Click to open the transcript: Kellie Jones and Thomas Mitchell
- Good evening, thank you all for joining us tonight. Even though I can't see you, I'm sure you all look amazing. My name is Jeremy Thomas, Amherst College class of 2021. I'm a former chair of the Black Student Union, and I would like to welcome you to the first event in our Black Alumni Week. Tonight, we are in for a treat, a conversation between two of not only Amherst's, but the world's, smartest people, MacArthur Genius Grant recipients Dr. Kellie Jones and Dr. Thomas Mitchell, hosted by Ayo Lewis, the current chair of the Black Student Union. This evening would not have been possible without the work of many people, and I extend my gratitude to Traci Wolfe, Carol Allman-Morton, Norm Jones, Emily Ravis-Brining, and the Black Student Union's event coordinators, Kalaria Okali and Ernest Collins, Amherst classes of 2022 and 2023, respectively. Black alumni, please do not forget to join us throughout the week at all the spectacular events we have planned, without further ado, our moderator for the evening, Ayo Lewis, is a senior neuroscience major, from New York City, she hopes to pursue reproductive healthcare with a focus on combating racial inequities in Obstetrics & Gynecology. She's currently a researcher for both Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston and the world health organization. On campus, she's an active member of Amherst College Hillel executive board and has held many positions on Amherst College Black Student Unions, executive board. She is currently the senior chair of the BSU. Dr. Kellie Jones, Amherst College class of 1981, is the Hans Hofmann Professor of Modern Art in the department of Art History and Archeology and African-American and African diaspora studies at Columbia university. Her research interests include African-American and African diaspora artists, LatinX and Latin American artists, and issues in contemporary art and museum theory. Dr. Jones, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, has also received awards for her work from The Hutchins Center for African and African-American research, Harvard University, and The Warhol Foundation, in 2016 she was named the MacArthur Foundation Fellow. Dr. Jones' writings have appeared in a multitude of exhibition catalogs and journals. She's the author of two books published by Duke University Press, EyeMinded: Living and Writing Contemporary Art, and South of Pico: African-American Artists in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s, which received the Walter & Lillian Lowenfels Criticism Award from the American Book Award Foundation in 2018, and was named best book of the decade in 2019 by Art News, best art book of 2017 in the New York Times, and a best book of 2017 in Art Forum. Dr. Jones has also worked as a curator for over three decades and has numerous major national and international exhibitions in her credit, her exhibition, Now Dig This!: Art and Black Los Angeles in 1960 to 1980, at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, was named one of the best exhibitions of 2011 and 2012 by Art Forum, and best thematic show nationally by the International Association of Art Critics. She was co-creator of Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the 1960s, which was named one of the best exhibitions of 2014 by Art Forum. Last but not least, we have Professor Thomas Mitchell, Amherst College class of 1987. A professor at Texas A&M University School of Law, where he also served as interim Dean in 2017 to 2018. at Tex A&M, he co-directs the program in Realistic and Community Development Law. Prior to doing Texas A&M, he served on the faculty of the University of Wisconsin Law School as a full professor with a chair in law. He's a national expert on property issues facing disadvantaged families and communities, and has published leading scholarly works addressing these matters. Professor Mitchell has done extensive law reform and policy work, most prominently serving as the principal drafter of a widely adopted model state statute designed to substantially enhance the ability of disadvantaged families to maintain ownership of their property. Professor Mitchell has also helped develop federal policy proposals, working with some in Congress and others in the executive branch to help disadvantaged farmers and property owners. In 2020, he was named as one of 21 residents of the MacArthur Fellowship in recognition of this substantial impact his overall professional work has had in assisting disadvantaged farmers and property owners, farmers and owners who are disproportionately African-American and other people of color. In 2021, he was awarded the Howard University award for distinguished post-graduate achievement, an award that Thurgood Marshall, Vice-President Kamala Harris, Zora Neale Hurston, and the Civil Rights icon James Farmer Jr., among many other Howard luminaries have also received. Professor Mitchell is a graduate of Amherst College, The Howard University School of Law, and the University of Wisconsin Law School, where he received an LLM, and served as a William H. Hastie Fellow. Please join me in giving the warmest Zoom welcome to our guests.
- Thank you, Jeremy, for that welcome, I am super excited to dive into this conversation with you guys today. So let's start off by what was your experience in general as Black people at Amherst, and how did that shape your trajectory afterward?
- I'm waiting for you Kellie. So Ayo, who do you want to take this?
- Oh, either of you could respond.
- You can go ahead Thomas, because I just froze, hopefully this is not going to happen all night, but go ahead.
