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Around the Kitchen Table:

Brodhead, Cole, lead a Cook Society discussion about race and diversity

The Griffith Film Theater stage was arranged to look like a kitchen circa 1960, with china cups hanging from a wall, flowers set on the small square kitchen table and an old Philco radio looking ready to play hits from Connie Francis and Elvis.

For Ben Reese, Duke's vice president of institutional equity, the kitchen was a place where his family and friends always had the longest and deepest conversations.  So when he invited Duke President Richard H. Brodhead, Bennett College President Johnnetta Cole and others to talk Monday about the sensitive issues of race and diversity, he wanted a setting to stimulate the discussion.

It proved to be an apt setting, for while the kitchen was for all the panelists a place of family and community, it was also a place of diversity, a place where, Cole said, "we are reminded that inevitably there are differences within families and communities."

"The kitchen for African-American women was not always a sweet place," Cole said.  "In slavery, the kitchen was a place where African-American women worked for someone else.  Some thought it was better work than in the fields, but it was harsh work still, and the kitchen they worked in belonged to someone else."

The dichotomy implicit in the kitchen setting was also apt, panelists said, because discussions of race and diversity are inevitably involve complexities that are not easily solved.  For the next hour, Cole, Brodhead, Reese, Rebecca Reyes of Duke's Latino Health Project, Lee Baker of cultural anthropology and undergraduate student Vivian Wang sat around the table and talked about these paradoxes.

The conversation was part of the annual celebration of the Samuel Dubois Cooke Society.  Named after Duke's first African-American faculty member, the society promotes equity and community through a series of events.  The society held its annual awards dinner Monday.

For Brodhead, one of the difficult issues of talking about diversity and race has to be grounded in some moral standards and values.  That's difficult he said, because much that has passed for morality on issues of race has proven to be wrong in the past.  Yet, he said, the discussion has to be about justice and education, which requires values.

"I don't believe in a value-neutral university," Brodhead said.  "We have to say that some level of moral education is at the heart of a serious education.  I'm not embarrassed by that. The irony is that to encourage diversity and embrace differences, we still have to have some standards that we believe in.  The solution is to have smart and sassy students to point out where we go wrong."

For Wang, one of the key elements of the discussion was power and how had the influence to set the boundaries on issues of race and diversity.  She described one exercise in a class on social identity in which she was asked to define who she was.  She then answered who her friends, her family members, her teachers and community thought she was.  She noted as she got farther away from herself, the descriptions became more limited by external characteristics, such as "Asian" or "woman."

Cole picked up on the importance of power relations.  She noted that in the interest of diversity, people can diminish others.  "These programs can't be like, 'Look at me, I'm broad minded. Won't you come to my university?'"

As president of a historically black institution, Cole said diversity doesn't pose a threat to those institutions.  Her college has in particular reached out to other audiences, including Latina and white women.

"It's in everyone's benefit," she said.  "As part of our students' education, we have to have them raise questions that they won't raise in absence of that diversity.  If we are going to graduate women to go out into the world, they have to know what is in that world."

When asked whether we were at the point that institutions such as Bennett weren't needed, Cole answered with an emphatic "No."

"We are still graduating the majority of African-American students," she said.