Where intersextionality meets microaggressive adultismWISHING for his death “in a fiery car accident” was only one of many messages directed at Chuck Henson when he became the University of Missouri’s new interim vice-chancellor for inclusion, diversity and equity. Mr Henson does not follow social media, but his wife does. Recently she agreed to stop reading the death threats and other missives intended for her husband, and instead to help him focus on his task, which is to end the racial turmoil that has made the university the centre of a nationwide campus protest movement over race for the past three months.
“We have a unique history and we have a unique problem,” says Mr Henson, a law professor. Missouri was a slave state until 1865; its first public university was founded in 1839 by James Rollins, an owner of slaves. It first admitted black students only in 1950 (Yale’s first black student graduated in 1857, Harvard’s in 1870). The relations of African-Americans both with other students, and with the overwhelmingly white faculty, have frequently been uneasy. Anger boiled over in November, leading to the...Continue reading
Source: United States http://ift.tt/1TpyLsE
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