SPELMAN COLLEGE

ETHEL WADDELL GITHII HONORS PROGRAM

Passing

By

Nella Larsen

Clare Kendry is living on the edge. Light-skinned, elegant, and ambitious, she is married to a racist white man unaware of her African American heritage,and has severed all ties to her past after deciding to “pass” as a white woman. Clare’s childhood friend, Irene Redfield, just as light-skinned, has chosen to remain within the African American community, and is simultaneously allured and repelled by Clare’s risky decision to engage in racial masquerade for personal and societal gain. After frequenting African American-centric gatherings together in Harlem, Clare’s interest in Irene turns into a homoerotic longing for Irene’s black identity that she abandoned and can never embrace again, and she is forced to grapple with her decision to pass for white in a way that is both tragic and telling.

Parable of the Sower

By

Octavia Butler

When global climate change and economic crises lead to social chaos in the early 2020s, California becomes full of dangers, from pervasive water shortage to masses of vagabonds who will do anything to live to see another day. Fifteen-year-old Lauren Olamina lives inside a gated community with her preacher father, family, and neighbors, sheltered from the surrounding anarchy. In a society where any vulnerability is a risk, she suffers from hyperempathy, a debilitating sensitivity to others’ emotions.

Precocious and clear-eyed, Lauren must make her voice heard in order to protect her loved ones from the imminent disasters her small community stubbornly ignores. But what begins as a fight for survival soon leads to something much more: the birth of a new faith . . . and a startling vision of human destiny.

Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism

By

Safiya Umoja Noble

In Algorithms of Oppression, Safiya Umoja Noble challenges the idea that search engines like Google offer an equal playing field for all forms of ideas, identities, and activities. Data discrimination is a real social problem; Noble argues that the combination of private interests in promoting certain sites, along with the monopoly status of a relatively small number of Internet search engines, leads to a biased set of search algorithms that privilege whiteness and discriminate against people of color, specifically women of color.

 

My summer at John Hopkins

By

Interviewed by Miah Hardy

Asia Reese is a sophomore Comparative Women’s Studies major, African Diaspora Studies minor from Baton Rouge, Louisiana who was a participant in a pilot research cohort at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.

Thank you for sitting down for this interview. What are your career aspirations?

Upon graduating from Spelman, I want to become a Humanities or Social Sciences professor.

It’s fantastic to hear about Black women aiming to diversify the academy! Tell me more about your research experience.

This summer, I participated in the pilot cohort of the First-Year Research Experience through Johns Hopkins University. This program was a subset of the Andrew Mellon Foundation which funds opportunities for less-represented groups within academia to gain research opportunities. This year, they partnered with HBCUs to give current first-year students opportunities to complete interdisciplinary research within the Humanities. I was granted the ability to research film and queer theory using the movie Moonlight as my literature of choice.

It sounds like your summer research experience definitely prepared you for your career goals after Spelman. How has being a part of the Spelman College Honors Program helped you to navigate those spaces in academia?

The Spelman College Honors Program has taught me my value as a Black woman and as a scholar as complementary identities. All of the HBCU students within the program offered different perspectives because we were more conscious of the different layers of a person’s identity that would impact their experiences. The Honors Program requiring classes such as Honors Philosophy and Honors Composition taught me how to be more critical of what other people perceive as truths. I have become more introspective and reflective thanks to the Honors Program.

You represented Spelman College and the Honors Program well. Do you have any advice for Honors Program students who may feel intimidated by the application process of competitive research opportunities like the one you participated in this summer?

Be yourself and believe in your Spelman education. Though the programs are described as “competitive”, the classes in which we take at Spelman require as much, if not more, critical analysis. You will be prepared and remember to always put your best foot forward. Understand that you will be going into a space in which you are the minority instead of the majority, meaning that every move you make, whether it be right or wrong, will be charged to the institution, not you as an individual. Your Spelman sisters will also support you through your academic experience because I definitely felt the sisterhood while I was in Baltimore, hundreds of miles away from Spelman and my home.

 

 

 

 

 

 

junior year away from 350 by Faty-Sharon Sylla

By

Hi everyone, my name is Faty-Sharon Sylla (C’2018 )and I am an international studies and comparative women’s studies double major. Although my major in international studies requires that I spend a semester abroad, my status as an international student (I am from France), exempted me from that requirement.

Instead, I decided to use my junior year to explore the united states a little bit more and tickle my academic interests, spending the fall in the nation’s capital and the spring in the capital of the world.

Below are blogs from my personal blog leblogdefaty.com where I speak upon my experience away from the gates of Spelman.

click on the links for illustrations.

