Biased Board Member

Terri Givens was a Development resource in 2020 and has joined the Board in 2021.  She comes across as a very nice and polite person with whom I have no doubt we would engage in pleasant conversation in a social setting.  However, here are some quotes from publicly available sources that may make you question whether her stated positions and bias are appropriate for a highly influential position providing guidance and direction to the school now and into the future.  All of these were reviewed via links on her website terrigivens.com.  Again, please note that these are links she provides from her own website as highlights of examples of her work:

Terri E. Givens - Politics in an Era of Populism, https://youtu.be/4fKPRuKuWXw

• 3:05 - Slide Title:  "The Shifting Norms that Threaten Our Democracy"

  • Slide Excerpt:  "There was clearly a norm up until that point [the mid-1990s] that called for the condemnation of racist appeals. However, those norms began to crumble as conservative parties took over from the left-leaning governments that had supported the passage of the RED in the early 2000s"

  • Quote: "a lot of the appeals that we were seeing on the far right back in the mid-90s were becoming part of the mainstream discussions in, particularly in conservative parties, but even on the left to a certain extent. Things like connecting the number of immigrants to the number of unemployed, racist appeals, it's very apparent in the US that there are many politicians in the republican party who are using what we call 'dog whistles', appeals that are clearly racist in nature."

• 6:00 - Slide Title "Comparative populism"

  • Quote: "we've seen a backlash against Obama in the US, a backlash against antidiscrimination policy, rights for LGBTQ, and women in power. And then of course the overt rise of white supremacists with neonazism, things like the protests in Charlottesville. The thing I really focus on is the types of racism and approaches to white supremacy becoming much more overt in the sense that you see more protests, although there have been of course responses to those, and so what's interesting to me and the media...you see the counter marches and so on that don't get as much media attention as these much smaller activities of the far right."

  • Quote: "also more generally Cultural Threat that has led to support for far right parties. Racism, Islamophobia, misogyny, and that's more on the right. On the left...we've seen a different type of cultural thread which argues that Islam is anti-gay and anti-women"

• 8:31 - Slide Title "Discourses"

  • Quote: "far right discourses from the 1990s have become mainstream by 2010"

EdUp Unplugged - Using Radical Empathy to Tackle Racism in America, https://youtu.be/YTs3fr_48gg

• 3:50 "our curriculum back then, and even today unfortunately, doesn't have a lot of black people in it"

• 5:00 "I need to focus more on what are the roots of racism across the Atlantic. Because slavery was something that grew out of European Imperialism and Colonialism and all that and it was brought to the US and other parts of the Western Hemisphere, Latin America and so on."

• 5:40 "it's built into my life, right, I mean I can't get away from being black. I think that's why some people don't understand necessarily why, you know, 'why for you is everything about race?' Well, you know, it's part of our lives, it's part of our history, it's something that we deal with on a day-to-day basis. And, so, I know, when writing my book, one of the things I really wanted to emphasize, is the fact that we have this structural racism that not only exists here in the US but in many other parts of the world

• 11:47 "we forget, not that we forget, but we have to learn that the game is fixed...the system is not, even to this day, is not set up for black people to succeed, and the reason for that is because all of these things are baked into our social structure"

• 13:00 "Silicon Valley is not hiring black people...black people aren't getting trained"

• 15:10 "police brutality and police murders are happening"

• 15:45 "words matter...people get a little uncomfortable with terms like 'white supremacy'...but the reason it's important to talk about those is because it's directly connected to structural racism...the problem is that white supremacy is a component of this because that's been the theme since the start of this country, right, that white is the norm"

• 17:10 "white society, you can't fit in there either"

• 17:25 "this is something people have to understand and why we talk about structural racism and white supremacy, because we [black] are not the norm"

• 18:05 "And so, when we say white supremacy, what we're saying is we have created a norm of whiteness and maleness really because there's the gender issue as well and we can't forget that."

• 40:30 "what we don't understand is that sometimes we have to be invited, right? It's not just that we have to say 'oh, we're equal.' It's like, no, I have to know that if I go to your institution I'm going to have the same opportunity, that I'm not going to be shunted to the side, that I'm not going to have professors giving me bad grades just because they think I can't do the work, you know."

• 41:25 - 42:45 "when I walk into the classroom, the professor is going to automatically assume that I'm not as good a student...unconsciously the professor sees a black person walk into the classroom...the black kids just don't do as well in my class as the Indian students...there's all these biases that exist out there, so that's why I say we have to work twice as hard because not only do we have to come and do well just to succeed in school but you have to overcome the biases that often the faculty have against you."

• 44:15 "I was acceptable because I was able to fit into that mold, you know, talking a certain way and so on."

• 44:38 "for some reason we tend to want to stereotype black people and put them in a particular box...the problem is it's a lot of really negative connotations"

• *49:30 "Basically, I come from the premise that I assume something is racist unless you can prove to me that it's not...it's the opposite of innocent before proven guilty but it's true"

• 51:25 "that's just adding to the labor we have to do to help these people [white] understand our experience, but that's just the reality we're in right now"

• 54:40 "why wouldn't I think that it's because I'm a black woman entrepreneur that I'm having trouble raising the funds for this [her company]"

• 55:15 "we are not in a post-racial society, neither here nor in Europe"

• 56:50 "I don't understand how a policeman can see somebody with his back to him and just shoot him." [in response to a question about brown-skinned people getting abused by police]

• 59:05 "it's up to white people; we've done everything we can...I'm being totally 100% real here; we have done everything we can."

Conference on Right-Wing Studies/Conference for Research on Male Supremacism - 8/6/2020, 
The Far-Right in 2020: Supremacist and Authoritarian Mobilization in the U.S. and EU, https://youtu.be/XOAx5At-i3A

• 35:35 "History and the role of Transatlantic white supremacy, which goes way way back to the development of the slave trade, into the 1800's around issues of immigration, especially immigrants coming to the U.S. and how those different groups were racialized in different ways"

• 36:30 "the eugenics movement...various other movements...starting to play a role in the thinking around race both in the US and across the Atlantic...thinkers in Germany and the UK interacting with thinkers in the U.S....how it's still playing to today...ideas and subjects the far right today focuses on come from these philosophers and political scientists"

• 37:30 "far right discourses from the 1990s have actually become maintstream by 2010"

• 37:45 "a lot of the things that people were saying in the 1990s have basically become mainstream, and we see that in the rise of Trump and a lot of the discourses in the GOP"

• 44:10 "immigration and race has become an important focus for, not just the radical right, but the center right, and appealing to a certain group of voters that is feeling very concerned, very much that their culture is under attack, and that they are losing out"

RanttMedia 2019Jan17, Racism Is A Core Component Of The Radical Right, https://rantt.com/racism-is-a-core-component-of-the-radical-right

• (note: includes a picture of Trump, Rep Steve King, and Steve Bannon, presumably as representative of the "Radical Right")

• "in the current political moment, it is clear that racism has become a key component for many radical right parties, including the Republican party in the US."

  • (note: under this quote is a picture of a tweet by @RanttMedia saying "Since it began, Republicans used racist dog whistles to gaslight their base and scapegoat minorities. Under Trump, they now proudly espouse their white nationalism.")