Following Bebe Moore Campbell’s transition into the spiritual realm, many took note of the Washington Post’s earlier appraisal, “If this is a fair world, Bebe Moore Campbell will be remembered as the most important African-American novelist of this century – except for, maybe Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin.” Her publicist, Dr. Linda Wharton-Boyd, noted that Bebe, as she was known to me, had not only received international acclaim for her writing but she had also become a powerful advocate for mental illness and fought valiantly against an array of social injustices. One dimension neglected by Bebe’s recent national coverage is the fact that Bebe was the quintessential positive outcome of a diversity initiative.
While teaching African American Rhetoric at the University of Pittsburgh (Pitt), I met Bebe who was small in physical stature but extraordinarily large in her ability to clearly express seminal ideas. In her term paper, for example, Bebe first discussed the adverse impact of European-derived aspects of beauty such as light skin color, long straight hair, small pointed nose, and a relatively flat posterior on African-American women. Next, she presented the psychodynamics related to her personal decision to cut her long straight hair and wear the “Afro” style. She summed up the excruciating experience by stating, “It was a ‘hellafied’ ‘thang!’” as she experienced the cognitive dissonance emanating from defining her external self in terms other than those for which she had formerly been praised. Once the paper was published in the Black Studies Department’s Black Lines journal, many young women not only identified with her story but also took major steps in the development of their race consciousness by redefining aspects of what made them beautiful.
Other faculty members quickly noted Bebe’s intellectual prowess. What was seldom made clear, however, was the fact that a hard-won diversity program, emanating from the struggle of African-American student activists, brought Bebe to Pitt. Thus, it is most unfortunate that there remain many people who naively, fearfully and politically seek to end diversity initiatives, believing them to be inappropriate uses of skin color, gender, sexual orientation, religion, or some other aspect of personal and collective identity. However, informed leaders of high quality and highly competitive institutions know that the best rationale for diversity is that its outcomes help their institutions fulfill their highest priority goals, their core values, and their most fundamental reasons for existing. As such, Bebe is perhaps Pitt’s Diversity Diva, a model outcome of its diversity programs.