Enjoy!

FALL 2016 part 1 http://www.leblogdefaty.com/en/2016/09/04/the-frenchie-in-dc-on-to-a-good-start/

Good evening humans!

As some of you people might already know, I am currently in Washington, D.C., and honestly, it feels like I am at the center of the world!

First things first, for those who do not know why or that I am even in the capital city, let me explain. I am participating in an exchange program at American University (which is located in DC). The program I’m a part of is the Washington Semester Program, and I am enrolled in the International Law and Organizations concentration. From Monday to Wednesday morning, I am supposed to be interning, and for the rest of the week, I have to attend seminars. The seminars consist of lectures, discussion, field visits, and guest lecturers cool, right? There are 18 other humans in my concentration which I really like because I don’t do people, coming from all over the world, and we all share one professor, Dr. Maisch.

As you may guess, a girl is rather busy, and has tons of readings to do, but I am really passionate about the subject matter, making it less of a burden however those who know me well know that being a nerd doesn’t prevent me from being le procrastinator. Anyway, last week started pretty well. On

Wednesday afternoon, I attended a talk by the Honorable Ambassador Barbara Stephenson what a title!, former American ambassador to Panama and President of the American Foreign Service Association. It was quite a motivating speech, in which she mentioned the new global threats, which are now non-state actors, such as global warming yes it is real, and global epidemics. She also highlighted the importance of international affairs in this new age. The next day, we went to the United Nations Information Center and met with it’s Director, M. Robert Skinner. We obviously talked about the UN, its history and its role, as well as the new challenges the international organizations now face, such as Daesh, and its quite problematic if you ask me administration and functioning. And next week, we are going to the Holocaust Museum.

Enough about school, let’s talk about the cool tings aka the capital city! I have to admit that I might have just fallen in love with DC… sorry NYC. I am lucky to live 5 minutes walking from AU, and the bus ride to downtown is only about 25 minutes! I live in a pretty nice neighborhood, very green but quite urbanized i like that *DJ KHALED voice*. I share an apartment with Joy, my Nigerian babes, it feels weird to have our own place! Here she is, followed by my working space adulting, i’m telling y’all, our living room, and my side of the room. ????

part 2 http://www.leblogdefaty.com/en/2016/12/31/2016-is-finally-over/

2016 was an interesting year, won’t you say so? and, personally, it was was of the best year of my life. sorry not sorry. Okay, yeah, universally, it was a $hitty year, but for Faty, it wasn’t an unpleasant was of spending 365 days. As you already know, I did and presented research TWICE in 6 months, the lowest grade I obtained this entire year was a A-, and I got a perfect GPA this semester. I also spent my summer in the wonderful place that is Planned Parenthood Federation of America, and my fall at the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs and their amazing Middle East Books. So academically and professionally speaking, I had an awesome year!

Alright, I confess, financially and emotionally it was not the BEST year (not at all). So I have this problem where my subconscious self believes that I am Rothschild’s daughter and does not seem to comprehend what “living on a budget” means. It was then indeed a difficult year, especially when you add the “misunderstanding” that happened with my scholarship, leaving me broke AF (and seriously considering dancing on a pole). Anyway, I end 2016 financially worse than I started it (even I did not know that was possible). Now emotionally. Well, one of the reason why I did not write as much (at all), was mainly because of my mental state. Mentally and emotionally, it was not quite easy because 2016 marked ten years since my aunt and my father reached the stars. And I remember telling 2006 Faty that everything will be alright in ten years, but I was wrong. And then comes in my insecurities, my lack of self-love, and my abundance of self-doubt, which, all mixed together, do not make the most tasteful cocktail. However for the first time in ten years, I sought help. I acknowledged that I had issues and that I needed to find solutions. There were ups and downs, but al-hamdulillah, I made it, and I am better. And I am proud of myself for that. So overall, I would say that 2016 was okay.

I am not going to make empty promises this time of the year, because I do not want to be reminded of them by my mother, nor to have Joy who i will miss a bit ask me all the was from Dakar “don’t you have a blog?”. Anyway, I invite you to become a better self within the next 365 (6?) days, and I wish you all an excellent 2017.

 

With hope and love,

Faty.

SPRING 2017

 

History of Ethel Waddell Githii Honors Program

Established in 1980, the Honors Program was renamed the Ethel Waddell Githii Honors Program in 1992. A distinguished scholar, teacher, and Spelman graduate, Dr. Githii served as the director of the Honors Program from 1985 to 1990.

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