AABDS and Howard Thurman Center Identity Series
In a new series on Black Identity co-organized by the Program in African American and Black Diasporic Studies and the Howard Thurman Center for Common Ground, a gathering of BU students, community members and faculty panelists grappled with the question posed in the program’s title “Am I Black Enough for You,” the inaugural event in the series. The theme of the program was inspired as a discourse addressing the intraracial diversity within BU’s Black student body which reflects large demographic cross-sections with students from African-American, continental African and Caribbean family origins. Faculty Panelists, including CAS Professors James Howard Hill Jr (Religion), Pamala Zabala Ortiz (Sociology), Nicole Smythe-Johnson (Art History) and moderator Saida Grundy (Sociology) shared much of their own personal biographies experiencing race, racism, and Black student communities in their respective undergraduate experiences, alongside their academic expertise on what Blackness means within the context of intergroup dynamics in the African diaspora and even locally with ethnically diverse Black communities in the city of Boston. “I think of the African diaspora as dialectic” said Prof. Zabala Ortiz whose research on experiences of Black racialization has centered on Afro-Dominicans. “It exists within the conversations had by those connected to it.” For Prof. Smythe-Johnson, acknowledging the connectedness of the diaspora needn’t require a glossing over of the differences Black students have in an institution such as BU. Smythe-Johnson, who was born and raised in Jamaica, agreed with her colleagues and the relationality of the diaspora, and offered the sizable audience a way to think about building solidarity that didn’t require sameness or glossing over those ethnic differences by encouraging students to put those cultural dissimilarities out in the open when organizing and socializing on campus. In a post-panel community meal, sponsored by the Howard Thurman Center, students engaged enthusiastically with each other and numbers of faculty and staff in attendance, a promising sign of BU’s dialectal Black diaspora continuing to thrive.
