Race and its Continuing Significance on our Campuses
an interview with
Dr. Joe R. Feagin

In the fall of 2002, every college president who was a member of the American Council on Education received a copy of The Continuing Significance of Racism: U.S. Colleges and Universities. This was the first in a series of occasional papers that ACE will be issuing in the coming months. They chose a noted scholar and graduate research professor in sociology at the University of Florida, Dr. Joe R. Feagin, to write the paper.

The Texas native and Harvard Ph.D. has written more than 40 books and 150 scholarly articles that have focused on racism and sexism. He served as president of the American Sociological Association from 1998 to 2001. His book with Harlan Hahn, Ghetto Revolts (Macmillan, 1973), was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. And recently his book Racist America: Roots, Current Realities and Future Reparations (Routledge, 2000) won a special award for scholarly contributions from the Racial and Ethnic minorities section of the American Sociological Association.

Recently, Black Issues In Higher Education spoke with Feagin about the state of race relations, particularly in higher education.

BI: Why do people feel uncomfortable talking about race in this country?

JF: Until the 1960s, many White Americans — and certainly until the 1950s, most White Americans — did not find it painful to be called "prejudiced" or "racist." Most Whites held so many racial stereotypes and prejudices in their heads up until the '50s and '60s that they were comfortable in expressing overt racism, overt racist attitudes and perspectives. With the 1960s came the constant reminder of the egalitarian values and ideals of this society, that came from the Black civil rights movement, and later the Latino civil rights movement, and even later the women's movement. But the movements of the '60s reminded Whites, and especially White men, of the egalitarian values on which this country was founded. Those values have tended to be more rhetoric than reality. I think one of the reasons Whites today get so upset over "racism" and "racist" is that we want to deny that we have these severe problems that we once cherished and relished.