Audre Lorde: "Racism will change at Hunter when we begin to recognize race, and distortions around race, as a reality in consciousness and when we dare to examine the ways in which those distortions affect teaching, and imprint themselves upon our students."
Recently I was given the opportunity to read through some of Audre Lorde's work that had been archived at Spelman college. These archives contain a wide variety of unpublished works that Audre had written, including a set of handwritten notes and remarks about her experiences at Hunter College as a student and as a faculty member.
While Hunter College often postures as an institution that is a pioneer in racial diversity and inclusivity, it is clear that this is not the case. Audre writes about how she experienced racism firsthand from different professors. One account that she writes about in these notes is when she went to the office hours of one of her professors and instead of discussing the assignment that she had come in to talk about the professor offered her a position as a maid. This job proposition was obviously racially loaded. Despite the fact that Audre was a brilliant scholar, because she was Black (one of the few Black women enrolled in Hunter at the time), her professor assumed that she would be delighted to partake in domestic work. Audre then goes into depth about the racism that is inherent in academia. For Audre "racism at Hunter is occurs when" students of color are looked down upon if they were too academically ambitious or try to enter fields that were predominantly white, such as medicine.
Deciphering her script and impassioned writing showed me how Hunter, despite the supposed historic progressiveness of Thomas Hunter, was and still is an institution marred by American racism. Lorde's well-founded critiques of Hunter are illuminating and should be remembered as we embark on our community reading of Sister Outsider. We must not only view the outside world critically, but we must look inwardly at our own institutions and see how they are inevitably tied to white supremacy.
