In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • "Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?": And Other Conversations About Raceby Beverly Daniel Tatum
  • D-L Stewart
"Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?": And Other Conversations About Race( 20th AnniversaryEdition) Beverly Daniel Tatum New York, NY: Basic Books, 1997/2017, 453 pages, $18.99 (softcover)

My undergraduate experience at Kalamazoo College was marked by questions of racial identity and racism from enrollment through graduation in 1995. The police beating of Rodney King in March 1991 and the acquittal in April 1992 that triggered an uprising in Los Angeles informed my transition into and first year of college. After a letter was delivered to the personal mailbox of our Black Student Organization president signed by the KKK that spring and my reading The Autobiography of Malcolm Xas told to Alex Haley (2015/1965) the following spring, I went headlong into racial immersion. The end of legalized apartheid in South Africa in 1994 capped off my junior year, when I became president of the Black Student Organization and helped launch the Umoja House, a themed residential community focused on African Diasporic identity and issues. The Umoja House would be my last campus residency.

The next academic year, I worked as a professional in student affairs at Kenyon College as the Multicultural Program Co-ordinator, where I revised the office's interracial dialogue training program and planned programs meant to enhance racial diversity on campus. I would begin my master's program in student affairs at The Ohio State University in Fall 1996, during which I became actively involved in the Black Graduate and Professional Student Caucus (BGPSC). While I was a member of the BGPSC, we supported a direct action led by the undergraduate Black Student Association to occupy the president's offices demanding more diverse representation in the curriculum, more Black faculty and staff, more efforts to improve Black student retention and graduation, and more need-based, grant-funded financial aid, among others.

It is from this background that I first considered Beverly Daniel Tatum's "Why are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?": And Other Conversations about Racepublished in 1997. Tatum's book was written to be (and still is) highly accessible for lay audiences. When it was first published, I remember the buzz that this book "finally" answered the question about why racial segregation persisted in educational settings despite then being over 40 years since the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education leading to the outlawing of racial segregation in the nation's public schools. I put finallyin quotes because most of the Black/Indigenous/People of Color (BIPOC) people I knew already understood why all the Black kids sat together in the cafeteria—and found ways to rig university housing policies to live together on campus or move in together into off-campus housing. To me, and many others in my networks, this book presented new education for white people. (I am choosing to not capitalize whitewhen referring to the racial group following the example and rationale of Crenshaw, 1991, and Pérez Huber, 2010.) Despite my lethargic response, Tatum's book had obvious value if for no other reason than to serve as a response—pre-Google—to the persistent questions I had faced throughout my undergraduate, professional, and then graduate student experiences: Why do Black students self-segregate? Are not these actions (e.g., living together, sitting together in the dining hall, going to African countries for study abroad, wanting to take classes with more Black faculty and staff) segregationist and antithetical to the purpose of higher education? Tatum's book was [End Page 738]a welcome counterpoint to Dinesh D'Souza's Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus(1991), which stirred vigorous debates in colleges and universities and across the country about the growing emphasis on multiculturalism in educational curricula.

There is a previous edition of "Why are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?"—a Fifth Anniversary edition was published in paperback in 2003. As the author acknowledged, this edition was much the...

pdf

Share