Yesterday i went to a screening of the student produced film "Still Black at Yale." (The title refers to the 1974 student film 'Black at Yale,' which i actually found YDN articles about when i was doing my senior essay research.) The film, produced and directed and all that cool stuff by two Yale seniors, looks at the multiplicity of black identities among Yale students and at the struggles facing black students at Yale. It's a powerful film, and the audience responded pretty vigorously during the question and answer session - asking for the inclusion of more Caribbean and African voices. The filmmakers said that they wanted to include voices of members of the Yale and New Haven communities who were not faculty or professional staff or students - like Dining Hall Workers. Since Yale's racialized job structure is referenced at several moments during the film - by a football coach who talks about being mistaken for a maintenance worker, and by one of the filmmakers herself, who, in a powerful voiceover over a black screen, talks about finding very little record of the lives of black students at Yale, but some stuff about black service workers, who, i believe, still outnumber black undergrads here, it seems like this would make a lot of sense. It would also be really powerful/interesting, i think, to hear black students talk about what this dynamic means to them. What did it mean to be black at Yale during the two most recent strikes, for instance?

But i'm also concerned with another question, one which "Still Black at Yale" should not have the burden of trying to answer, for, as some noted at last night's screening, to do so might amount to a colonization of the film's message, of the kinds of speech the filmakers were trying to make visible, by those of us who have played a role in that silencing. Yet i still think that we need to ask ourselves and each other: "How do white Yalies construct whiteness?" What does it mean to be white at Yale? For those of us who claim white privilege, these question are ones we need to answer if we want to topple white supremacy and fight for a better world. What does it mean to be a "white" student at a university where there are more black dining hall and maintenance workers than classmates? Whiteness is all too often ignored as normative when, as Matthew Jacobson and others have written, it is as much a historical construction, with shifting definitions which once excluded people like me as "Hebrews" (or Irish, Italians, Slavs,) but have been structured on an antinomy of civilization versus barbarism, of European enlightenment against people of African descent since the creation of whiteness as an ideology of difference. Treating whiteness as the norm (and i do NOT think that "Still Black at Yale" does this) or as an essentialized and unchanging category makes impossible a serious analysis of the racialized global and national constructions of citizenship, "intelligence" and power. I want to see a "White at Yale," a conversation about white privilege which challenges white supremacy in the academy and acts in solidarity with projects like "Still Black at Yale."

Is this reasonable? Or does something like this take away from the power of speech claimed by "S.B.a.Y.?" Would a film about whiteness at Yale really just put attention back on white people in ways which would be denying black students a voice all over again?

EDIT: I found the online pdf version of Ritual&Dissent, the latest iisue of 211 Park Street, the African American Cultural Center's newsletter, so i'm linking it.