Earning and Demanding R-E-S-P-E-C-T

AUTHOR, SOCIOLOGIST, AND HARVARD UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR, DR, SARAH LAWRENCE-LIGHTFOOT SHARES HER THOUGHTS ON WHAT RESPECT MEANS FOR BLACK WOMEN IN THE ACADEMY

Any good professor knows that sometimes, the most teachable moments emerge when you least expect them.

For Dr. Sarah Lawrence-Lightfoot, such an occasion arose a few years ago when she and her colleague, Jim Coleman, a professor of sociology had finished presenting papers at an academic conference at the University of Chicago. At some point, a graduate student raised his hand and began asking a question.

"Professor Coleman and Sara ...," the student began to say.

"I started sweating profusely, I couldn't even hear the question," Lawrence-Lightfoot says, recalling the incident as vividly as it had happened yesterday. "I don't think this man intended any malice. This was just the cultural script he had been socialized to. If you have a man of a certain age and a Black woman of a certain age, you address the man as professor and the woman should be called by her first name."

For Lawrence-Lightfoot, a MacArthur Fellow and the first Black woman professor to hold an endowed chair at Harvard Graduate School of Education, this was too much. She decided she could not let it go.

"I told him I couldn't even hear the question because he asked it inappropriately," she says. "So I asked him to repeat the question and ask it appropriately. [Coleman and I] were both senior people and we both gave serious papers. There needed to be a symmetry of respect."

The subject of R-E-S-P-E-C-T, as Aretha Franklin sings, comes up a lot these days, as Lawrence-Lightfoot tours the country talking about her new book, Respect. The subject, she says, is important because of the consequences for society today. But for Black Americans, it can be an especially painful subject because of the legacy of discrimination and disrespect they have had to endure.

Lawrence-Lightfoot engages the reader on the subject not through an abstract discussion of philosophy, but through six powerful portrayals of people in diverse occupations who use respect to engage and empower their patients and their students. Even between people of vastly unequal status, she maintains, respect can create symmetry, empathy, and connection. Respect can transform lives.

"The traditional view of respect is a very hierarchical view," Lawrence-Lightfoot says. "The more status a person has, the more knowledge, people who are of a certain class or color should receive more respect than those who are lower on the totem pole."

Lawrence-Lightfoot argues for a new view of respect, one of symmetry and balance that would insure equality even if there are differences in status or knowledge or skill.

She calls the people profiled in the booklike Jennifer Dohrn, the midwife who empowers poor young women at the Childbearing Center in New York; or middle-school teacher Kay Cottle--"practitioners of respect."

"Respect requires daily vigilance," Lawrence-Lightfoot says. "It is the daily work of giving respect and receiving it."

The idea of respect came to Lawrence-Lightfoot quite naturally because of her parents. Her father, Dr. Charles Lawrence, was a professor of sociology at Brooklyn College. Her mother, Dr. Margaret Lawrence, is a retired child psychoanalyst and was the first Black woman to graduate from Columbia University Medical School. Both parents had grown up in Mississippi and gone to predominately White universities for their graduate degrees.

Throughout their lives, Lawrence-Lightfoot says her parents endured discrimination and disrespect and "yet they treated everyone, from the university president to the gas station attendant, with the same dignity and respect. They had endured the assaults of racism and disrespect and yet somehow developed enough self-respect to give respect to even the most invisible people."

Lawrence-Lightfoot followed in her father's footsteps and became what she calls a "people-watcher," known in academic circles as a sociologist. Last year, she became the first Black woman appointed to an endowed professorship at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. When she retires, the chair will be named after her, the first such chair to be named after a Black woman.

In her three decades of teaching, she has won her share of honors, including the MacArthur Prize Fellowship in 1984. She is a prolific author, writing books on a range of subjects. In perhaps her most well-known work, Balm in Gilead: Journey of a Healer, she chronicles the life of her mother. She wrote about high schools in The Good High School, and drew portraits of Black middle-class life in I've Known Rivers: Lives of Loss and Liberation.

Although she is well known, Lawrence-Lightfoot realizes just how rare her position is in the academy. At Harvard, she is one of just a handful of Black women in senior faculty positions.