Dear Colleagues,
I love the new website. It will do a lot to increase the organizations
visibility in this scholarly community and introduce new and returning
graduate students to the GSCA and M.U. Ms. Cargile did a fine job!!!!!!
However, I am concerned about the use of term minority on the website. The
literal meaning of minority is less than 50 percent. To many people,
however, it implies underprivileged or disadvantaged. Many people see and
use the term minority as a neutral term for any person of color. The term
has been used as a sort of shorthand when folks have worked as advocates for
the oppressed, crafted policies that strove to diminish the
socio-economic-political disparity and inequities that exist between people
of color and white folks. I don't believe that in the spirit or minds of
any graduate student of color at Miami University, that there is the sense
that they are inferior, underprivileged or disadvantaged. Some of us have
endured trying circumstances, but we are no less capable, brilliant or
confidant than the next person.
Many of us have experienced the attitudes of the misinformed, that thinks
less is expected of students referred to as minorities. We can't promote an
ideologue that in any way paints us as being aberrant, different or less
than.
Our families and communities have never lowered their expectations of
us and we don't go around calling ourselves minorities by habit (or do we?).
Numerically graduate students are a smaller student community at M.U., but
we have to think of ourselves as a whole and a part of the world, not a
minumental fragment of a majority population. We are fully committed and
invested in our success as scholars, teachers and researchers and that in no
way implies that we enbrace mediocrity or inferiority.
I'm hoping that the website as a public communication medium can highlight
the fact that the GSCA is for graduate students of color (all students of
African, Latin, Asian, East Indian, Native descent) period and their allies.
In closing every since I've been here the GSCA has had an overwhelmingly
African-American student focus, despite that its name implies a different
reality. Major outreach to all the graduate students of color needs to occur
ASAP. The graduate school has all of our vital statistics and the
constructed term 'race' is marked on our files. This information can be used
to remove the facade of community and really start building one
wholistically.
If anyone on this list finds my comments inappropriate, positive or engaging
cool... We can have a dialogue, after all this is a discussion list, not
just a posting list :-)
Love and Peace,
Yolanda R. Brown
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LIVE THE WORDS...REAP THE REWARDS!
Don't be a spectator in your own intellectual life!
Thomas Jepsen
To decide to live at the level of choice is to take responsibility
and be in control of your life. Arbie M. Dale
“Self worth cannot be verified by others. You are a worthy person because
you say it is so. If you depend on others for your
value it is other-worth.” Wayne Dyer-Your Erroneous Zones
Be prepared, curious and vigilant! Yolanda R. Brown
Be the change you wish to see in the world. Mahatma Gandhi
Vision looks inward and becomes duty.
Vision looks outward and becomes aspiration.
Vision looks upward and becomes faith. Author unknown
Conventional education makes independent thinking extremely difficult.
Conformity leads to mediocrity. To be different from the group or to resist
environment is not easy and is often risky as long as we worship success.
The urge to be successful, which is the pursuit of reward
whether in the material or in the so-called spiritual sphere, the search for
inward or outward security, the desire for comfort--this whole process
smothers discontent, puts an end to spontaneity and breeds fear; and fear
blocks the intelligent understanding of life.
J. Krishnamurti
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