Dean's Diversity Action Council Reflections 4-20-21

During the 2020-2021 Academic Year, the Dean's Diversity Action Council met monthly and were joined by the leaders of SBA and our student affinity groups. Each meeting began with a reflection, prayer, or poem by one of our Council members or students to ground us in our work together. We have compiled these reflections to share with our community, because they powerfully represent the challenges we face, the courage we seek, and our hope for a brighter future.

As always, we aim to create long-term, sustained progress toward justice, equity, and human dignity.

Dean April Mara Barton April, 2021

August 10, 2020 Dean April Barton Dear God, We ask that Your divine inspiration fill our minds, hearts, and spirits as we work to overcome the affliction of discrimination and racial inequality -- and as we work to lift the voices and lives of all those who are marginalized and treated unjustly.

Help us to lead with compassion, integrity, dignity and mutual respect. Help us to unify and heal our community.

May we be strengthened by the fellowship we share together in order to serve You and Duquesne Law. Let us be reminded to give ourselves and others mercy and grace as we work together.

Let us be inspired by Jim Lawson who taught us the concept of the beloved community. The idea that in the bosom of every human being there is the spark of divinity. It is the spark of something that is sacred, holy, and special and that we don’t have a right to destroy.

We pray for our beloved community at Duquesne Law.

September 21, 2020 Rosie Fassette, 3L Inspired by Ruth Bader Ginsberg This past Friday, the world lost a beautiful soul and one of my personal heroes I spent the next days reading over the words that she will be memorialized for and I came across this “Yet what great defeat could we suffer than to become the forces we oppose and their disrespect for human dignity.” It was then that I realized that the undercurrent of every one of her words was human dignity. Isn’t that perfect? For dignity is the seed from which great nations sprout. What’s more is that it is what we return to, it is what we lean on, it is what we yearn for.

The question in my soul is: who will carry this torch on for her?

Here I am Lord, Is it I Lord?

I have heard you calling in the night I will go Lord, If you lead me, I will hold your people in my heart Let us remember the words of another great woman: People are often unreasonable, illogical, and self-centered, Forgive them anyways If you are kind People may accuse you of selfish ulterior motives Be kind anyways If you are successful, You will win some false friends and true enemies Be successful anyways If you are honest and frank People will often cheat you, Be honest and frank anyways What you spend your years building, Someone could destroy overnight Build anyways If you find serenity and happiness They may be jealous By happy anyways The good you do today People often forget about tomorrow Do good anyways.

Give the world the best you have It may never be enough Give the world the best that you got anyways You see, in the final analysis, It is between you and your god, It was never between you and them anyway.

God help us to bear witness to the dignity of all who You have created, regardless of stage of life or wealth or ability or color or creed. For You have created each of us fully equal each bestowed with Your inherent Dignity. Amen.

October 27, 2020 Professor Aman Gebru Inspired by the October 27, 2018, shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue I would like to make two main points: • •

The fight for racial justice is long, and it is difficult… but history shows that those who discriminate based on superficial features will lose in the end. As Martin Luther King, Jr., reminded us “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

The second point is that those who hate a group based on biases they have, don’t just hate one group. That hate is transferred to other similarly situated groups as well.

For example, one of the topics that this committee has talked about is police brutality. While the issue has gained some attention in the US, it has been and is present in many other places. For instance, the #EndSARS movement against police brutality in the Nigeria started slowly in that country, but it quickly became global because many others people could relate to the problem. Although this incident is about a different kind of bias, supporters around the world realized the injustice as if it was their own.

The fight for justice is also multi-faceted. To mention an unfortunate example, exactly two years ago, on October 27, 2018 the world witnessed the senseless attack on three Pittsburgh Jewish congregations. I came to interview at Duquesne a few days after the attacks and I could sense the damage and the shock within the Duquesne faculty as I met with many professors, but several months later, when I moved here, I saw several messages of support including the “Stronger Together” sign from residents, business, and government institutions. That experience taught me that when various communities work together to fight injustice, they always win.

I would like to end my remarks with these words from Emperor Hailesilasie of Ethiopia in a speech he gave at the United Nations in 1960. The same words were included in Bob Marley’s hit song “War”. … On the question of racial discrimination, the Addis Ababa Conference taught, to those who will learn, this further lesson: that until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned; that until there are no longer first class and second-class citizens of any nation; that until the color of a man's skin is of no more significance than the color of his eyes; that until the basic human rights are equally guaranteed to all without regard to race; that until that day, the dream of lasting peace and world citizenship and the rule of international morality will remain but a fleeting illusion, to be pursued but never attained.

In a Hollywood like ending, Fascism has been discredited, and Hailesilasie and others who fought against these aggressions are celebrated as global icons. Let’s join forces to uproot racism wherever and whenever we see it.

Click to listen to War by Bob Marley & The Wailers.

