[music]
Ms. Sharon Wilder currently serves
as a chief equity and inclusion
officer for Montgomery College.
She serves as a speaker
and conducts numerous
trainings on issues
involving equity, inclusion,
diversity
compliance, public engagement
and public private
partnerships.
Most recently,
she presented a workshop
on the emerging role
of the chief diversity officer
and served as a panelist
on the Managing Diversity
in Community
Colleges panel
at the American Association
of Colleges and Universities
Diversity, Equity and Student
Success Conference.
She is a 2007
graduate of Leadership
Greater Washington
and also a graduate of the 2019
Maryland Equity and Inclusion
Leadership Program
under the auspices of Governor
Larry Hogan's office.
Sharon is a graduate
of the University
of Massachusetts Amherst,
where she serves on
the advisory board
for the College of Social
and Behavioral Sciences
and attended
the George Washington
University,
where she studied to become
a certified public manager.
She also has a juris doctorate
from Georgetown University.
Thank you so much,
Jeanette Rojas,
for your lovely introduction
and for your leadership
in this program,
we really, really
appreciate you
taking the lead for this
fall dialogue series.
Again,
my name is Sharon Wilder
and I'm the Chief
Equity and Inclusion Officer
at Montgomery College,
and I'm pleased to welcome
you all here today
for what I am
certain will be
a courageous conversation
for many of us.
Today.,
we're talking about
critical race theory,
a topic
that has exploded
in the public
arena this year,
especially in education,
where numerous
state legislatures
have been debating bills
and passing laws
banning its use
in the classroom.
There are
significant disagreement
and misinformation,
even among experts
about its precise definition,
as well as how its tenets
should inform
policy and practice.
So our esteemed keynote
presenter today
will certainly delve
further into this.
However, I know
many of you
today are asking the question
just what is critical
race theory anyway?
So I'm going
to touch on a
few basic tenets right now.
CRT emerged
out of a framework
for legal analysis
over 40 years ago.
And it's really
an academic concept
created by legal scholars
Derrick Bell,
Kimberly Crenshaw,
Richard Delgado,
among others.
And, you know, as a student
at Georgetown Law,
I studied this concept,
not even expecting
it would be thrown
into the current
national debate.
The theory says
that racism
is part of everyday life,
so people white or nonwhite
who don't intend to be
racists can nevertheless
make choices
that fuel racism.
A good example of CRT
is when
in the 1930s, government
officials literally
drew lines
around areas
deemed poor financial risk.
This is called redlining.
They did this often
explicitly due
to the racial composition
of those who lived
in those communities.
And then banks
subsequently refused
to offer mortgages
to black people
in those areas.
And today,
those same patterns
of discrimination
live on through
facially race blind policies
like single family zoning
that prevents
the building of affordable
housing in advantaged
majority white neighborhoods
and thus stymies
racial desegregation efforts.
Well, here in Montgomery
County, our county leadership
has been really intentional
about
making sure that these types
of single-family
zoning
are not occurring here.
Well, to an extent,
the term
critical race theory is now
cited as the basis
of all diversity
and inclusion
efforts,
regardless of how much it's
actually informed
those programs.
And one
conservative organization,
the Heritage Foundation,
recently attributed
a whole host of issues
to CRT.
Everything from the 2020
Black Lives
Matter protests, LGBTQ+
clubs in schools,
diversity
training in federal agencies
and organizations,
and those that that receive
federal dollars.
And then, of course,
just the general free speech
debates on college campuses.
The Heritage Foundation
went on to say
when followed
to its logical
conclusion,
CRT is destructive,
and it rejects
the fundamental ideas
on which our constitutional
republic is based.
Now, some critics claim
that this theory advocates
discriminating against
white people
in order to achieve equity.
They mainly aim
those accusations
at theorists
who advocate for policies
that explicitly take race
into account.
Last year,
Montgomery College launched
its first book club,
its first book club book
was How to Be an Anti-Racist
by Dr. Ibram X Kendi.
Now in this book,
Dr, Kendi states
white
people are
inherently privileged
while black
and other people of color
are inherently
oppressed and victimized,
and that the United States
was founded on racism?
And so there's not
much of the current debate
appears to spring,
not from the academic test,
but really from fear
among critics
that students,
especially white students,
will be exposed to supposedly
emotionally damaging,
disparaging and or self
demoralizing ideas.
And all of these
different ideas
grow out of longstanding,
tenacious
intellectual debates.
So critical race theory
emerged out of
post-modernist thought,
which tends to be skeptical
of ideas of universal values,
objective knowledge,
individual merits,
tenets that
many conservatives hold dear.
So our speaker today, Dr.
Traci Dennis,
will delve more into this
as we
reframe the narrative today.
I'd like you to
please acknowledge
and take a look
at our electronic program
for today.
Take note
of the community agreement
that you will see there
and also acknowledge
those that have helped us
get to this program today.
I will be introducing Dr.
Charlene Mickens
Dukes are interim
president
and Montgomery College,
who will bring remarks
and share her own reflections
about this collective
anti-racism journey.
The college has been
on over the past year.
And we have
used the equity of
the Office
of Equity Inclusion
Cycle of Change model,
which I developed
two years ago,
to help us think through what
the evolution could be for
each one of you
in terms of equity
and inclusion.
This model can be found on
the E and I website,
and it demonstrates
the cycle of growth, change,
and action
we expect members
of our college community
to undergo at this time.
I'd like to introduce Dr.
Duke's.