- So I think that this is going to be one of the first times I'll share this and it's something sometimes I wanted to share with my law students who sometimes put me on a pedestal and think that what I, whatever I've achieved, they can't. So part of my Amherst experience was just informed by some personal family issues. I come from a family sometimes of great strengths but you know, a fair amount of kind of dysfunction, and some of that manifested itself when I started at Amherst in terms of some pretty severe financial issues that put at risk my ability to even start at Amherst or stay there, and so one of the things that I have to give a shout out to is the Amherst financial aid office, Dean Joe Paul Case, Kate Gentile, who fundamentally made my ability to stay in college possible as opposed to dropping out, but you know, some of those experiences kind of, on the other side of the track, you know, really ended up building some real resilience for me, and not that I'd want other folks necessarily to go through what I experienced, and in some ways I think just being resilient and making the best out of a bad situation, so if I had had my druthers, if I had not had some of the familial challenges, I probably would have studied Environmental Science with focusing on some issues of Environmental Justice, I would've stayed in Anthropology, but I ended up becoming an English major at Amherst, and it's just a wonderful department, and had great mentors and professors, and people like Barry O'Connell and Kim Townsend, and decided just to try to hone my writing skills, my analytical skills, my critical thinking skills and those very kind of skills, even though, when sometimes you're an English major, you don't know if you're actually learning something, I've used to this very day. I think the other thing, and I'll leave on this is that at Amherst, I became an activist, I had been a football recruit at a number of Ivy League colleges, went to Amherst, wasn't recruited, thought they did recruit, and encountered pretty serious racial issues in the athletic department, and that's drawing on one of my strengths in my family, and the way I was raised was to not accept kind of second best, and I ended up kind of leading a movement to address, some of the racial issues in the Amherst athletic department, and there were skills that I used and developed in that very process that I use to this very day. The importance of building allies, I got to know people in the Dean's office, the President, the Board of Trustees. I used the media in terms of writing op-eds or whatever they were called, letters in the Amherst Student, and then very much developed kind of a bottom up and top-down kind of approach, making sure that there were key allies in place that I could call upon who were in a position to help kind of change the conditions on the ground, and so in some ways, even though I thought, you know, I'd be kind of, I imagined a college experience where I, athletics would play a much more substantial role in terms of the kind of enjoyment. I mean, ironically for me, I'm actually glad that I experienced what I experienced because, A, it raised my consciousness about certain issues of race that I had not been fully aware of, I would say, and it actually gave me kind of a training ground that proved useful, and the success we achieved gave me confidence in other venues in life where I've been, that issues that were perceived as being beyond the ability to reform actually can be reformed. So, let me just stop there.
- Well, when I came to Amherst, of course I was in the second class of women to matriculate from being a freshman, if you still say that a frosh, and there was only one more year before that for transfers, and I have to shout out my crew, my girls who were still, even in the pandemic, you know, brought us back together closely I think, Inez Corbello, Wendy Blair, Victoria Casa, but of course it was a school for men, and I have to say that there were men who welcomed us even though we were kind of messing up their game because Amherst was a men's school, and you had Smith, Mount Holyoke, and so we just kind of stomped in. But there were men that welcomed us like Kimball Smith, and Raymond Allen, who I'm still pretty close with today. I think in terms of, you know, Thomas brings up a great point about activism, I came from New York and my family were activists and poets, and so I, you know, that was just part of my nature, I didn't even think that I was really doing anything special by going to the school and being one of the first Black women to come here. I didn't even think about it, I just thought, oh, this is life, and met some people from Los Angeles and have become obsessed with Los Angeles ever since, and you know, had good friends from New York. What it did allow me to do is, why I still think a Liberal Arts education is so beneficial, because it just allowed me to explore, Amherst allowed me to do what I wanted to do, I came in wanting to be a diplomat, I've said this many times, and I kind of got stuck with my French classes, Spanish was fine, but French, because I really thought, well, French isn't just about France, it's about Africa, it's about the Caribbean, and that's not really what was happening here at the time. So I went back to my art roots and realized, I never wanted to necessarily be an artist because I didn't want to be that broke, that's what I said to myself, but then I discovered being a curator, writing, and I started to pursue that, and I was able to basically craft my own interdisciplinary major with Black Studies, Latin American Studies, and Art History, and I've been basically doing that ever since and teaching that, it wasn't really a field, I had to make it up. I mean, people were teaching, don't get me wrong, and I had a great teachers, Professor Pemberton in African Art, Asa Davis in Black Studies, my advisor was Andrea Benton Rushing, she was an English professor and I wrote a senior thesis with her. Jim Maraniss was my other reader in the Spanish department, these are all people who supported me, and I just kind of made my way believing these things because I'd grown up around artists, I'd grown up around Black artists of all kinds, and even though they weren't in books that I read, I knew they existed, so I just kept on down that track and Amherst allowed me to explore, but also to make my own major and something that has clearly impacted the world.
- Wow, thank you both for your answers, what unique and beautiful paths, I'm sure all of our Black students and Black alumni on the call right now can relate to both of your paths. So for those on the call who aren't as familiar with both of your works, can both of you give a lay person summary of your work, your research and what you're doing with your life right now.
- Go ahead, Thomas, go ahead.
