Driving on lunch hour a week back, I tuned the car radio to the metropolitan classical music station and heard a voice amplified through a hall. The City Club of Cleveland, for its penny, was given an hour or so of thoughts from Spelman College President Beverly Daniel Tatum. A psychologist and seminarian, Tatum is author of social dialectics "Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?" and Talking about Race, Learning about Racism. A meticulous scholar, she was heard on-air to pronounce the word "alumni" so it rhymed with "honeybee," as would have the Romans.
Spelman was founded in Atlanta, four years after the end of Reconstruction; a redoubt for lettered black women, built by two Northerners on an altruistic mission. The college is a cloister now, or at least sounds like it envisioned by Tatum, whose profession seems to be the creation of problems for the purpose of devising solutions. Several times in the twenty minutes I listened, Tatum described feelings of estrangement among Americans who are black (it is manifest) but understood it to be the incompletion — rather than the consequence — of an identity that is dermatological and cultural. In the language of academia, Tatum reasoned against the persistence of "racial and sexual" prejudices. And then — an anecdote, a robotics team from Spelman competing twice at Georgia Tech but more duly, as the only one "all-female and all-black." Opportunity despite exception or differentiation, could she tell the pair apart?
At present: probably not. Recently, students had held a vote for favorite movies. Members of a race-founded campus organization noticed no dark faces between the chosen stars, and protested. This was, for Tatum, a "learning experience." For one, she noted, "African or Bollywood movies" were overlooked. Bollywood? While it troubled to hear that foreign individuals are mentally, if not statutorily, relegated to a compensatory class — surely most Indians, immigrant or in the homeland, do not consider themselves needy — Tatum's closing on the matter was more urgent. Pressured, the polling students "didn't do the same thing the next year" which, for Tatum, worked out happily because "sometimes majority rule doesn't work." No, it doesn't work for one disputant every time, but for he or she concerned with the chromatic order of people there is a religio loci, hallowed ground, on which democracy offends.