Stand4Strome: A Strome College of Business Student Support Initiative
Stand4Strome. A simple, but important message that takes many forms, particularly at this unprecedented time.
The video of George Floyd being murdered by the Minneapolis police has shocked the conscience of people and the resulting protests have created an opportunity for long-overdue social and economic change.In support of such change, Dr. Ron Carlee, Assistant Professor (Clinical), in the School of Public Services has been writing and conducting workshops on police and implicit bias for several years in collaboration with the International City Management Association (ICMA).
Carlee represents the Strome College of Business on the President's Task Force on Inclusive Excellence and supports the equity committee for the Hampton Roads Chamber, helping to develop an equity dashboard for the region.
"Racial equity has always been important to me," Carlee says. "I grew up in Birmingham, Alabamain the 1960s. The deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and so many others,show how far we still have to go. The attacks on protesters by unidentified federal agents in Washington, D.C. and Portland recall the days of Bull Conner."
Before joining ODU, Carlee was a city/countymanager, a profession dominated by white men.ICMA asked Carlee to present a pre-conference workshop on race and police: "ICMA staff were concerned about racial equity and had organized many learning opportunities. They said that the white male city managers were complaining about black people calling them 'racists.' My job has been to present the same message in a way that white managers do not immediately shutdown or become defensive. Rather than calling them racists, I work to enable them to see their own biases and privilege as well as systemic racism in society. I hope to prepare them to listen to and hear people of color, which is a critical next step. But for African American friends, colleagues, and mentors over the years, I would not be prepared to do this work.
"Carlee's workshops have been presented at international, regional, and state conferences.Last fall he gave the workshop for the senior staff of the Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring.
Early in the effort, Carlee expanded the workshop into an ODU graduate course on Institutional Racism."This was one of my best teaching and learning experiences," he reports. "The class was balanced by race, gender, age, and military service. We all learned something new from each other every week."
Carlee is currently transitioning the workshop and graduate class to a virtual format: "I never had an interest in doing this work without the intimacy of face to face interaction. The most basic lesson is that people are people, which is hard to deny when you are sitting next to each other looking into each other's eyes. Given the realities of COVID-19, if we don't do our work virtually, our work won't get done."
Carlee will present the new virtual workshop for seven villages in Westchester County, New York this summer. Carlee's latest writing on equity was inICMA'sjournal PM, entitled "Silence Is Complicity: Can White America Demonstrate that Black Lives Matter?" The article is accessible at icma.com.