- Essentially, I look at a variety of legal structures and mechanisms that have disadvantaged African-Americans and other disadvantaged communities in terms of their properties and, you know for African Americans, there have been dynamics both in terms of substantial loss of rural land and agricultural land that African-Americans have owned, but on the urban side, we sadly, 50 years after the enactment of the federal Fair Housing Act, we're at a time in 2021 where there is the largest gap in Black-white home ownership since the federal government began collecting data decades ago. So I kind of look at well, what are the explanations, what are the factors that have contributed to these differential experiences with property ownership or property rights can be mental, and then what I've tried to do is leverage my scholarship to reform laws or, and help put into place policies to address those issues, issues that have contributed to the racial wealth gap, and so I've done that on the state and federal level. So on the state level I'm the principal drafter of this model, state property statute that has been enacted into law thus far in 17 States including eight Southern States and the U.S. Virgin islands, and we have a number of states in play in 2021, and on the federal level, I've worked with Congress on some bills to help Black landowners and Black farmers and other Socio-economically disadvantaged landowners and farmers, and also I'm currently working with some of the leadership in USDA, some policies as well.
- Amazing stuff, I always think this is the real work, but what I've been doing is, well, I started out when I left Amherst, I went to the curatorial field. I started really on a trajectory working at The Studio Museum in Harlem, and worked for various other organizations, I would say that at that time, you know the places where I could get hired were nonprofit, you know, municipal, federally funded, things like that, and ethnically or culturally specific institutions. And so at that point, then I started getting other smaller things, but then I said, well, you know, the best way to get to the top of this field is to get a PhD. So that's when I started on that path and I fully intended, I actually had a position while I was going to graduate school, I'd pick up a position at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, which was, you know, still is arguably one of the very important contemporary art museums in this country. And, you know, I was doing my dissertation and doing that part-time and doing these other things and got to, you know, still, always doing shows. I was able to go to South Africa and do The second Johannesburg Biennale while I was still in graduate school 'cause that was not a job I was going to turn down, it was my first trip ever to Africa and to do a show in a place that had just been three or four years out of apartheid, it was really, strange to say, a dream come true, but it was to just be able to see that everything you thought was hard was really not hard at all. Then when I finished my PhD, actually one of my last years finishing, I was a Fellow at Amherst and I was teaching, and I had the opportunity to apply for a job at Yale, which was my PhD alma mater, and I said, okay, well I'll just try this and go back into museums, and then I really made the move to do that in a way, because I figured I can really reach as many more people you know, in museums, you maybe have a few internships and you can look for people of color, and this way I figured I could impact all people to talk about art of the African diaspora, art of Latin America and so on, and I just had a bigger platform, so then I found myself being a professor, still doing shows on the side, because museums kept calling me, but it's interesting, my last show was about seven years ago, and I think that's because you see the change in the climate now, where so many Black people, are being hired finally by mainstream museums, and if you think back to the sixties, when among other protests, and what people were fighting for, one of the things was to be represented in museums, and while these institutions like the Museum of Modern Art, like the Whitney Museum of American Art, or even the Metropolitan Museum of Art, would buy works by these artists as a kind of a form of reparations I would say, they would never hire people, and that was kind of the last hurdle, it was things that artists and others were asking these institutions to do, but at the time people would say, oh, but why do you need that, we, you know, we can study this work just as well, but that wasn't the point, but I'd say, even in the last few weeks you see the Whitney Museum of American Art has hired the head of curatorial affairs as a Black woman, the Guggenheim has done the same, so these are new times, but at that time we were just trying to get the word out there.
- Thank you both for giving such robust overviews of your work. So I'd want to dive into a question, you guys, oh, you can't see my bookshelf here, but I have a whole heck of a lot of James Baldwin on my bookshelf, and I recently just re-read Baldwin's A Talk to Teachers, in which he says this famous line, "One of the paradoxes of education was that precisely the point when you begin to develop a conscious you must find yourself at war with your society. Is it the responsibility to change society if you think of yourself as an educated person." So to the both of you as professors yourselves, what do you think the responsibilities of teachers are, and Professor Jones, do you want to start with this one?
- Sure, I think I didn't even realize I was a teacher as I said, until we had the opportunity, you know to start teaching art history on the graduate level, and I never really imagined myself as a teacher, but then I realized even every show I had done was really teaching people how to see this work and see that African-Americans, people of the diaspora, had a whole culture and history that had been overlooked and was not in books necessarily. So I think that's, you know, Baldwin is of course spot on with that, and he calls it at war with I guess you could say that, I just always think it's changing people's minds, as I said, I wanted to originally, when I went to Amherst, I thought of myself as a diplomat, running all around the world, learning languages and changing the world in that way through different kinds of mediation and arbitration and things like that, but what a friend of mine who's a diplomat told me is that, you know you were actually doing it with your work in culture, that you were doing cultural diplomacy, and that made me feel like, okay I didn't just give up on that first dream that I had, but I think absolutely, you know and I won't speak for Thomas, but I will invoke his great example that this is the work that we've been called to do, is that the world needs changing, the things need changing and we're changing it in our ways in our fields, and I'm happy to say that I've been an optimist and I'm happy right now, at least to some degree, that the museum field and those things are changing. Of course we have a long way to go with other things, but I'm glad to see these changes in my lifetime, at least.
