On August 21, at the Cherry Grove Community House, as Fire Island tensely awaited the arrival of Hurricane Henri, Criminal Justice Professor and Chief Diversity Officer Stephanie Jirard, of Shippensburg University, in Pennsylvania, led a discussion about perceptions of race, creating cultural change, history of racism in America, and more, presented by the Arts Project of Cherry Grove’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Committee. The committee consists of Kay Davis of the Cherry Grove Fire Department, Cherry Grove Community Association, Inc. (CGCAI) President Diane Romano, CGCAI’s Ken Wong and Ian Kearney, Belvedere Guesthouse owner Julian Dorcelien-Eberhardt, Marie Martinez, Marc Crockett, Dr. Anna Tirado, filmmaker and archivist Parker Sargent, APCG President Thom “Panzi” Hansen and Vice-President Dennis McConkey.
After opening remarks by Kay and other members of the committee, Dennis introduced Professor Stephanie Jirard, who was his high school class president in Massachusetts. Stephanie stressed empathy and sensitivity and said, “You are an expert on race if you grew up in America.” Change will be gradual, she said, adding, “You need to remain hopeful. This is not an area in which despair can grow and flourish” and “You have to speak about race in rooms where you have authority” and, when you do, keep in mind, “I speak for the voiceless.”
She continued, “You have to disrupt the status quo” and be aware that “challenging your identity or clear set of values creates friction.” She covered the knotty problem of “law and order” and, as a past trial lawyer, maintained, “I never won a jury trial based on intellect—it’s all emotional.” She used the O.J. Simpson trial as an example of why, in the face of all evidence, the jury did not call for the death penalty.
Stephanie showed a film clip of writer Kimberly Jones, who compared and contrasted the groups of protesters, rioters, and looters, in attendance at some Black Lives Matter marches after the murder of George Floyd, and urged being mindful of the poverty that motivated the last. She reminded that the reasons that Africans were brought to America were for agricultural work in the South and textile work in the North.
The Professor used the metaphor of an 1840s southern mansion in connection with “structural racism,” the different rooms representing aspects of government, society, and the law, with “enslaved people” not entering through the front door and moving through the rooms only with the leave of the white owners.
She explained that “how to get [cultural] changes to take hold” is by acting “consistently over time” to help people to adapt and to “reinforce new values.” Racism, she noted, is instilled in people at a very early age and, near the end of the discussion, she showed a film clip of an experiment in which two small black children, a girl and a boy, were given a choice between a white doll and a black doll and chose the white doll, because, although they felt that the black doll looked like them, they also felt that she was “bad.”
There is clearly much “work [that] has to be done culturally” by all of us. This discussion was a good start.
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