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All through high school I was that person who slept through my history classes, which is a terrible thing to admit, but it's true. And it's mainly because the historical narratives that I learned in high school had very little to do with people who looked like me or sounded like me. What I get to do as the director of African-American Studies in part is to create opportunities for people of African-American descent in particular to be heard and to feel empowered. 

Two of my favorite courses, one is about slavery in US history and culture, and the other is a class called Sex, Love, and Race in Early America. We have to look at what is Blackness, what is whiteness, how are they defined against each other? 

But also, how our different groups in American society throughout time classify. All you have to do is turn on the news. Conversations about race, about inequality, about police brutality are saturating, right, popular media. You can't understand why that is or why certain conversations are taking place without understanding how that inequality was constructed in the very first place. 

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