- Yeah, I would say that just with any of my students, I just try and make sure that I can do what I can to help my students develop to their full potential, and recognize in some case, that they come into my classroom, or my interactions with them with some deficiencies, you know, I think some of the challenges I had in my life gives me empathy for my students, and I try to, you know, sometimes you just have to be honest with them about where they're at, the potential they have but, where they can get to, but sometimes some remedial stuff that they need to address. I think I'm very much a fan of robust experiential learning so that they have an understanding of the world that is not purely academic. And then sometimes as part of that, to the extent possible I try to help stimulate, or develop, or further develop a sense of my students to have empathy, empathy for others, empathy for those who have not had the opportunity structure that almost by definition, if we're an Amherst student or Alum that we have, and to use that empathy to live a life of service to others and service to society, you know, in some ways I did that early in my career, is after stumbling upon some of the legal problems that African-American families had with their land, and this wasn't anything that appeared in any property case books or textbooks that I studied or anybody else that studied in law school for generations, it came through from my bottom up research of spending a lot of time in the rural South with families, in churches, town halls, in their homes and having them share their experiences with me, and which painted a picture of a completely different picture of their interaction with the legal system than we had been taught in case books. And then I realized that in addition to my scholarship when I left these communities, they still had a substantial lack of access to legal services, which was going to further place obstacles in their way of maintaining whatever property rights they had. So then I kind of, on the side, it was kind of crazy, folks thought, I developed a like summer clinical or externship program where I placed law students to work for many disadvantaged communities, mostly in rural America, but it was in the rural South, it was in Indian country, it was in Appalachia, it was on the Texas-Mexico border, and part of that experience, is I didn't just want the students to have this kind of missionary complex, where they were working in New York or Chicago or wherever they were working and just working from a distance, I actually required the students to live in the very communities that they were serving so that they could actually have, walk a mile in the shoes of the people that they were serving, and my idea was in addition to the technical experience, that they would, their knowledge of the world in general of the world, that many people on this planet live, who are not privileged would be expanded, and then maybe that would serve as a spark for at least a subset of them to devote their lives, to try and to address the challenges that many disadvantaged people who have a lack of access to basic resources face, so that's kind of, I'd say three of my goals.
- Wow, so on the topic of devoting your life's work, I know we have a lot of graduating seniors and young alumni who are currently thinking about how turn their passions into a job. So for those who struggle with turning their passions into a vocation, you both have done so, so how do you feel or what do you feel enabled you to do so, and Professor Mitchell, would you like to start with that?
- Sure, so I think, in my case. I'm sorry about that ping there, but you know, in my case some of the difficulties I had with my family and some of those difficulties that caused, it actually in some ways, ironically, I think, nothing that I'd recommend for necessarily everybody else, but it kind of got me off the track, 'cause, just being, I want to be super successful, not necessarily thinking broader, except for I want to be at the top, whatever the top meant. So it kind of got me off of this very kind of pre-professional track just being competitive for competitive sake, and it kind of, you know, it kind of knocked me down and it kind of stripped my ego out of the process. And when I kind of got knocked off of that track, I actually did start thinking about some broader things, I mean, I had experienced things in my life that I didn't think I was going to experience when I was younger. They were tough, but it also made me realize there's a whole bunch of good people in this society, who have had half the opportunities I've had, right, this is their daily experience, what I'm experiencing, and I knew at that time that it wouldn't, in my case last forever, so I think it's just that, you know, taking the ego out, really kind of doing things for the right reasons, developing a sense of concern for others outside of yourself. But, you know, and then I think when I had these other experiences that just further kind of stimulated. I had experience when I was in college, junior year, my grandfather died in Newark New Jersey. For a variety of reasons I had never met my extended family and my father was estranged from his father, but he asked me to go to my grandfather's funeral in Newark. And that part of our family truly lives on the other side of the tracks, I mean, they have lived in desperately poor circumstances, and I just spending the time with them, just really was one of those But For the Grace, There Go I moments, they had photos going back to America's origin, Southwest Georgia, where family's from, and where they were enslaved, and Jim Crow, and I think that just really built this kind of passion. But the passion by itself is not sufficient. One of the things that I also learned is, one needs mentors, and I was fortunate to have a number of mentors in my life, some were Black Alums at Amherst who I met and befriended, Dr. Tuffy Simpkins and his wife, Diane, I could name a number of Alums, but two of my professors at Howard law school, were Michael Newsome and George Johnson were Black Alums from Amherst who very much looked after me, helped, they were resources for me, as I was kind of thinking about what I wanted to do with my professional career. And so I very much have cultivated this group of mentors during my life, that when I was at a crossroads I can go to, and say, listen let me run some stuff by you and get your input. And then, you know, I don't, for me, I'm just incredibly resilient, and I don't know how you tell somebody or you get somebody to be resilient, but I never, when I get knocked down, I'm just, I see it as a temporary setback and get back up, 'cause I know what I, I know what the goal is, and I know it sometimes can be a long, windy road, but I ultimately have faith, as Kellie mentioned herself, is I'm kind of an optimist. I'm a pragmatic optimist, the way I kind of describe it.
