January
25, 2002, Special Edition
Front-Page
News
Two for the Globe
A feature article on acting president Beverly Daniel Tatum appeared
in the Boston Globe January 10. "At Home with Beverly Daniel
Tatum"
focuses on Tatum's home life in Florence, Massachusetts, where
she and her husband, Travis, strive for "an active response
to their status as a black family living in a predominantly white
neighborhood." Their response includes enrolling their sons
in schools with at least some other black children, actively seeking
opportunities to socialize with other black families, embracing
African American art and cultural traditions, and, for several
years, attending the Martin Luther King Community Church in Springfield.
These efforts to combat social isolation and help their sons "see
themselves positively reflected in their environment" are
based on Tatum's research on black families and personal experience,
both of which tell her that the best-adjusted children come from
"race-conscious" homes (those in which parents embrace
their blackness and cultural heritage), not from ''race-neutral''
or ''race-avoidant'' ones in which families take a laissez-faire
attitude toward racial identity or shun discussion about it altogether.
The Boston Globe also
drew on Tatum's expertise on race for the January 13 article "Roots
Plus 25," in which writer Don Aucoin considers whether the
twelve-hour TV miniseries Roots had any enduring social effects
after sweeping the nation in 1977. The program, which was based
on Alex Haley's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1976 book, won nine Emmy
Awards and still stands as the third-highest-rated program of
all time. Aucoin finds that its messages about race and discrimination
encouraged the national movement toward multiculturalism and triggered
a lasting interest in genealogy, and he quotes Tatum as saying
that "the segments of Roots set in Africa made the crucial
point to black and
white viewers that ‘there was a history before slavery.'"
On the other hand,
Aucoin finds that Roots did not have a significant influence on
the political and economic policies underlying discrimination,
and that its story has not reached today's younger people (those
under 35).
MHC "Magnifique"
An article in the December 4 issue of the French newspaper Les
Echos discusses why a number of "women only" colleges
in the U.S. are thriving. According to the story, now that parity
is being written into the laws of Western societies, the idea
of single-sex colleges might seem "anachronistic." But
in fact top women's colleges are faring well. The reason? Women's
colleges, the article explains, give female students the opportunity
to be leaders. As French professor and department chair Nicole
Vaget says in the article, ". . . in an academic environment
free of every possibility of inequality between the sexes, women
students learn to direct their intellectual potential, to develop
confidence in themselves." The story also quotes Raluca Dalea
'01, who says that at Mount Holyoke "a woman's capacity to
lead is placed in the foreground." In addition, the article
describes Mount Holyoke's campus as magnificent, reports that
the number of international students at MHC is on the rise, and
notes the success of such graduates as U.S. Secretary of Labor
Elaine Chao '75.
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