Fisk Conference a Big Success

Allow me to praise the work and passion of all the individuals involved in the 2004 Fisk/Ripon Race Relations Conference, which once again proved to be a one-of-a-kind challenging and inspiring event.

Born in the early ’90s, springing forth from Professor Doug Northrop’s (then Dean of Faculty) and his Fisk University colleague’s vivid imaginations, the conference has provided participants from Fisk, a historically black university in Nashville, Tenn., focused on the betterment of talented young humans through the liberal arts, and Ripon College (its historically “pale” companion) with an instinctive playfield for social analysis, cultural interchange and heartfelt debate on the “racial” issue, one that is too often misinterpreted, misunderstood, and sickeningly (ab)used for the sake of political and social propaganda.

This was a group of young college students and a few of the faculty, coming together and addressing some of the most controversial topics that our countr y is faced with and suffers with. I was shocked to find out that this is the only program of its type. I had expected this to be a nationwide program. I believe it should be, but it made me appreciate the opportunity even more.

In doing so, it has been an outlet strikingly peculiar and unique, allowing young women and men from a variety of ethnic, social, ideological and geographical backgrounds to discuss racial identity, prejudices, racism and their multi-faceted interplays within our world, and to do so without hidden agendas nor ulterior motives, but simply out of sheer thirst for knowledge and exchange of basic, diverse human experiences.

A lot of the merit for the conference’s success goes to the faculty members who since day one poured their insight, ideas and fatherly care into the program: from Dr. Northrop to Dr. Leslie Bessant, all the way to Dr. David Seligman and (officially beginning his “tour of duty” next year) Dr. Joe Hatcher, Ripon’s spokespersons have provided a leadership that has been as friendly and immediate as it is effective.

But the Fisk/Ripon conference would not exist, and could not function, without its more spontaneous, rambunctious components, the many students from both institutions who year after year feed each other with challenges, entertainment, practical jokes, wisdom and clearly spelled-out definitions of what it means to be human in this non-flawless world, today. Whether this happens during a discussion session on the ever-sopresent, yet never acknowledged, “White Privilege,” or after a speech by Civil Rights hero Diane Nash, while drinking beer with mustache- and mullet-sporting natives in a liquor venue in downtown Ripon, or after an impromptu all-nighter of ‘socializing,’ it is always something that leaves a mark of thoughtfulness in its unmediated beauty.

As a member of the Ripon College family since 1998, I have been truly blessed to be a part of the Fisk/Ripon exchange for the past six years, and bear witness to its outstandingly unique and mind-opening nature, one that is intuitively inspiring — sometimes life-changing. Simply and truthfully, there is no other event like it: not in the academic universe nor in the vaster spectrum of American social life.

For this, and for the sake of the young human beings who make it what it is, the whole Ripon community should embrace and cherish it. r

Mauro Sacchi ’01 Sacchi is a native of Gallarate, Italy. He served a mandatory term in the Italian military before returning to Ripon this winter. He will begin a position as a teaching assistant in Italian and head resident for the Italian House at Colorado College, an Associated Colleges of the Midwest institution in Colorado Springs, in August. His article originally appeared as a letter to the editor in The College Days and is reprinted here with permission.