Response to Prof. Duncan's editorial
Meredith Duncan's piece really is a fine editorial. On the one hand, I can understand the reluctance of the media to make a point of the race of a skier. That instinct comes from the idea that race should be irrelevant to achievement. It’s actually a good instinct—in some contexts. But not all.
Meredith is right: race should be mentioned whenever it is a legitimate object of interest. When I was directing the CLE program at the Law Center, we made every effort to ensure that all races were represented. At first I was reluctant to mention explicitly what I was doing because I didn’t want people to think I was focusing unduly on race. That's the same instinct that I infer the media had about the skier. Later I found that it was a good idea to be upfront about it. I simply said to people, I want you to participate because you’re a fine speaker, but I’ll tell you the truth: I haven’t been able to get anyone who’s Latino/Hispanic, African-American, etc. (depending on the need) on this program, and I’d appreciate your doing it if you possibly can. I never had a black or Hispanic speaker say anything negative in response. I think most of them appreciated both the goal and the candor. Maybe I was lucky, and frankly, I felt awkward in raising the issue at first. We would have never gotten the diversity we did, however, without being frank about what we were doing.
This was only part of Meredith’s message. (And I don’t know whether she would approve of my CLE methodology — and I have no authority from her to say!) The other part of the message, the main part, is that we should remember where we came from. And that’s impossible to do without recognizing the role of race. That's something that people tend to forget (or be reluctant to do), as Meredith says, in post-racial America, where bad events still sometimes occur. The bottom line: memory is important.
