Though some would like to think that the United States has moved beyond racial and sexual discrimination, Daisy Hernandez emphatically does not. A writer and editor from California,
Hernandez spoke Tuesday night at the Student Union Theater to a diverse group of UNC Charlotte students about the continued problems faced by minorities, particularly female minorities, in this country and how these problems are highlighted and exacerbated by the current economic downturn.
She began the event by establishing a rapport with the audience, commenting offhandedly about her first experience with sweet tea and mentioning a website that offers a discount, in celebration of Black History Month, on movies starring African-Americans. “I don’t think it’s exactly what Rosa Parks had in mind,” said Hernandez, but she clearly liked the idea.
By contrasting it with current instances of racism, she effectively set up one of the night’s themes, an inconsistency among our perceptions about the state of race relations today. On the one hand, she said, we see Barack Obama as President, and on the other, we find people mocking him from a racist standpoint. “So much has changed…so much has stayed the same,” said Hernandez. Part of the reason for this incongruity among the things we see, Hernandez argued, is a result of our “narrative of race.”
According to her, we tell ourselves that race is no longer an issue, but it clearly is. Here, she drew on her New Jersey upbringing, in which she heard that racism and sexism were problems of the past.
“The community I was a part of was incredibly segregated,” said Hernandez. A large part of her message was that we need to work to dispel the misconception that race is no longer a problem, a misconception perpetuated by the narrative of race.
“There was a dissonance, at least for me, between what I was seeing and what I was being told,” said Hernandez. Much of the support for her arguments came from stories, her own and others, as well as studies illustrating the continued effects of structural racism. The evening’s tone was more colloquial than academic. Hernandez did not use slides, cite lengthy statistics, or develop numerous difficult theories.
Rather, she used key examples and stuck closely to her themes. Hernandez worked as an editor and writer for numerous publications, including the National Catholic Reporter and Ms. Magazine. She was an editor for the feminist anthology “Colonize This!: Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism,” and her piece “Becoming A Black Man” earned her a nomination for a GLAAD Media Award. Following the talk, a few students, many of them clearly interested in pursuing these topics, contributed comments and asked questions.
These ranged from how institutionalized racism affected funding for Hernandez’s work to practical steps towards ending it. Hernandez was particularly interested in the last question. In one way or another, even before it was asked, much of the evening was devoted to answering it.
According to Hernandez, we have to disabuse ourselves and others of the comforting notion that goals of racial equality have been entirely reached. New technology, she said, particularly positions us to do this. According to Hernandez, whether through blogs, Twitter, or videos taken with cell phones, “You have a lot of power to tell a story you want to tell.”
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