Author of "Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?" to Speak at University of Richmond
March 8, 2006
Beverly Tatum, author of “Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?” will deliver the annual Founders Week Lecture March 27 at the University of Richmond.
The speech will begin at 7:30 p.m. in Cannon Memorial Chapel. It is free and open to the public. To reserve a ticket, contact the Modlin Center Box Office at (804) 289-8980.
Scholar, teacher, author, administrator and race relations expert, Tatum is the ninth president of Spelman College. Prior to her appointment to the Spelman presidency in 2002, she spent 13 years at Mount Holyoke College, serving as professor and chair of psychology, dean of the college and acting president.
She is also a clinical psychologist whose research interests include black families in white communities, racial identity in teens and the role of race in the classroom
For over 20 years, Tatum has taught a course on the psychology of racism. She has also toured extensively, leading workshops on racial identity development and its impact in the classroom.
In her critically acclaimed 1997 book, “Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? and Other Conversations about Race,” she applies her expertise on race to argue that straight talk about racial identity is essential to the nation. It not only dispels race as taboo, but gives readers a new lens for understanding the emergence of racial identity as a developmental process experienced by everyone. Tatum is also the author of “Assimilation Blues: Black Families in a White Community” (1987). In addition, she has published numerous articles, including her classic 1992 Harvard Educational Review article “Talking about Race, Learning about Racism: An Application of Racial Identity Development Theory in the Classroom.”
Founders Week is a tradition of the University of Richmond Chaplaincy Office, which celebrates the founding of the university by Virginia Baptists, “who believed that faith and reason should be partners in education,” according to the university’s chaplain, the Rev. Dr. Daphne Burt.