Monday night I went to the monthly Science Cafe Cleveland at the Great Lakes Brewery tasting room. The topic was the origin of life on earth. There were probably about 150 people there. Usually it's not that well attended but someone obviously told their class to attend because there were some high school kids there with biology books. I don't make it to every Science Cafe but I try to make the ones I can.
What intrigued me about this meeting is that as well attended as it was, I believe there were two black people in attendance. That's it. Just two. Out of 150-200 people. At an event right across from the West Side Market.
Now, I understand some people have probably never heard of the Science Cafe but it's put on through a partnership of several area institutions like the Museum of Natural History and Case Western Reserve University. Certainly some black people attend those institutions. But oddly enough, I used to be a member of the Natural History Museum and I used to attend some of their lectures. Almost no black people attended those either. I've seen plenty of black people take their kids to the museum and school kids get to go every year on field trips.
This is not meant specifically to be a post about racism but all the hoopla over Obama has sensitized me to the issue. As I sat listening to the lecturers, I realized that the gulf between people is going to be difficult to bridge. I'm certain that there are plenty of other types of events largely attended by blacks and maybe some of them wonder why whites don't attend. I think this is the change I'm waiting for. Until there's a little more commonality between the races, I just don't see a lot of the underlying problems getting better. I know I'm painting with a broad brush and that there are whites who love hip hop and blacks who like physics. But in general, we're still a very segregated society and once the dust of the election settles, I don't see it being much different.
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3 comments:
One of my very favorite topics. You are absolutely correct. Nonprofit institutions, no matter how well meaning or whatever the cause, do little effectively to recruit membership or leadership from minority communities. Mostly, they don't know how. And despite it's warm and fuzzy reputation, the world of nonprofit management is very thin on minority leadership outside of organizations that deal specifically with issues pertaining to poverty, social justice, etc.
Some organizations also are just not part of the experience that many urban families have, and they do relatively little to change that. A program like Science Cafe might have to hook up with a group like the National Society of Black Engineers or other professional groups that work with urban youth and families in order to reach into those constituencies. Unless folks are directed to programs like Science Cafe, which sounds GREAT, they won't come.
Two years ago, Cleveland had an opportunity to recruit one of America's brightest scholars to run the Western Reserve Historical Society. The search committee was all white men with the exception of one black woman who probably squeaked her way onto the committee because she used to run University Circle, Inc. Instead of picking a Cleveland native who had run the Smithsonian Museum of American History and also launched the Freedom Center in Cincinnati, and who also was black, they picked a very safe choice, a talented woman from the east coast who was older and had run more traditional regional historical organizations. While the person they chose is doing a fine job, it's a shame they passed over someone of national reknown who wanted to come home and was therefore willing to run a much smaller institution. It would have made a big difference to have one of these organizations headed up by someone who looks more like the kinds of customers they are so desperately trying to attract, but in the end his ability to lead likely would have been greatly hampered by the Doubting Thomases on the Board.
I have to agree with your conclusion. This example you've written about is something organizations have been working on for a long time and still haven't solved it, and if you consider that's a snapshot of the problem being handled by supposedly well-educated, forward-thinking folks, the prognosis is not good.
Where can we find info about Science Cafe? That sounds great.
Here's a link to Case's page for the Cafe:
http://www.case.edu/affil/sigmaxi/
I agree that these types of groups don't do enough outreach but I also think it is incumbent upon people to seek out these kinds of opportunities. After all, things like the Science Cafe have a very tiny budget.
The point of my post is that, while we can't minimize racial differences, a lot of this comes down to differences in SES, education etc. I have more in common with an educated black person than I do an ignorant white person. However, when I attend events having to do with science and education, I rarely see any black people attending, even though many of these events are in the heart of black neighborhoods.
Again, I don't know what this says and I don't have enough info to draw a conclusion but it is a consistent observation. And, to my knowledge, there isn't some other science cafe going on in the city that blacks know about and I don't. So, for some reason, they're not getting the message or they're not interested in seeking it out.
This sort of thing, people coming together to increase their knowledge about the world, is what will really bring change someday.
"So, for some reason, they're not getting the message or they're not interested in seeking it out."
Seems to me, that's what this post is really about, and a far more sensitive topic to discuss.
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