Melissa Harris-Perry Speaks at CSU

http://www.glaad.org/sites/default/files/MelissaHarrisPerry.jpg

A simple online search of Melissa Harris-Perry will tell you that she is an American writer, professor, television host, and political commentator with a focus on African-American politics. Basically, she's a super hero and can do everything.

Harris-Perry hosts the Melissa Harris-Perry weekend news and opinion television show on MSNBC. She is also a regular fill-in host on The Rachel Maddow Show as well as a professor of politics and international affairs at Wake Forest University, where she is the founding director of the Anna Julia Cooper Project on Gender, Race, and Politics in the South. Prior to this, she taught at Princeton University and the University of Chicago. She is a regular columnist for the magazine The Nation, and the author of Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America.

      Now that I have that out of the way, she is also really funny, really inspiring and really brilliant.  

Harris-Perry spoke at the college I attend, Colorado State University, on Sunday night. She spoke about Black History Month in the context of the Black Lives Matter Movement, Adult citizenship, calling for black bodies to no longer take the "junior positions" or taking up a position as a "the" (something like "The Black Vote" or "The Black Candidate") ontological blackness and how it relates to how other intersectional identities (she mentioned the Queer and Tran* experience while I snapped my fingers poetically to myself in the back of the room) share similarities, citizenship for individuals persons (stating that true citizenship starts in the uterus and I instantly fell in love with this euphemism), how Black Cultural Participatory language is a language that not everyone "understands or bothers to translate," (which she masterfully demonstrated through subtle Beyonce Formation lyrics) among many other social inequities that mainstream media attempt to whitewash and skate over. 

                                                 Basically, she's a powerhouse.

Harris-Perry spoke with an air of intelligence over these subject and a shared personal connection with the wrongful nature of subjugating black bodies into any particular "social confinement." 

She spoke about how the #BLM Movement is not a novel or new ideology and theorized what Martin Luther King Jr. would have thought about this social media charged movement if he would be alive today. She suggested that MLK would have used social media for greater aspects of visualizing social injustices, citing his face words of "A riot is the language of the unheard." 

A point she made which really resonated with me was when she spoke about the notion, that we all as a society know, that "Race isn't a biological reality." She then went on to say that "We know that race is not real, but we feel it in our bodies." These words hung heavy in the room after she said them, simply because I think she wanted us to really ruminate on this idea. This made me thing about the falsity of living in a post-racial world that I spoke about in my last blog post. When people attempt to speak and internalize issues concerning race in a way that denies the pain, discrimination and ultimately eraser of race as an identifier, they are essentially taking away the ability "to feel." 

Harris-Perry ended her lecture in summation of the main points she believes are reinforcing the visual landscape of a post racial society we receive from mainstream media and that of black people taking on "junior partnership roles" (the lesser) in all facets of society.  She states:

1. We live in an age that highlights the continuing abuse of *black* bodies and perpetuates disgust for and control of these bodies.

1. Our colleges are more economically and racially homogeneous.

1. Education is increasingly defined by narrow measurement performance. 

1. Our lives are increasingly mediated by technology. 

She ended her speech with alot of great one-liners that I honestly started jumbling them all up trying to write them down fast enough. Basically, she said that "College should be hard, but it should be safe." We should be pushing ourselves to have these hard conversations and treat them with respect and humility in order to become well-rounded and knowledgeable human beings.

And I couldn't agree more. 

- K