Scholarship in Action by Ron Howell, Journalism Collaborations

Volume X111 Number 11 In This Issue On the Lighter Side BC’s Hidden Treasures Faculty Notes Scholarship in Action By Ron Howell, Journalism Collaborations There’s a certain restlessness in Jeanne calling in life, she also desires the liberation of Theoharis’s voice, a restlessness that goes minds that are darkly closed to the injustices beyond the angst of a scholar struggling occurring around them. Her students will benefit. with her next book. Professor Theoharis, “In the fall, I’m going to be teaching a course Political Science, is, in fact, on sabbatical. She’s on race—as before, yes, but there will be a larger working on a biography of the late African component to it, given my interests now,” says American heroine Rosa Parks, who, one day in Theoharis, “[Recent events] have shown me how 1955, said she wasn’t going to take it anymore and the war on terror is being taken out on specific refused to give her Alabama bus seat to a white groups. I think [the course I teach] will include a rider, sparking the Civil Rights movement. unit on race and rights in post-9/11 America.” The night before we spoke with Professor Theoharis, in early April, she had traveled from her home in Brooklyn to CUNY Law School in Queens, where she talked about her latest cause, the plight of her former student, Pakistani- born Syed Fahad Hashmi, who is in his third year of solitary confinement at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Lower Manhattan. He’s been charged with helping another man provide “material support” to Al-Qaeda, in the form of raincoats, waterproof socks, and other similar materials. Every other Monday evening, Theoharis attends vigils outside the Detention Center, That impulse, to turn experience and Jeanne Theoharis, demanding a loosening of the harsh and restrictive history into material for study, is a driving Political Science conditions under which Hashmi is being confined. force in Theoharis’s scholarship. Take the book The trial was scheduled to begin in late April. she co-authored last year that gives voice to Theoharis hopes and strives for Hashmi to black and Latino youngsters criticizing their public receive humane treatment; but she also wishes schools. Our Schools Suck: Students Talk Back to relief for numerous others she believes are a Segregated Nation on the Failures of Urban suffering from the government’s overreaction in Education (New York University Press, 2009). Her the war against terror. Central to her principal love of learning—and the need to inject it with an 1 Scholarship in Action amphetamine of action—stems from a beloved Her struggle, which continues today, was to mentor who taught sociology when she was a achieve workplace justice for immigrants. freshman at Harvard College back in the late ‘80s. Almost immediately upon coming to Brooklyn, “I learned to be a mentor myself, in some Muñoz began “looking for a place to make similar sense, from him,” she says of that professor, connections” and she volunteered at a Bushwick- Roderick Harrison. based community organization, Make the Road by Theoharis’s academic work has foundations Walking. (Three years ago the group merged with in the demographic changes of the past forty-five the Latin American Integration Center to become years, when periodic waves of immigration—from Make the Road New York–MRNY.) Latin America, Asia, Africa and Europe—changed “I ran a computer class for immigrants, so they major cities and vast regions of the country. could learn the basics of computer; everything And how many localities of the nation, or from e-mail to MS Word to Excel to saving files,” even the world, have been as transformed as she says. Brooklyn? Globalization, in fact, is a reality that is Then, as she began to immerse herself in her wholesomely and beautifully evident in a stroll teaching, Muñoz realized how truly complex was along the verdant walkways of the Brooklyn the ethnic landscape of New York City, especially College campus. compared to Los Angeles, where to be black was to be African American, and to be Latino was to be Mexican. “There are so many sub-groups on the East Coast, and each group has different issues,” she explains. She tells of one of her core curriculum classes— People, Power and Politics—in which blacks were divided between native-born and immigrants, who disagreed totally on the issue of reparations. The African Americans said they alone deserved Carolina Bank compensation for slavery, and the Caribbean Muñoz, Sociology students took a more global view of the triangular transatlantic slave trade and its after effects. The complexity of the ethnic “All students in the class, immigrants and convergences in Brooklyn has tempered— native born alike, benefited tremendously from or maybe better put, made more this exchange,” Muñoz wrote last year in Radical thoughtful—the activism of Professor Teacher 84 (April 2009). Much of Muñoz’s Carolina Bank Muñoz, Sociology. activism is actually in the form of her scholarship, Before coming to Brooklyn College, Muñoz which is decidedly of the writing-is-fighting was in Los Angeles directing a project that strove variety: tight-fisted and ready to swing at the last to “make connections” between immigrant groups discovered injustice. and unions. 