Our recent to-do over the Pledge of Allegiance ignored one pertinent fact. The pledge's author, Francis Bellamy, considered using the word "equality" in the final phrase, meaning it would have concluded: "One nation, indivisible, with equality, liberty and justice for all." But in 1892, Bellamy knew that many opposed equality for women and African-Americans. Bowing to prejudice, he left us with the conundrum of pledging to liberty and justice for all, without equality.

Evelyn Hu-De Hart, the recently installed director of Brown's Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America (CSREA), tackles this contradiction by "re-telling history so that the consequences of past actions are illustrated and analyzed." The center's work starts from the idea that constructs of race and ethnicity are "real institutional and legal categories that gate-keep equal access to rights and privileges in our liberal democracy." Though freed from slavery and granted citizenship in the 1860s, African-Americans, for example, lived under the Jim Crow system of legal, social, and financial apartheid into at least the 1960s.

Pointing out that the power and privilege of "whiteness" is as contested as similar concepts, Hu-De Hart believes it, too, deserves more serious study than our multicultural celebrations of "fetish, foods, and fads." Indeed, racial shape-shifting effected even whites ethnics, like the Irish and Italians, who were once considered "black" only to be reclassified through the European immigrant trajectory of education and class mobility. White women and poor whites, however, still face more obstacles.

Correcting the failures of our laissez-faire melting pot requires analyzing each group's particular social integration, Hu-De Hart believes. For example, cultural notions of immigrant Chinese men severely limited their lot in the 19th-century, while Native Americans were infantilized as hostile wards of the state.

Putting race in context requires "using the correct words." Hu-De Hart, who knows eight languages, adamantly defines Jim Crow laws as "apartheid," reservations as "containment camps," and the institutional policies of the US government toward Native Americans as "genocide." Her insistence stems from the belief that "when we neutralize language, we neutralize historical study," and that a neutered history is less likely to produce alternative values for the future.

Despite her combative language, Hu-De Hart isn't a separatist. Following Brown president Ruth Simmons' inaugural commitment to knowledge in the service of society, Hu-De Hart instituted a practicum in which CSREA students employ their interdisciplinary knowledge to help an ethnic community in Rhode Island with a specific need.

Issue Date: August 30 - September 5, 2002