NORTHAMPTON — Black kids are still sitting with each other in the cafeteria, according to psychologist and best-selling writer Beverly Daniel Tatum said, but in the past two decades, many other things have changed with regard to race.
Hundreds squeezed into the Edwards Church sanctuary Wednesday to hear Tatum speak about racial identity and progress made on racial issues. The event was hosted by the Sojourner Truth School for Social Change Leadership and Broadside Bookshop.
Tatum recently released the 20th anniversary edition of her acclaimed book “Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together In The Cafeteria? And Other Conversations About Race.”
Tatum spoke of changes in the past 20 years that have negatively affected the black population in America. She said there has been an upsurge in incarceration, the Great Recession, which had a disproportionate impact on black people, and a backlash against affirmative action.
She said schools are still funded by the property tax, and because many neighborhoods are still segregated, it causes inequity in school systems.
While the election of President Obama in 2008 brought a sense that America was a “post-racial” society, she said, it also brought on a backlash, with many people joining white nationalist groups.
Tatum discussed racial identity and how it can be different for people of different ages and life experiences.
“When I wrote this book in 1997, I was very much inspired by the 20-year-old students in my classes when I was teaching about racism,” Tatum said. “Fast forward to 2017 … I’m thinking about the 20-year-olds of the 21st century.”
She read a section of her prologue where she contrasts her background with that of someone who is 20 years old in 2017.
Tatum said she was born in 1954 in segregated Florida and moved up to Massachusetts as part of the Great Migration out of the Jim Crow South. She watched Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speeches and marches on the nightly news. Tatum said her generation has lived through times of social progress. She said she saw the colleges and universities where she worked grow more diverse.
“For those born in 1997, that is something in their history books,” she said. “Their perspective is shaped by a very different shape of events.”
Someone who is 20 today would have been 4 years old when the Twin Towers came down, Tatum noted. They would have been 11 when Obama was elected president, 15 when Trayvon Martin was killed, and 17 when Michael Brown was shot and killed in Ferguson, Missouri.
“We have a lot of work today if we are to truly move forward as a nation,” Tatum read.
Stephanie Logan, a multicultural education professor at Springfield College, found a spot to sit along the aisle of the church’s crowded sanctuary. She carried her copy of Tatum’s book with her.
Logan said she has used it for the past four years to help teach her students, sometimes assigning it as a course text or just reviewing specific chapters.
“I teach 20-year-olds,” she said. Tatum’s remarks “crystallized” her sense of the way her students perceive the world, Logan said.
Tatum noted that the epilogue of her book is titled “Signs of Hope, Sites of Progress” and said that great things that are happening.
“Progress is rarely linear,” Tatum said.
Caitlin Ashworth can be reached at cashworth@gazettenet.com.