“We think we’re in this post-racial society,” LaKeitha Poole, coordinator for African American Student Affairs at Louisiana State University, said at a meeting for ABCC state coordinators. “But we always get the question: Is the [black] culture center still relevant? I think they are.”
While the relevancy question won’t go away, Poole’s opinion found consensus, it’s fair to say, among most of those attending ABCC’s 24th conference, Oct. 30- Nov. 1 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Students, their use of the centers and the success stories that come from them make the best case for the continued existence of black culture centers, Poole says. LSU’s 21-year-old African American Culture Center is “definitely the hub of black student life” on the Baton Rogue campus, she notes.
On other campuses, like Yale and the University of Illinois, black culture centers are even older. Both have centers that turned 45 years old this year.
As ABCC approaches its quarter-century mark, its leadership is well aware of the shifting winds surrounding race, culture and ethnicity on campuses nationwide.
“There’s a multicultural movement on college campuses,” says Richard O’Bryant, referring to an increase in other minority students — Asians, Africans and Latinos — on campuses nationwide who seek their own cultural recognition. That’s not “a bad thing,” he acknowledges.
