The school year is well under way. And it’s time to address the argument of whether it’s imperative for minority students to have role models from their own ethnic group. Good and desirable, yes, but if the operative word is essential, I am ready to disagree.
My conviction crystallized a few nights ago, as I plopped down in a chair in my hotel room on Connecticut Avenue. Emotionally drained from a chance meeting with an old friend whom I hadn’t seen in 20 years, I proceeded to call another friend to share my feelings: I had just run into a role model for all seasons–not to mention all colors.
Twenty years ago I used to amble into a university classroom on the South Side of Chicago and audit the classes of a historian whom I consider to be the most dignified man in the United States. Tall, imperially slim and sartorially resplendent, professor John Hope Franklin came across not only as an authority on the history of the American South, but also as a man who had paid his dues in life.
It struck me from the first moment I saw him that he wore his personal and professional triumphs no less gracefully than his finely cut suits. Occasionally, the native Oklahoman, who is now 82, would recount his experiences as an up-and-coming black scholar in the pre-civil-rights era.
He once told his class of arriving at a university library in the South to conduct research. Given the prevailing attitude of Jim Crow, he was obliged to sit apart in a separate room from white scholars as he pored over books and manuscripts. Years later, he also related to us, he shared the story with an audience at the same university. He ended it by expressing his “gratitude” to the university for having been given him his own room in which to work.
When Franklin talked about slavery, he did so objectively and dispassionately. Even so, I will never forget the controlled anger he evinced when he addressed the argument of one scholarly book that the typical slave was “only” whipped 2.1 times a year, or whatever the figure was.
As for myself, I thought that perhaps by listening to him and reading what he suggested–from “The Diaries of Mary Chestnut” to “Time on the Cross: The Econometrics of American Negro Slavery”–I might learn a great deal more about the country in which I was born. This year marks the 50th anniversary of another book he occasionally recommended, his own magnum opus, “From Slavery to Freedom.”
When I felt a hand on my shoulder as I stepped onto an elevator the other night and turned to hear one of America’s pre-eminent scholars greet me by name, my heart skipped a beat. Franklin was inaugurating his tenure as chairman of President Clinton’s Commission on Race at the moment that I was ending my endeavors as a member of the Commission on Immigration Reform. A good deal of what I know about America, I owe to the intellectual light he shared with me two decades ago.
As we spoke, I was struck with the realization that he was the second African-American luminary to have exerted a direct influence on my life. The other was the late Barbara Jordan, who chaired the immigration commission until her death two years ago. As I pondered what it had taken for these two extraordinary people to take their place among the country’s intellectual and political elite, it was impossible for me not to get a lump in my throat.
If there is something unnatural about living in America today, it is the way in which the natural bonds of humanity are being overlooked. But let’s be clear: It is good, reassuring and desirable for young people to have same ethnicity role models. I won’t argue the point with, say, bilingual educators in Massachusetts or Texas who would just as soon import Hispanics from abroad as hire bilingual educators of non-Hispanic descent. Despite occasional differences of opinion, I am deeply proud of Mexican-American scholars such as historian David Montejano and political scientist Rodolfo de la Garza, professors at the University of Texas.
Yet all students from all ethnicities have a great need for role models who can teach and inspire, regardless of color or national origin. To hold otherwise is, I suspect, to evince more interest in guaranteeing jobs for adult members of certain groups than in meeting the absolute needs of young people facing the future. It is a hypocritical indulgence the nation can ill afford.
