SOCIOLOGIST TO LECTURE ON RACIAL IDENTITY IN COLLEGES

Swarthmore College sociologist Sarah Willie will discuss the impact the college experience can have on racial identity in a lecture titled "Acting Black: Race, College and Challenges for the 21st Century" on Tuesday, Feb. 17, at 7 p.m. in the Multicultural Center. Willie, a member of the Haverford College class of 1986 who coordinates the Swarthmore Black Studies Program, will compare the experiences and attitudes of graduates of a historically black university with the experiences of African-Americans who graduated from a predominantly white university. She will touch on the parallels between women's colleges and historically black colleges.

Willie's lecture will draw on her recently published book Acting Black: College, Identity and the Performance of Race. In her interviews with African-American graduates of both predominantly black and predominantly white institutions, Willie says, "I learned some uncomfortable things about the cultural life within each kind of college setting. I was expecting to learn those uncomfortable things about the white colleges, but I was surprised by what I found at the black colleges."

The book, says Willie, treats her research as well as her own experience as a student at Haverford and as an exchange student for a semester at Spelman College, a historically black women's college in Atlanta. "The semester at Spelman was in some ways a wonderful antidote to my experience at Haverford," says Willie, "both as a historically black college and as a women's college. But I was expecting Spelman to be a utopia, and I found that it had its own problems."

Willie says that her white friends from college are often surprised to learn how significantly her experience of Haverford differed from theirs when they read her book. Her experience and her research at both majority-black and majority-white institutions illustrate "the ways inequality, but also various forms of prejudice, are likely to be reproduced in any setting," she says. Acting Black offers suggestions for colleges and universities seeking to make their campuses truly multicultural.

Willie's lecture, sponsored by Sisterhood, is part of a series of events celebrating Black History Month at Bryn Mawr.

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