- Well, yeah, passion, that's the only way you can continue in a area that people just look at you and say, well, what are you doing? I think one of the things that Amherst taught me, or I've learned when I got there, is I was always, as I mentioned, surrounded by artists of all kinds, dancers, poets, painters, et cetera, and mostly many people of color, when I got to college, and as I said, looking at the books, people didn't even know these people existed. I was like, wait a minute, hey wait, and so I realized that this was something real and that I was uniquely positioned to do this because I knew it, and I trained myself. I started out with doing exhibitions and said I wanted to go onto the next level to get right to the top, did that, then I said, hmm, well maybe teaching isn't that bad, I'll do that too, and just along the way, part of it was trying to get as many people to know about this as possible, and it also allowed me to do the things I wanted to do as a diplomat in the end, travel, speak languages, I've done shows in Brazil, I've done shows in South Africa, in London, as well as all across the United States, and you know, my students look at me like, why would you give that up to just teach, that seems kind of boring, and I said, well, because you can do it now. You can do it now, and part of my teaching is not only in the classroom, which is exciting, but to have to mentor younger people on projects, to get people writing texts for my projects, or being an assistant on the project, to work on my books with me, I mean, I think all of these experiences students really hunger for in the end, so, and there's a lot of work to do. But I also still enjoy it very much, and really, I enjoy, as I said, seeing how the field, this field is changing and really it's, I'd have to say, it's because of protests, Black Lives Matter, because, again, as I mentioned, in the sixties when things started to change at another point, for let's just say African-American artists, it was because of protests, it was because people were protesting the museums. I think people don't really realize that the reason why we have free nights at museums is because artists protested, because they said some people can't afford these fees and they need to see this, and other people said, you know what, we're taxpayers. You can't have a museum that's all white men, it's not going to, we're paying taxes too. You've got to change that. All the protests now, where we're talking about, aspects of voter suppression and corporations weighing in, well museums, these artists made the museums weigh-in to this because of, you know, they were taxpayers, and that's when things changed. But they didn't change, they changed to a certain point. Oops, sorry about that, and so, now what I see in terms of what's happening, in 2020, the museums have changed again, and so, and they've gone further and they've realized that the diversity aspect is with the people who work there. While I had my, you know, once I got my PhD and I was working as a professor, I still was doing a lot of shows, I did shows at the Brooklyn Museum, I did shows at the Hammer Museum, Now Dig This, which won a lot of awards, I did shows at The Studio Museum in Harlem, and, you know, for the mainstream institutions or larger institutions, it was because they had nobody doing these kinds of, with this kind of ideas. For me now, there are so many more people out there, that I can kind of retire from that, although people say, okay, when is your next show, but there are just so many new young voices and new ideas to look at. Again, the ideas of gender parity, and LGBTQ issues in museums, in art, in art history, that is a new horizon that our scholarship needs to address as well. Those are stories that haven't been told. So I think so much has come out of this last year that is again, shining the light on culture and how culture has to expand and add new voices, and I'm excited about those things and possibilities.
- Yeah, can I just say, share one thing also, 'cause.
- Yeah.
