Discussion takes on issues of race
College of Arts and Sciences hosts dialogue

By PATRICIA DONOVAN
News Services Editor

Racism-among other things-is killing America's cities, the director of UB's Center for Urban Studies told a White House-sponsored dialogue on race held in the Center for Tomorrow on March 24.

In an impassioned commentary outlining a pattern of deliberate economic deprivation based on race that has occurred in the U.S. in recent decades, Henry Louis Taylor, Jr. noted that "fewer than 60 years ago blacks and whites in this community shared residential space and attempts to separate them failed.

"Then came a period of rabid racial hatred followed by those with the best jobs and opportunities fleeing the city and leaving the worst off of their fellow citizens in the inner city and on the bottom rung of the employment ladder.

"We have less overt, hostile racism today. Why? Because there's much more segregation now than in 1935," he explained.

"We have dying cities full of economically deprived people while those who can, avoid them by moving farther and farther out into the country to get away, ruining farmland, producing concrete sprawl...vast, undefined 'developments.' It goes to show that racism ruins a lot of things besides the lives of African Americans."

Taylor was among speakers discussing racial attitudes in the Buffalo area at during "One America: Conversations That Bring Us Together." Sponsored by the College of Arts and Sciences, it was organized by Brenda Moore, associate professor of sociology.

The event was the 38th in a series of discussions about racial affairs in America led by William E. Leftwich, III, deputy assistant U.S. secretary of defense for equal opportunity, in cities across the U.S. as part of the White House Initiative on Race.

More than 40 individuals-including UB faculty members and staff, religious and community leaders and political figures-participated in panel discussions, speaking of concerns about racism, ethnocentrism, class conflict, cultural representation, sexism and the class system that much of America denies.

UB President William R. Greiner told the 300 participants, "The problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line," quoting the distinguished American sociologist and activist, W.E.B. DuBois, author of the pioneering 1903 work, "The Souls of Black Folks."

Buffalo Mayor Anthony Masiello, who has promoted dialogue across racial and ethnic divides, beginning with his 1998 initiative, Roll Call Against Racism, promised that his administration will develop policies and programs to strengthen all communities and to help bridge the racial gap.

Panelist Rodney Appleby of Buffalo State College noted that "a discussion on race is not really discussion of race and color, but discussion of character. If one person uses opportunistic attitudes to take advantage of others, we can't legislate against it. It is character that has to change."

Frank Mesiah, longtime president of the Buffalo Chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People agreed, noting, "Children learn to hate. We need to know what it is in this society that produces this hate in them. It isn't enough to know it's there. Americans must-they must dig out its roots if we are ever to be a united people."

Mesiah said racism can be quashed. "We learned to hate the Germans and then we learned to love the Germans. We learned to hate the Russians and now we've learned to love the Russians," he said, "and if there was a serious effort to accomplish it, we could learn to love one another as well.

"It isn't done," he said, "because racism serves a purpose in this country and we have to recognize that it continues to exist and reveal why it exists before we can eradicate it."

Several speakers, including Erie County Commissioner of Mental Health Ellen Grant-Bishop and Lana Benatovich, president of the National Conference for Community and Justice, encouraged pressure on corporations for inclusion and advancement in the minority work force, to encourage them to give up some power in order to tap into the talents and creativity of those who have a different perspective, other kinds of knowledge.

"What these institutions don't recognize," said another panelist, "is that it is they themselves who are losing the most. This nation won't be a European, white-dominated nation for long. Holding on to the past is a refusal to grow, to celebrate the inevitable change and to 'become' part of the new America. It's foolish, childish and wasteful."

Andres Garcia, vice president of Kaleida Health for West Side Community Health Services, cited UB as one local institution "rife with racism." He cited the low number of women, Hispanics, blacks, Asians in UB departments and called the university's public radio station, WBFO, to task for failing to "represent and serve the diverse community of which they are a part."

"Where is the women's programming?" he demanded. "Where are the stories on and the music of Buffalo's Latinos, Asian-Americans and Indians? How can they call themselves a public radio station when the programming is so one-dimensional?"