Need For a Diversity Think Tank
Professor Fosu believes that even the most structurally racist university in one of the whitest states in our nation, such as the University of Rhode Island, can deliberately transform into an oasis of diversity. For that reason, after consultation with URI students and professors, The Diversity Think Tank was founded in 2020 by Professor Louis Kwame Fosu to effectively train students, HR administrators, organization leaders, and policymakers to become transformative racial equity and diversity policy experts. These experts utilize strategic nonviolent advocacy to end antiquated policies that reinforce structural, systemic, and institutional racism in academic institutions. The goal is to create dignified, diverse, enlightened, equitable, and loving environments in academic institutions, especially for Black Americans, Latinos, and other marginalized people.
Professor Fosu believes that even the whitest structurally racist university, in one of the whitest states in our nation, such as the University of Rhode Island, can deliberately transform to become an oasis of diversity. For that reason, after consultation with URI students and professors, The Diversity Think Tank was founded in 2020 by Professor Louis Kwame Fosu to effectively train students to become transformative racial equity and diversity policy experts who utilize strategic nonviolent advocacy to end antiquated policies that reinforce structural, systemic and institutional racism in academic Institutions. The goal is to create dignified, diverse, enlightened, equitable and loving environments in academic institutions especially for African-Americans, Latinos and other marginalized people.
To quote Justice Earl Warren in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision that dismantled the racist Separate but Equal doctrine in 1954 argued by an African-American Thurgood Marshall who was the NAACP’s lead attorney, “…to separate education experiences solely because of their race, generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the world that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone…”
In America today, there is a phenomenon where some educated Blacks, who have been damaged by generations of systemic racism and centuries of oppression and lynchings, are now living Earl Warren’s dire warnings about discrimination and what Justice Felix Frankfurter describes as a “chilling effect” in the 1952 Supreme Court case Wieman v. Updegraff. That chilling effect has chastened some African-Americans to a point where they are unwilling or unable to raise their voices on behalf of their own marginalized communities. As in the Wieman case, black faculty and administrators are pressured to implicitly pledge loyalty and allegiance to their institutional racist oppressors or their jobs are immediately at risk. We bear witness to this tragic phenomenon at the University of Rhode Island and many other institutions, where some African-American men and women, and other historically oppressed people, have become deniers of racism and are often actively complicit in defending and buttressing the dehumanizing policies of institutional racism.
In the Wieman case, Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter’s extraordinary opinion stresses the necessity of independence in the noble role which teachers play in a democracy:
“The process of education has naturally enough been the basis of hope for the perdurance of our democracy on the part of all our great leaders, from Thomas Jefferson onwards. To regard teachers — in our entire educational system, from the primary grades to the university — as the priests of our democracy is therefore not to indulge in hyperbole. It is the special task of teachers to foster those habits of open-mindedness and critical inquiry which alone make for responsible citizens, who, in turn, make possible an enlightened and effective public opinion. Teachers must fulfill their function by precept and practice, by the very atmosphere which they generate; they must be exemplars of open-mindedness and free inquiry. They [teachers] cannot carry out their noble task if the conditions for the practice of a responsible and critical mind are denied to them. They must have the freedom of responsible inquiry, by thought and action, into the meaning of social and economic ideas, into the checkered history of social and economic dogma.”