Dr. Kevicha Echols and Dr. Juan Morales-Flores continue as the co-facilitators of the DFIG and are responsible for organizing the meetings, planning the agenda, selecting reading materials, and updating the wiki page. We scheduled three meetings for the Fall 2014 semester: 9/16, 10/7, and 11/25.
We have also scheduled the date for our first KCC Diversity Symposium for October 30th. Our keynote speakers for the symposium are Tamara Buckley and Erica Gabrielle Foldy authors of the book The Color Bind: Talking (and Not Talking) About Race at Work. We will also be selecting chapters from their book for our readings this semester.
New members are welcome. Just a reminder that reading the chapters is not a requirement for attending our meetings. As always we look forward to engaging in important dialogue and supporting one another!
September 16, 2014
We were happy to welcome several new members to the group and had a very productive and fruitful discussion for our first meeting of the year. We began the meeting with updates about the diversity symposium, asking members to help us recruit students for our student panel. In addition, we also asked members, new and old, to help with brainstorming possible topics of discussion for our roundtable sessions as well as finalizing members who will facilitate the discussion at the roundtables.
For the remainder of the meeting we discussed chapters 1-3 from The Color Bind: Talking (and Not Talking) About Race at Work. Some members began the conversation by stating their appreciation for the book and the opportunity to talk about race at Kingsborough and a few members shared the same sentiment that the conversation was past due and necessary for us to have. Many agreed that the symposium would also be an important venue to address and begin dialogue about race and diversity at Kingsborough. In the beginning of the book the authors introduce a new concept and way of looking at race in the workplace. They suggest we look at race in terms of color cognizance rather than color blindness. Some members pointed out that they see the color blind approach in the younger generation, including students at KBCC, who say that race does not or matter color does not matter. However, color cognizance, as the authors suggest is a way we embrace awareness of our differences and race and celebrate our differences as such. Several members agreed that this was a more effective approach.
October. 7, 2014
This meeting was the lowest attendance that we ever had for our meetings. We were supposed to discuss chapters 4 and 5 of The Color Bind: Talking (and Not Talking) About Race at Work, however we talked very little about the chapters and continued to talk about the symposium. We shared the final plans and schedule for the symposium. Then together we generated questions to ask the authors of the book (our keynote speakers) and we also brainstormed questions for our panels.
November 25, 2014
We welcomed two new members at our last meeting for the semester. We did not assign any readings; instead we debriefed about the symposium and shared feedback from some of the surveys we received. We discussed the idea of having a Diversity Symposium committee as well as followed up on suggestions for having a diversity event each semester as suggested by President Herzek. We shared the idea of having a smaller workshop or panel in the spring and the larger annual symposium for the fall semester. Members were interested in being on the symposium committee and another member shared information about the current KBCC Diversity Task Force initiative to address achievement gaps in students of color.
We also discussed books and articles for reading material in the spring. We decided that we will revisit the books that we read in previous semesters (Microaggressions in Everyday Life, Presumed Incompetence and The Color Bind) because there are several chapters that we still have not covered and members felt that these were really good text to continue to read and reflect on in our conversations. Additionally one member suggested that the previous texts may also serve as potential themes for upcoming symposiums.