2 Activism takes many forms: anyone who Earlier this year, Muñoz received a Fulbright She does help students cope with heart- extends themselves for Visiting Scholars grant that will allow her to travel wrenching problems, keeping tabs on their the betterment of friend, to her native Chile where she will study the after well-being, their progress in class, their efforts to relative, or colleague is an effects of Wal-Mart’s takeover of the Chilean retail advance and finally—through hard work and good activist in spirit. chain, Líder. fortune —graduate and go on to employment or The piece in Radical Teacher follows her graduate studies. publication two years ago of Transnational Tortillas: She has come to believe, from her experience Race, Gender, and Shop-Floor Politics in Mexico and in New York, that immigrants of color— the United States (Cornell University Press, 2008), documented or otherwise—tend to have an a call to arms against exploitation of vulnerable especially difficult experience in academic studies. Latino workers. Transnational Tortillas tells how a Mexican tortilla-making company took advantage Another campus activist is Mark Ungar, of its employees, in Mexico as well as in its Political Science, who practices an factory in California, creating divisions between activism that blends so naturally with his light- and dark-skinned women south of the discipline—international politics—that he border, and pitting undocumented workers against finds himself constantly on the go. documented ones in California. Here in New York, Muñoz has developed a special sensitivity to the sufferings of undocumented students, and has become active helping them in their search for stability and success. In Radical Teacher, she wrote of her shocking, eye-opening encounter with realities of life for many immigrants here. “On the first day of class, five students requested appointments to speak with me in Mark Ungar, private. All five students were undocumented and Political Science had family members who were undocumented,” she wrote. “They were hoping I could help . I “I’m considered an international activist had to explain that I was not a lawyer, nor was the working on international issues,” says Professor class about how to immigrate ‘legally,’ but about Ungar, who chairs the graduate program in the social process of immigration. political science and international affairs. “I’m very She adds: “Over the course of the semester, focused on policy and change at the political level.” several of my students saw their family members Ungar has become an expert on police deported; one student successfully evaded a behavior in the barrios of Latin American workplace raid by Immigration and Customs countries. Just prior to the first of two Enforcement.” conversations he held with us, Ungar had returned 3 Scholarship in Action to the campus from the U.S. Immigration Court at Federal Plaza in Manhattan. There, he had testified on behalf of an eighteen-year-old woman from a small town in Honduras who has been seeking political asylum here. “Many people in her family were killed and she fled because of threats made on her life” he said. We later met up with Ungar just hours before he was to depart for Honduras. He was traveling on assignment from the United Nations to assess “the political control that the military has in the country,” following last year’s overthrow of Regine Latortue, Africana Studies Honduran President Manuel Zelaya. Because the U.N. must take a neutral stance Activism takes many forms: anyone who on the negotiations to settle the Honduras’ extends themselves for the betterment of Constitutional crisis, they turned to Ungar as an friend, relative or colleague is an activist impartial expert. in spirit. Among these, says Regine Latortue, Ungar’s globe-trotting assignments—a boon Africana Studies, are students, faculty members to students taking his courses—cover the role of and staff who have been sending money and the military in politics. goods to Haiti in the aftermath of the earthquake Ungar’s third book, Policing Democracy: that killed a quarter million people. Professor Overcoming Obstacles to Citizen Security in Latin Latortue, who is Haitian, knows that activism, like America (Johns Hopkins University Press), is slated heroism, can be shown in ways that are quiet and for release this fall. unrecognized. Student campaigns, seeking small amounts from large numbers of people, have raised more than $5,000 and two shipments of goods for Haiti, and more is coming, said Dave Bryan, special assistant to the Dean of Student Affairs.

Load more