It was nearly a year ago when I reached out to Dena Simmons ’05—a beautiful writer and fiercely intelligent young woman who works at the Center for Emotional Intelligence at Yale—to see if she would be interested in writing a feature essay on what it means to confront racism in America today.
For our fall 2015 issue, I wanted Dena to draw on both her own life experiences and those experiences lived by the students, teachers, and activists she’s encountered in her career. “I want this essay to speak to every reader,” I said, “and to be clear that this is an issue that involves all of us.”
The resulting work was her brilliant “We Cannot Afford to Walk Away,” whose title is drawn from this passage in the essay: We cannot afford to walk away, to turn off our screens, and to carry on with our comfortable lives. None of us, especially those in power, have the right to be comfortable. It’s through discomfort we learn and transform most. Questioning, challenging, and curbing racial injustices is everyone’s job.
A few weeks after we published Dena’s essay, Middlebury held the first of three campus gatherings in which issues of race, inclusivity, institutional history, free speech, and cultural appropriation were talked about, wrestled with, and argued over; tears of anguish and tears of frustration were shed. And while the catalyst for the meetings was one incident, it became clear to all that we were talking about more than an isolated occurrence. Questioning, challenging, and curbing racial injustices is everyone’s job.
For this issue’s cover story, we hired a dear friend, the Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer John H. White, to help us continue the conversation that began with Dena’s essay. While on campus he spoke to a crowded Wilson Hall, and among his inspirational words of wisdom was the affirmation that we all strive to “recognize the somebody-ness of everybody.” It is what we must do if we are to learn and transform and become a community where, as Laurie Patton has so eloquently stated, inclusivity is not a problem to solve but an everyday ethic.