- About just the critical importance of having a passion. worked at a large law firm in Washington, DC., and a lot of type A people, a lot of people who had been 4.0 students, they had every kind of the elite kind of qualification, but I didn't find a number of folks I work with, if you sat down and said, well what are you passionate about, they really struggled. They were, you know, I'm passionate about being considered successful, but it, you know, if you kind of went beyond that, a lot of them, fundamentally, you're talking about people in their mid to late twenties, thirties, could not fundamentally answer that question, I mean, and so for me, I left Washington, DC., where I had practiced, to do this fellowship at Wisconsin, I remember a partner at the firm said, he's trying to get me to stay there, I said, I want to go this academic route. I was very polite. But he said, oh, that's great, 'cause the firm I worked at, turns out if you look at law professors in the country who have worked in a large law firm, more have worked at that law firm, so it was not an unusual thing for people to leave the firm to become a law professor. So he said, oh, that's great, so what are you interested in studying, 'cause it was a two year master's program where you wrote a lengthy thesis. I said, well, I'm very interested in the challenges that African-American families have had in terms of maintaining their land in the rural South, and the partner said, he looked shocked, and he said, you know, what you've just described is what we refer to as career suicide. Nobody leaves this super elite firm to go try to be a law professor to do whatever that is you've just said, and obviously you're burnt out. You need to go to the Caribbean, lay up on a beach for three weeks, and then come back to Washington, DC., in a frame of mind to make quote unquote, appropriate career decisions. And I just remember driving out from DC., to Madison, Wisconsin to start my LLM program, my master's program, thinking my God, could I have picked a more irrelevant marginal fringe issue? It was a program that most people became law professors, and I was like, I think I told somebody before that, I, you know, basically I called my friends and said I'd be lucky when this program is over, to get an interview at YMCA night law school in central Mississippi, but for whatever reason, I'm passionate about these issues. I love going to the rural South and sitting in people's homes, or at churches, or diners, and talking to them. I think that was my, the anthropologist side me or the sociologist I couldn't take advantage of it at Amherst, and so I said, I just love using my critical thinking skills, but also being on the ground, meeting with people, learning about their lives, learning about the history. You know, the interesting thing is, I ended up finding out that, well maybe not in the large law firm world it was valued, but you know, within a couple of years, some of the work I was doing was considered pathbreaking and next thing I know, I'm getting vice-presidents at the Ford foundation asking me to come to New York and meet with them, which I totally didn't see that happening, right. And so, most of the things, based upon where the baseline was, on in terms of the feedback I was getting in DC., just didn't seem possible, but it turns out that there were many other stakeholders who had different kinds of value structures or interests, and so, just the point is, you got to have confidence, and you got to enjoy what you're doing and not be thinking about what are the accolades that you're going to get from that work. Sometimes the accolades happen, sometimes they don't, but you should just enjoy what you're doing because you feel like you're living your own life, you're pursuing your passions and you're making a contribution in whatever way that may be.
- Wow, I am so glad that you did not listen to that partner for one. Well, before we do some of my last few questions, I do want to remind the audience that you can drop your own questions in Q&A box, and we will get to them in just a few minutes, but before then I, Professor Jones, you did mention your exhibition, Now Dig This, at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and it seems to bridge these disciplines, your disciplines of Art History and Archeology, a very Amherst combination. So what are your thoughts on the contemporary movement to take down confederate monuments and what is the role of art in protest?
- Well, that's a great question, and I know if my sister is looking on tonight, she'll be saying, aha, somebody's going to get you with that monument question. Well, the role of art in protest goes back, of course centuries, you know, if we think of even the Mexican Revolution for independence from Spain. Part of that was people marching with an image of the Virgin of Guadalupe, right, as their symbol. So art has always been a part of symbolizing what change means, and if we go, you know, we can look at the '30s where you have, in this country, social realism, which was about showing the American worker, the working body of men and women, to the '60s where you have the great poster movement, so obviously, you know, art is part of change, always, just if you think of the idea of the poster itself, what people, the placards that people carry, even with our current situation with Black Lives Matter, and the George Floyd assassination, shall we just say, that situation, you can see all the murals all over the world that have come about with his image on it. Black Lives Matter in Brazil, Vidas Negras Importam, with images of George Floyd, so, I mean, you just keep going. Now, we can turn to the Confederate monuments. Early on in that kind of debate, my idea was that you can really just move them out of the public eye and into their own precinct. That was one thinking that I had. Well, first of all, let's start with the idea that we need more monuments to more people. Let's just start there. But then I thought, okay, some of these, as an art historian, some of these images have been made by people who are well-known American artists, maybe we should put them somewhere. But I think after last summer, what became clear to me is that people will continue to use those. Well, I'll back up slightly to say, my thinking in that is, if you go there and start removing these images all together, it's a slippery slope to get to removing Frederick Douglas, say in Rochester, which started to happen last year also, where people are saying, other monuments that we might be more interested in, or I might be more interested in, that are not about hate per se, some other people see in another way. So you would have a slippery slope to that, but I think now, I see no matter where you move images of hate, people may rally around them. So I'm still somewhat confused about it. First, I'll just say that we need more, and then I do think maybe some of these, maybe keep just one or two, but it's, yeah, it's a challenging situation, but let's start with, let's have more images of this country, what it really is to represent our world and deal with those. Take those other things down. We'll deal with them. That's where I am. I'm still thinking.
- Still a great response, and I agree with you, we have to have more monuments to our history heroes and the true history of the United States. So we're actually going to dive into an audience question with my last question, not the last question of the night, but audience member, actually great minds think alike, we had the same question. Renee, class of '06, said, what do you think of Biden's relief package which gave $1 billion of 9 billion total to Black owned farms which have declined to less than 40,000 from 1,000,000 in 1920. So of course this is to you, Professor Mitchell.