January 22, 2021 Dr. Valerie Harper “Hope deferred makes the heart sick, so rejoice in hope, be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer” (Proverbs 13:12; Romans 12:12).

With closed eyes and bowed heads let us be thankful for awakening this morning with our families and friends in the New Year of 2021 and with the ability to use our voices. May we also pray for the families who lost love ones in 2020 and awake to one or more voices missing from their homes?

Voices – When you look at headstones you see the year we were born and the year we pass with a dash in between. With the “DASH” representing our voices, how we live our lives, and what we did in between those years. Therefore, as we lose a few voices, our voices should rise to fill the dash in support of humanity.

Regardless of our faith, whether Christian, Islam, Jewish, agnostic, we must be mindful of the “other.” What will your DASH say?

We must understand the body before us because it is the cover for which lies the “human being.” The body which we must learn to understand shows the rainbow – the differences in race, ethnicity, culture, gender, etc. But, ahh remembering that the human being inside is special. As we engage in dialogue where we must learn empathy, not sympathy; to be comfortable with being uncomfortable; open our hearts; where we cultivate curiosity, understanding; where we learn and teach; where we acquire or enhance our awareness, may our meaning and purpose align with our words and actions toward hope for a more authentic and equitable future for our community and beyond.

February 19, 2021 Alexandria Iwanenko, 3L Inspired by the words of Justice Sotomayor and Justice Ginsburg This excerpt really emphasizes why our work on this council is so important. We have to make sure all students in the Law School and on campus as a whole feel like they belong.

“Race matters to a young man’s view of society when he spends his teenage years watching others tense up as he passes, no matter the neighborhood where he grew up. Race matters to a young woman’s sense of self when she states her hometown and then is pressed,” “No, where are you really from?”, regardless of how many generations her family has been in the country.

Race matters to a young person addressed by a stranger in a foreign language, which he does not understand because only English was spoken at home. Race matters because of the slights, the snickers, the silent judgments that reinforce that most crippling of thoughts: “I do not belong here.”

-Justice Sotomayor and Justice Ginsburg dissenting in Schuette v. BAMN (2014

March 19, 2021 Antonio Bonnetty, 3L “Walk with your ancestors, and be free from chains and find change in your heart, speak not words of daggers but songs of freedom and fly with the love of glory.”

New Horizons A Poem by Antonio Bonnetty In 2015 we dreamed among the Stars hoping, wishing, dreaming to find a spark of life on a Planet that existed as a twinkle in the eye. Danger struck like gushing water but we fought the tide and brought home glory. Today the waters gush anew, loved ones lost to an enemy we can not see. No empathy given to our fellow man. Love broken like branches as flames of opposition and hate swam or daily lives stealing our dignity and suffocating trust. Yet we survive, as tears run down our faces like autumn rain we march while in pain reaching for ropes of freedom to pull us from the darkness. Blinded by pepper spray, words of hate, and microaggressions we see tomorrow’s bounty, a table where all have a seat to eat, to love and be full on justice and equality. Breath with me, breath deep for you walk with giants as tall as the eye can see, you are the descendants of Kings and Queens who even in bondage knew mercy and hope. As they spoke of freedom while in chains because they knew change was gonna come.

April 16, 2021 Shreya Desai, 3L Inspired by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. There’s been a spike in the violence perpetrated against so many Americans of different colors and genders and backgrounds. Even since I was first asked to offer reflections, the list of mass shootings around the country has just continued to grow. Most notably, we’ve heard about the shooting in Atlanta, the grocery store in Boulder; there was a doctor’s home that was terrorized in South Carolina, even just last night, the Fed Ex facility in Indianapolis. There has been a total of 150 mass shootings just within the year and we’re not even through April. Not more than five days has passed between the shootings and nearly 200 individuals are dead because of this gun violence. I think that this sheds light on a particularly dark issue that is going to stain American history for many, many decades to come.

I found this quote from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 1964 lecture for the Nobel Peace Prize that I just thought was important to reiterate in light of everything that is happening in our world today.

“Violence is impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all. It is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his understanding: it seeks to annihilate rather than convert. Violence is immoral because it thrives on hatred rather than love. It destroys community and makes brotherhood impossible. It leaves society in monologue rather than dialogue. Violence ends up defeating itself. It creates bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers.”

So we must fix our vision not merely on the negative expulsion of war, but upon the positive affirmation of peace. We must see that peace represents a sweeter music, a cosmic melody that is far superior to the discords of war. Somehow we must transform the dynamics of the world power struggle from the negative nuclear arms race which no one can win to a positive contest to harness man’s creative genius for the purpose of making peace and prosperity a reality for all of the nations of the world. In short, we must shift the arms race into a “peace race”. If we have the will and determination to mount such a peace offensive, we will unlock hitherto tightly sealed doors of hope and transform our imminent cosmic elegy into a psalm of creative fulfillment.”

Diversity Hands designed by Kat D. of LaLaSessions