Dear Colleagues,

Below is an op/ed piece I wrote for the Alabama Sierra Club Monthly magazine.  I am advised they will print some version of it for the March edition but at any rate, this is the whole piece.

Know Justice, Know Peace,

Rev. Dr. E-K. Daufin, Professor of Communication

ASU FSA Co-VP for Faculty, AEJMC MAC Officer

Alabama State University, 915 S. Jackson St.

Montgomery, AL 36101-0271 PH:334-229-6885

Thanks in advance for your research & creative activity referrals: http://home.earthlink.net/~ekdaufin

With all my  heart I want work that I love; for abundant pay; in a beautiful, functional, comfortable environment; with/for kind, competent, happy, supportive people who love, enjoy and appreciate me and I they. Ashe.

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The Sierra Club has for many years been dedicated to the cause of environmental justice. We also need to better promote ethnic and cultural diversity within the Club. Those minority members who we do have should feel welcomed and respected by other Club members. E-K Daufin has written the following article to encourage such respect and understanding among all Club members. She makes excellent points relative to her experiences and concerns, and we should all read and evaluate her statement honestly and with a positive attitude. We and E-K believe that virtually all of the comments that have generated E-K’s concerns were not intended as insults or criticisms, but are still offensive, even if unintentional. Some are clearly biased and bigoted racial slurs. These have no place in the Sierra Club, nor in any civilized society. Please go out of your way to make E- K and other Sierra Club members feel welcome at, and full participants in, all Sierra Club events. Making members feel welcome often has more to do with what we say after, “Welcome.”  Thank you for your serious consideration of this issue.

- Robert W. Hastings, Chapter Co-chair

- John Ackerman, Chapter Chair

Calling for Cultural Sensitivity in the Alabama Sierra Club

                Some Alabama Sierra Club (ASC) members have expressed their desire to increase our African American membership.  However, the Club has been an increasingly racially hostile environment for me as a visually identifiable woman of color. We must change that if we ever hope to recruit and retain more people of color.  In fact I was ready to quit myself before Bob Hastings and John Ackerman offered to help me try to improve the situation.

I am submitting a long, but not inclusive list of the racially hostile incidents I have had to face while participating in the ASC. Alone, each incident may not seem like much but cumulatively they create a brutal effect.  Each feels like a kick in the stomach to me.  Since President Barack Obama was elected, the number of racist remarks from ASC members has escalated alarmingly. (Please remember too that even if you voted for President Obama you may still unintentionally hold and espouse racist views.)

More important than the list of offensive incidents and making sure you don’t do those things to me or any other person of color, are doing few things to make the ASC a less hostile environment for African Americans and Latinos.  I am not a spokesperson for all Black people but I am a professor of communication, a nationally published author on these issues (including the Los Angeles Times Sunday Op-Ed page, Essence magazine, other book, journal, magazine articles, radio and television interviews, etc.) and a visionary activist for social justice.  I have also done extensive race, gender and size equity consulting.  Those who may unwittingly offend other Sierra Club members of color will want to consider the following:

1. Don’t say to me, or anyone else at an ASC event, anything you would not feel comfortable walking into a large group of African American people and yelling at the top of your lungs. 

2. Don’t assume that I (even after authoring this article) or any other person of color, would want to discuss race with you.  None of us are your free race equity coach, always ready to serve you.  Questions of race relations are uncomfortable for us all to discuss but studies show that African Americans are physiologically more negatively affected than White people in these discussions.  I have often felt physically nauseous and anxious in ASC gatherings when I’ve had to deal with racially insensitive members. 

3. Do get some on-going cultural sensitivity training. It didn’t take one book or workshop to develop erroneous assumptions about African Americans, so don’t expect one book or workshop to solve the problem.  Reading the extremely mild, middle-of-the-road, Dr. Cornel West’s Race Matters may be an accessible place to start. (http://www.amazon.com/Race-Matters-Cornel-West/dp/0679749861)

4. Do read a great booklet called Cultural Etiquette: A Guide for the Well-Intentioned by Amoja Three Rivers.  Pay special attention to the sections titled: “For Your Information” and “Just Don’t Do This. Okay?”  Accept and internalize what you find there.  It includes information such as: “Reverse racism’ within the context of present society, is a contradiction in terms,” and, “It’s not a compliment to tell someone: I don’t think of you as Jewish, or Black, etc.” http://www.amazon.com/Cultural-Etiquette-Amoja-Three-Rivers/dp/B0006DJSVI

5. DON’T argue with an African American or Latino if she or he tells you that you’ve said something racist or culturally insensitive. Do APOLOGIZE and say what you’ll do to avoid doing that in the future.