- Yes, I have to say that I'm very hopeful about the Biden administration, I was on one of their policy committees looking at challenges that Black, indigenous, other people of color farmers and landowners faced during the election. But what I've seen in the administration is really the most robust attempt to address decades long systemic discrimination against Black farmers and landowners. So it's both the administration, so, it was actually the COVID bill was a $5 billion, $4 billion dollars of debt relief, a billion dollars to use for other programs or services. I've actually, was in a meeting with the secretary [unclear], and his special senior advisor for racial equity a few weeks ago, kind of helping, working with them to think about how that might can best be spent. But also you have in Congress, you have Corey Booker, Senator Booker, Senator Gillibrand, and Senator Warren, introduced a bill called The Justice for Black Farmers Act, which also is the most expansive attempt to address the hundred years of discrimination against Black farmers. That bill won't pass as a whole, but it actually is currently informing the USDA and parts of it could pass, and other states are taking that up, so the focus on addressing this, you know, many, many, many decades of unbroken discrimination, is the most robust attempt, there's, so I think that there's some, you know, there's some real excitement. The one thing I will say, is that I'm part of a research team that has looked at the economic consequences of this massive loss of Black owned agricultural land, one of the people on it is Darrick Hamilton, who's a leading public intellectual at the youth school, and some others, and our preliminary estimate of the impact on Black wealth of this loss of land is 300 billion, that's just the land itself. We are continuing that study to look at the impacts of losing that land in terms of not having property as collateral to send your kids to for higher education and other impacts, and that, kind of a more expanded estimate, is going to be at least 300 billion, maybe 500 billion or more. So it's great what the Biden administration is doing now, but I also think we need to have a reckoning of what is the true scope of harm that had been done, to not just Black farmers but the Black community in general, as a result of this discrimination against Black farmers and landowners.
- Thank you. That was amazing. So we are embarking on the start of Black Alumni Week, and we have a question here from the audience that says, when you think of your time at Amherst, what is your most vivid memory? Either of you can answer that one and it can fall into any bin of memories.
- Wow. I think I have too many, but I, you know, just the place. I came from new York's lower East side, not that I had never been to the country, but, and Amherst was a little bit more rural at that time, not as ex-urban per se, I just think spending time with my friends who I mentioned, Wendy Blair, Inez Corbello, Vicki Casa, and others, and just learning about myself and what my purpose would be and developing that passion. I think if anything, we could talk about fun little events we had, but I think the core of the memory at this point is about how I made myself into the person that I am today through this experience and with great friends along the way, always.
- Yeah, I think for me, just kind of growing up, I grew up in San Francisco. You know, my parents were professionals. I would describe it as, we lived on, my experience with Black community, we were on the outskirts. My dad was a doctor who had, most of his patients were poor African-Americans, but in terms of my direct experience, and I think for Amherst, to me to come and have the kind of the group of Black students in all their talents, academic talents, humor, this kind of sense of the community. Amherst was the first time I ever had a Black teacher, never had had that growing up, and then the Alums, and learning about the history. And I think this manifested, I mean, I think, this kind of came together during Black Alumni Weekend, which was weekend, right, not week, and I just thought the just incredible collection of talents, the humor, the dance, the music. And I remember that. I think the second thing, just in terms of my activism was a friend of mine who worked in the Dean's office told me about a meeting the Board of Trustees was having at the Lord Jeff, and essentially that they were there to study, to evaluate the racial climate on campus, but there were not many students of color invited to that, and so I kind of snuck into the meeting and by the end of the meeting I think one of the members of the Board of Trustees, I think it was CEO of the Bank of Boston said, listen, I really hear your issues. I'm committed to changing them, and he gave me his business card with his personal home number and said, we're going to work through this, call me anytime, and we did.
- Wow, that's incredible, and speaking of student activism now it's no longer the Lord Jeff but Boltwood Inn.
- What is it?
- The Boltwood Inn. The Boltwood Inn now, yeah. So now we have another question from class of '81, I think Professor Jones, you'll recognize this name, Vicki Kassa asks. How has mentorship, either to you or by you, been a part of your journey, and Professor Jones, would you like to start with that one?
- Yes, well, Vicki Kassa is a teacher, she's just getting ready to retire this year, amazing, so she's really knows about mentorship. Yeah, I'd say the professors that mentored me, Andrea Benton Rushing, Doug Davidson, Asa Davis, Jim Maraniss, those people, and a lot of my bosses, shall we say, my supervisors going forward in the museum world, were all women. Kathy Hallbreich, Mary Schmidt Campbell. Kathy Hallbreich was at Walker Art Center, Mary Schmidt Campbell at Studio Museum in Harlem, that kind of having a strong female role models in executive positions I think was amazing. You know, I think mentorship, yeah that's what you do, when somebody signs up to do their PhD with me, I am all in with them and whatever they need, whatever letter they need, because it's really about people following their passion for what they need to do, and even, of course I've mentored people who are not working with me at Columbia University, but elsewhere. So I really believe in that, because I think that that's a part of how this thing is driven, as Thomas has pointed out, but shout out to Los Angeles and Victoria Kassa.
- Professor Mitchell?
