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Exploring race, ethnicity and place

More than 50 years since the start of the Civil Rights Movement, TCU students and faculty explored the evolving intersection of races and places.

Exploring race, ethnicity and place

TCU graduate student Katherine Fogelberg and TCU professors Sohyun Lee (Spanish), Freyca Calderon Berumen (Education) and Karla O'Donald (Spanish) shared memories of nonconformance in their panel discussion “Cartographies of the Self.”

Exploring race, ethnicity and place

More than 50 years since the start of the Civil Rights Movement, TCU students and faculty explored the evolving intersection of races and places.

“We all believe that no single discipline has the answers to the complex questions that face America today over the issues of race, ethnicity and place,” said Andy Schoolmaster, dean of AddRan College of Liberal Arts.

At the seventh biennial Race, Ethnicity and Place Conference in October, an international cadre of academic researchers gave more than 200 presentations, including 50 by TCU faculty, students and recent graduates representing 20 disciplines.

With TCU as the conference co-sponsor, Schoolmaster aimed to showcase the breadth of Fort Worth to scholars from across the world. “It’s more than just cowboys and cultures,” he said. “But really a vibrant growing, exciting place, and a satisfying place to live.”
From the non-academic realm, Fort Worth Star-Telegram columnist Bob Ray Sanders used Langston Hughes’ poetry to describe the progression to, and deviance from, racial equality. Community organizer Renny Rosas ’78 talked about the political challenges and opportunities for Mexican-Americans.

Pass, Fail or Go to Jail

“Why did a chance encounter on the street turn into a deadly shooting? There’s a lot of psychology behind that, a lot of sociology behind that, a lot of policy choices,” said Pearce Edwards ’13 about Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, Mo.

As students at TCU, Edwards and Miles Davison ’13 co-authored a report about diversity at the university and offered suggestions to increase inclusiveness on campus. They were inspired by the transformational potential of research and continued independent studies after their graduations.

One project was to investigate the reasons some U.S. kids move from school to the prison system. At the conference, the young scholars discussed their findings during a presentation called “One Nation, Under Bars: How Educational Practices, Perceptions and Policy Fuel the School-to-Prison Pipeline.”

The researchers compiled data from academic and media sources and measured how factors including racial diversity, income levels and urban proximity affect the rates of student incarceration.

“African-American and Hispanic students are anywhere from 1.5 to five times more likely to be suspended from school than their white peers,” Edwards said.

The three researchers wanted to investigate the reasons behind the different punishment likelihoods not only between racial groups but also when measured by schools containing majority populations of the same race.

“Our theory is people are biased sometimes, and they might make decisions that don’t actually reflect what’s happening and that might lead to disparities.”

“We have this problem of incarceration of youth and criminalization of youth, and that’s being created by people’s attitudes,” said Edwards. “How do we understand our attitudes, and how does that help us have a more tolerant society?”

Assumptions ≠ Reality

Ever heard the phrase, “You are not who I expected you to be”?

If so, you are not alone.

Sometimes a person’s “image does not match with the name and the labels or preconceptions people have,” said Freyca Calderon Berumen, doctoral student and adjunct professor of education at TCU.

Calderon Berumen, TCU Spanish professors Karla O'Donald and Sohyun Lee, and graduate students Julie Vu and Katherine Fogelberg wanted to share firsthand memories of nonconformance to expectations in their panel discussion, “Cartographies of the Self.”

“We are a group of friends from different cultural backgrounds,” said Calderon Berumen. “We all have had experiences related to assumptions some people make when hearing our names and then seeing us.”

Assumptions are accepted as truth with or without any supporting evidence. For example, the name Julie Vu, probably suggests a woman of Asian descent. Vu, however, “is the whitest and blondest woman among us,” said Calderon Berumen.

During the discussion, panelists described situations in which parts of their personalities did not accurately portray a holistic sense of self. They emphasized experiences related to ethnicities and nationalities but distanced those occurrences from who they are as people.
“Our personal experiences interconnect in ways that is practically impossible to represent in a map,” said Calderon Berumen.

Neighborhoods Inverting

Kyle Walker, assistant professor of geography at TCU, discussed the entropy index, a tool used to measure racial and ethnic homogeneity in neighborhoods.

Fifty years ago, ethnic and racial minorities lived close to city centers, creating a “diverse urban core,” he said. “As you moved out to the suburbs, to the urban fringes, it became much more homogenous, much whiter, much more segregated.”

Walker wanted to discover if this segregated trend still stood as fact. He pored through census data to locate 2014’s most diverse areas in the urban United States.

He found a “demographic inversion,” he said during his presentation, “Locating Neighborhood Diversity in the American Metropolis.”

Geographic areas closer to the downtowns are now home to predominantly white professionals. Suburbs are becoming “a migration destination of racial and ethnic minorities who maybe historically have been excluded from those places,” said Walker who focused his study on urban centers in Chicago and Fort Worth-Dallas.

In 1990, Fort Worth’s most diverse neighborhoods were near downtown. Now, more Caucasian, and often wealthy, people are moving into areas, such as West Seventh Street. Nowadays ethnic and racial minorities dominate suburban neighborhoods in Haltom City, North Richland Hills and other places south of Interstate 20.