Dr. Roland Fryer, noted Harvard University economist, to share his insights into issues of race and inequality.
January 13, 2006
ANDOVER, Mass.—While many schools and businesses give their students and employees a day off on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Phillips Academy will be spending the day exploring issues of race and inequality in Amercia. The school’s regular class schedule will be cancelled so that students can take advantage of an extensive offering of special workshops and community service projects coordinated around the day’s theme of “Economic Justice: Unfinished Business.”
“We see Martin Luther King Jr. Day as an opportunity to promote dialogue on issues that matter to all of us, but which are difficult to talk about,” says Linda Griffith, Andover’s interim dean of Community & Multicultural Development (CAMD).
Griffith said the need for such dialogue was apparent in the weeks following Hurricane Katrina, when the school set up forums for discussing issues of poverty and social justice brought to the surface by the suffering endured by the poorest of New Orleans residents. “Some people seemed shocked and embarrassed by the discussions and felt speakers were bashing America,” she said. “Clearly, these are tough topics for people to face. And it can be too easy for people to think that these issues don’t involve them.”
Among the scheduled events to be held on Monday, January 16 is a keynote speech by Dr. Roland Fryer, a 28-year-old assistant economics professor at Harvard University who’s considered a rising star in the academic world because of his unique application of economic and scientific tools to issues of race and inequality. Fryer’s innovative work and rapid rise in academia is even more extraordinary given his troubled childhood, during which he was exposed to drugs, crime, and parental abandonment.
In a profile on Fryer that ran in the New York Times Magazine last year, one of Fryer’s colleagues, Henry Louis Gates Jr., a Harvard humanities scholar, praised Fryer’s work saying, “I think he’ll raise the analysis of the African-American experience to new levels of rigor and bring economics into the mainstream area of inquiry within the broader field of African-American communities.”
While Fryer’s coldly analytical approach to race issues can raise hackles, he and others are convinced such an approach is more conducive to finding real solutions to ongoing problems. As he told the New York Times Magazine, “I want to have an honest discussion about race in a time and place where I don’t think we can. Blacks and whites are both to blame.”
Fryer’s talk will take place during an All-School Meeting on Monday morning, after which students will disperse to other activities. Ninth-graders will attend a seminar that provides some historical perspective on the civil rights struggle, while older students will be able to select from among seventeen different workshops. Diverse in nature, the workshops range from one that uses the 2005 ethnic riots in Paris as a point of discussion for exploring racism, to another that uses music videos as a catalyst for discussing issues around race, money, and gender roles.
In the afternoon, students will have the option of taking additional workshops or participating in one of four community service projects. These include helping out with MLK Jr. Day activities at the Lawrence Boys’ and Girls’ Club and helping sort and pack food at the Neighbors in Need organization. Students will also be able to attend showings of the movie, Crash, a 2005 film about racial strife in post-9/11 Los Angeles.
Some 120 public school students from Andover also will be coming to the Phillips Academy campus to participate in the MLK Jr. Day Kids’ Fair, which will be held in the Cage from noon to 3:00 p.m. There they will be able to learn about the life and work of Martin Luther King Jr. through games, arts and crafts, storytelling, and other fun activities.
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