6. Do read the Huffington Post article by a White, bestselling author, former Right Wing Republican and a founder of the Religious Right Frank Schaeffer titled, “Obama Will Be One of The Greatest (and Most Loved) American Presidents.”  Though the author is White, the article might give you just a little taste of what President Obama’s election means to most African Americans. www.huffingtonpost.com/frank-schaeffer/why-this-former-right-win_b_84709.html

7. Do search for and read books about African American women’s traumatic experiences with their naturally kinky hair before you say anything about any Black woman’s hair.  My chapter, “What I Dreaded,” and other’s about being a Black woman with kinky hair in, Children of the Dream: Our Own Stories of Growing Up Black in America, may be a place to start. http://www.amazon.com/Children-Dream-Stories-Growing-Conflict/dp/0671008064

8. Do immediately SAY something, if you hear any ASC member (especially a conference speaker) say something racially or culturally insensitive.  Respectfully but clearly say that that kind of talk is NOT okay with you.  Keeping silent and even going to support the person of color privately later is of no help whatsoever and only encourages the offender.

If you will do these things and continue to work on them, whether you think you need to or not, you will be contributing to the hope that we can change the ASC into a welcoming, supportive environment for people of color who care about the environment.

Here’s a list of some things insensitive ASC members have been willing to say to my face or in my close proximity.  Usually worse is said and done when there are not visually identifiable Black folks around.

• Calling an uninsured driver and his friends who sideswiped an ASC member’s car “a bunch of Mexicans…probably illegal aliens.”
• Saying Muslims will “always hide criminals (because)…that’s just the way they are.”
• Whispering to a white woman near me that, she was “angry because a White person told a Black child not to be proud of Obama because he’s Black.” 
• Asking people whose livelihood you control whether you are racist, and then bragging that you’re not, because that employee evaded the question and you interpreted that response as a, “No.”
• Repeatedly proclaiming the true, unquestioned standard of female beauty is blonde, blue-eyed and slender (A lot of White women and virtually all women of color won’t fit any of those categories.).
• Saying a bi-racial man at her job is “at fault” for the racism perpetrated against him because he always brings up race.
• Saying people who complain about racist language used by whites against black people, including “You people,” is foolish and unfounded.
• Saying that I and other African Americans who have managed to achieve a level of success did so either because of Affirmative Action or because we didn’t have huge racist obstacles to surmount.
• Assuming people of color think you are a pinnacle of race equity because you work with them or because you think you have Black friends.
• Describing someone as, “really, really Black” and meaning his skin color vs. his strong cultural identity.
• Telling me they know African Americans perspective on the Republican Party’s (at best) benign racism and that we’re wrong. 
• As an environmentalist, bad mouthing President Obama at a ASC conference even though Obama’s environmental record is stellar and the National Sierra Club endorsed Obama.
• Not challenging an ASC conference speaker who speaks disparagingly about Obama to the audience even though he just put a head shot of G. W. Bush on the huge screen as the answer to, “What’s the worst environmental problem in history for the entire planet?”
• Defending so-called environmentalists who voted against Obama and for McCain (who’s running mate’s motto was, “Drill Baby Drill,” and who reportedly hunted wolves from helicopters herself).
• Telling me that I am the 1^st person of my race they’ve seen at a SC conference and to “bring more of my race” next time.
• After I tried to physically evade a racially offensive ASC member, he ignored all those cues and insisted on interrupting my dinner conversation AND putting his hand on my shoulder to tell me how glad he is a person of my race is there, forgetting he told me last time.
• ASC conference speakers who leave out the interests of African American and Latino communities or skip us all together for instance, if they talk glowing of new environmental development when in reality they have displaced a historically significant African American poor community, or speakers who discuss white settlers and American Indians in detail but don’t make time to discuss the largest group living there -- African American slaves, or those who refer to privileged upper class white graduate students as “slave” labor.
• Complaining to me about every/any black person’s transgression (Ex: underprivileged African American students calling an ASC member’s daughter on specially paid hardship duty, names etc.)
• Insisting that my Nubian locked hair is just like her (White) daughter’s, even after I have begged to differ.
• Loud, public question, “How do you get your hair like that?”
• Arguing with me that Don Imus, as an internationally, daily broadcast radio show host is not responsible/a problem for calling the almost-entirely African American, winning, female, college basketball players “a bunch of nappy headed ho’s..some hard ho’s,” but argue that really rap music recording artists who get lucrative record deals from White-owned major recording studios and sell albums to purchasing customers or have their music (thankfully) censored on the public airways.
• Saying your “good Black friend “likes if people are racist because she laughs when White delivery men repeatedly assume she is the maid when she opens her own homes door.
•  Other insensitivities: “Watching you climb that (really steep, really long) hill you’re making me feel like an Olympian athlete “ and “Your religion won’t get you into heaven.”

Just don’t do these things. Okay?