- Yeah, so I think that, earlier, I indicated that if you want to make meaningful change you've got to have passion, but you also have to have mentors, and I think Amherst, as I mentioned there, sometimes through Black Alumni Weekend, I actually got Black alums who ended up becoming mentors for me, and I think that increased my sense of responsibility for paying it forward when I would get into position to mentor other people. There's also, I mentioned this LLM program at the University of Wisconsin I went to, it was founded by the University of Wisconsin Law School's first minority professor, first African-American Professor, just a giant, a guy named Jim Jones, who really became a hero of mine in terms of developing, I mean, in all kinds of ways, but it's represents the most, the longest lasting pipeline program in existence, it's existed since 1972, to try to diversify the faculty at law schools all across the country. And so I just think that between these mentors and observing their examples and learning at their feet, I just recognized that it's my responsibility to mentor other folks, to, you know, help them, like, as I said, realize their full potential, but with no fixed notion of what path they need to take, but just try to help expose them to things that they maybe hadn't been exposed to, be there for them when they wanted professional advice, try to give them the cost and the benefits of the various options that they have laid out for me, and then try to sometime help build their networks by introducing them to people in important positions I know in a variety of different realms. So I just think that that's just key that notion of paying that forward.
- Yes, yes, paying it forward is so important, I, as I graduate Amherst, I hope to do that for future classes. Well, I'm keeping my eye on the clock and I see that our time is coming to a close, so I'm going to ask you guys one last question, and that question is, what brings you both hope, both in your scholarship and in the day-to-day? Professor Mitchell, would you like to start or either one of you, whoever feels compelled.
- Kellie, you want to go?
- I'll jump in, you know, people like yourself, Ayo, you got me on this call today, you know because I'd known Ayo and then all of a sudden she's graduating from Amherst as a neuroscience major. What? So, that, I mean, I think about teaching, that is the most wonderful part is to see people do their thing, do their passion. I always tell people when, I'm not one of those professors that tells you what to write your dissertation on, because you're in the future, you're seeing things about the world that I don't even see yet, so I'm very happy to, you know, what brings me hope is young people, and I'm going to shout out Jeremy Thomas, the New Rhodes Scholar. Hello. Fantastic.
- I would say with me, you asked about my scholarship, so when I started, a little more than 20 years ago, 20, almost 25 years ago, what I was studying was considered backwater, the fringe, the marginal, in legal academia, in property law scholarship. I've been very happy to see that, at least in terms of the interest in these issues, they've grown. There's far more casebooks and textbooks now, that at least in parts of the course actually talk about these issues, talk about the perhaps differential experience folks who are racial minorities or ethnic minorities face, then it was when I started, I don't want to say it's nirvana, believe me, there's so much more work that needs to be done, but there's actually some issue that had been invisible and now are kind of being addressed. And then also I realized that outside of the legal academia, where sometimes can have a kind of a narrow wavelength, that there are many other stakeholders in the nonprofit world and state and local governments and others that really do have an incredible interest in this, that's just something I just never would've thought would have been the case. And then I think just in the personal, I think there's a couple things. One, in my professional work, the legal reform of this particular property law that responsible for substantial loss of property on African-Americans and others, was considered, was a centuries old law, it was considered that it could never be changed, and the fundamental notion was, yeah, it's unjust but those who are negatively impacted fundamentally lack political and economic power, so the assumption was, what state legislature, especially in the South, is going to change this law to benefit African-Americans and others, you know, and, you know, as I indicated, there's eight Southern states, and in my work, and this surprises me, I've, there's equal number of red states and blue states that have enacted an equal number of legislators who are Republican and Democrat, have been sponsors of my bill, and at some level, surprisingly, I've been able to have some very human conversations with them and rational conversations where I've been able, they've given me the opportunity to make the case, which, that does surprise me. The second thing is, five years ago there, it seemed that all we were going to do is write the history of how Black people, in terms of owning land or farms, became extent, that nothing could be done, and there's just an amazing outburst in the last few years of this social movement of all kinds of organizations, rural and urban and sometimes urban farming that just seemed unimaginable like a few years ago, and that gives me hope. In some ways it seemed like it came out of nowhere. And then last thing, like Kellie said, I'll just do it the personal. I have a 10 year old daughter, and you know, it's not that she doesn't have her challenges and there are challenges that are raised, but when I look at her group of friends, it's a very diverse group of friends, and I see how they kind of interact. It does give me some hope that there can be a greater sense of kind of unity, than maybe in the past, I don't know, right, like I said, I'm a pragmatic optimist. I do see some of the racial issues she faces, but to me it represents progress at least from the past.
- Well, I want to thank you both for such a wonderful evening for your insightful responses and what an extraordinary way to kick off Black Alumni Weekend, I also do want to extend my thanks to the executive board of the Black Student Union, with special thanks to Jeremy Thomas, E.J. Collins, and Kalaria Okali. I want to thank the president's office and alumni and parent programming, and last but not least, I want to thank you all the audience for tuning in tonight, being a part of our conversation. I hope everyone has a great night. Thank you.