Nero, chair of the college’s King Day committee and a professor of rhetoric and American cultural studies.

“The people hit hard in the Great Recession have been middle- and working-class folks, the poor and people without substantial assets, such as students.�

The 2012 Sankofa performance at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College.

King, who at the time of his assassination was planning a “Poor People’s Campaign� that would march on Washington, D.C., had a clear view of the interrelatedness of poverty and injustice.

But, as , “Many never learned about King’s crusade for a guaranteed annual income or have forgotten he was assassinated while supporting the working poor — sanitation workers on strike [in Memphis] because of low wages and dangerous working conditions.â€�

For the public at large, King Day at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ will provide “the opportunity to see a college community engage with a major social issue of our time,â€� says Nero.

“Our keynote speaker, Dr. Butler, will challenge us in new ways to recommit ourselves to King’s vision of economic justice. Our debate with Morehouse College addresses the issue of the role the government should play in reducing poverty.� And the films and workshops, as well as Aaron Calafato’s play about student loan debt, will address myriad dimensions of financial justice in the U.S. and abroad.

Paul D. Miller, the musician, essayist and media artist also known as DJ Spooky, presents a live performance of his internationally renowned multimedia project Rebirth of a Nation at 8 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 2, at Lewiston Middle School, 75 Central Ave.

Co-sponsored by departments and programs at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College including the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Museum of Art and the Multicultural Center, the performance will be followed by a panel discussion featuring the artist with Mark Bessire, director of the art museum; Dale Chapman, assistant professor of music at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½; and Charles Nero, associate professor of rhetoric.

Admission to the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ event is $10 for general seating. For tickets, please . For more information contact 207-786-6135 or olinarts@bates.edu.

The performance takes place just days before the 93rd anniversary of the release of Birth of a Nation, the silent film by D.W. Griffith whose racist interpretations of American history during and after the Civil War have been a source of outrage for nearly a century. Miller, of New York, adapted Griffith’s film for Rebirth of A Nation.

“With the news dominated by broken treaties, ethnic oppression, raw power grabs and security threats, the time seems just right for revisiting” the film, Miller writes in his program notes. “There are so many resonances with contemporary culture’s indefatigable sense of shock and surprise.”

His piece, Miller writes, “posits no answers, only more questions.”

Starting with a newly restored print of Griffith’s film, Miller edited, manipulated and remixed it. Combining this footage with his original score, as recorded by the Kronos Quartet, Miller now performs a live mix, creating a unique version of Rebirth of a Nation at each show.

The piece was commissioned by and performed at the Lincoln Center Festival, New York; the Festival d’Automne à Paris; the Vienna Festival; and the Spoleto Festival USA. It has been presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago; the Romaeuropa Festival in Italy; Harvard University; the Herod Atticus amphitheater in Athens; and many other venues.

Miller is best-known by his “constructed persona,” “DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid.” He has recorded a huge volume of music, solo and in collaboration with artists as diverse as Iannis Xenakis, Kool Keith a.k.a. Doctor Octagon, Pierre Boulez, Killa Priest from Wu-Tang Clan, Steve Reich, Yoko Ono and Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore.

He scored the 1998 film Slam, which starred critically acclaimed poet Saul Williams and received awards from the Cannes and Sundance festivals. In 2006, Miller received access to the vaults of the classic reggae label Trojan Records, resulting in his landmark Sanctuary Records compilation In Fine Style, DJ Spooky Presents 50,000 Volts of Trojan Records!!!

Among his other recordings are Optometry (Thirsty Ear, 2002), a jazz project featuring Matthew Shipp, William Parker, Joe McPhee, Carl Hancock Rux, Daniel Bernard Roumain and High Priest from Anti-Pop Consortium; Dubtometry (Thirsty Ear, 2003), a dub remix of the same, featuring Lee “Scratch” Perry and Mad Professor; and Riddim Clash (Play, 2004), a collaboration with Twilight Dub Sound System.

Miller took part in the 2007 Venice Bienniale with the video installation New York is Now, which originally appeared at the Luanda Triennial in Angola in 2006.

Miller has written for The Village Voice, The Source, Artforum, Raygun, Rap Pages, Paper Magazine and other periodicals. With noted African American poet Steve Cannon, he is co-publisher of A Gathering of Tribes, a magazine dedicated to new works by writers from a multicultural context. Miller was the first editor-at-large of the cutting-edge digital media magazine, Artbyte: The Magazine of Digital Culture.

His first collection of essays, Rhythm Science (MIT Press, 2004), was included in several “best books of 2004” lists, including those of the Guardian (UK) and Publishers Weekly. Sound Unbound, an anthology of writings on sound art and multi-media edited by Miller, will be published in paperback by MIT Press in May.

Along with the Museum of Art and Multicultural Center, sponsoring Miller’s ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ engagement are the college’s departments of theater and rhetoric, and of music; the program in environmental studies; the offices of the dean of the faculty, student activities and admissions; the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Dance Festival and the Harward Center for Community Partnerships.