Sojourner Truth Lecture

2024 Sojourner Truth lecturer Rokhaya Diallo explores her life and the experiences of women

Shayla Brown — Fri, 08 Mar 2024 20:21:56 +0000

2024 Sojourner Truth lecturer Rokhaya Diallo explores her life and the experiences of women Shayla Brown Fri, 03/08/2024 - 15:21

Award-winning journalist, broadcast host, and filmmaker Rokhaya Diallo is ��AV’s 2024 Sojourner Truth Lecture speaker and award recipient. Born in France to Senegalese and Indian parents, Diallo said she started to notice that fewer people looked like her as she advanced in her studies and career. This led her to explore her own identity and depict the experiences of other women of color in her work.

Sojourner Truth lecture speaker Rokhaya Diallo. Photo by Brigitte Sombie.

Race wasn’t something Diallo was really aware of while she was growing up, she said. “The U.S. narrative is prevalent all over the world, so whenever we speak about Black [public] figures [in France], we only refer to American figures,” said Diallo. For example, she said, there are landmarks named after figures such as Martin Luther King Jr., but not many named after historic Black figures from France.

Diallo’s lecture discussed Republican Universalism in France, and she shared clips from her documentaries demonstrating the challenges Black women in France faced expressing their multiple identities in a society that prides itself on being “colorblind.”

“It was important to question how France displayed itself on film and TV,” she said in describing her 2020 documentary Acting While Black: Blackness on French Screens.  “[The country] tried to tackle racist sentiments in the public space but also reshape the idea that we had about the French identity,” said Diallo.

“This was my favorite part of the lecture,” said LaNitra Berger, associate professor of history and art history and director of African and African American Studies Program. “It really highlighted the inconsistencies in French policy and culture that make it difficult for people of color to feel accepted in French society.”

Diallo’s February 26 lecture was virtual to an in-person audience.

“We wanted to be cost effective and honor Rokhaya's busy schedule, but we also wanted the feeling of a community gathering in person to discuss an important topic,” said Berger.  

The Sojourner Truth award is given annually to a Black woman whose work embodies the principles of Sojourner Truth through art, scholarship, activism, and contributions to public life. Sojourner Truth was an outspoken advocate for abolition, civil and women's rights in the nineteenth century. Previous speakers have included Marilyn Mobley, Jennifer C. Nash, Kakenya Ntaiya, Maya Rockeymoore Cummings, and Aja Clark.

Also in attendance at the lecture was Stephanie Rambo, an assistant professor with Mason’s English Department. Rambo was presented with the Sojourner Truth Faculty Award by Berger for her research on literary Black girlhood across the diaspora.

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LaNitra M. Berger, PhD

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Kakenya Ntaiya speaks her truth at Mason’s annual Sojourner Truth Lecture

Shayla Brown — Wed, 22 Mar 2023 18:51:25 +0000

Kakenya Ntaiya speaks her truth at Mason’s annual Sojourner Truth Lecture Shayla Brown Wed, 03/22/2023 - 14:51

In This Story

LaNitra M. Berger, PhD

Dr. Kakenya Ntaiya, guest speaker at ��AV's Sojourner Truth Lecture. Photo by Shayla Brown/Strategic Communications.

Kakenya Ntaiya’s life was set to follow the traditional Kenyan path of ending school early in preparation for marriage and motherhood at the age of 15, but she had a different dream.

Ntaiya, who was ��AV’s 2023 Sojourner Truth Lecture guest speaker on March 2, is the founder of Kakenya’s Dream, a nonprofit organization that is dedicated to educating and advocating for young girls across rural Kenya.

“I’m really grateful to be here as we are ending the celebration of Black History Month, and also welcoming Women’s History Month since they’re two of the entities that I have within me,” she said. “In communities like ours, you find that the place of a woman is pretty low.”

About 50 people were in attendance during the lecture. When Ntaiya was asked why it was so important for a Black feminist to also be committed to health, she responded, “Health is everything, especially mental health, but general health is everything.”

“I grew up in a community where about 40 percent of young girls between the age of 15 and 19 give birth, 50 percent are married off during childhood, 80 percent undergo female genital mutilation (FGM), often without anesthesia,” said Ntaiya, who also was subjected to the procedure in Kenya where it is considered a rite of passage to womanhood.

“I was lucky to survive because most girls die from bleeding,” she said. “There are consequences for the bodies of these young girls.”

Despite having been subjected to FGM, Ntaiya made a deal with her father to let her forgo marriage and finish her education, promising her rural Kenyan community that she would go to school in the United States and use her education to help the village in exchange for their support.

“The commitment that Kakenya has to supporting women and girls internationally is unparalleled,” said LaNitra Berger, director of Mason’s African and African American Studies Program. “I have so much respect for the organization that she runs, and the ways in which she is completely dedicated to the cause of women and girls’ education.”

Ntaiya said she was driven to make a difference to help end child marriage in Kenya, in the absence of intervention from NGOs or other aid organizations.

“The government of course had laws in Kenya [that said we're] not supposed to be married before 18, but those are just laws in the box that are not implemented,” said Ntaiya.

In addition to educating girls and women on various topics, Kakenya’s Dream also gives boys and men the tools to help them be allies for women battling cultural norms.

“They now speak out against the practices [of the past] and we have a better future with the younger generations now sensitized about the harm of FGM,” said Ntaiya. “Young men learning about this are going to marry a woman that is not cut, and that is where we start seeing the generational change that will break the norms that have been there thus far.”

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Duke professor highlights racism in the birth process

Colleen Rich — Tue, 08 Mar 2022 15:38:30 +0000

Duke professor highlights racism in the birth process Colleen Rich Tue, 03/08/2022 - 10:38

Jennifer Nash. Photo provided

Delivery room experiences are “ground zero of the black maternal health crisis,” Duke University professor and author Jennifer C. Nash said Tuesday, March 1, during ��AV’s virtual Sojourner Truth Lecture, cosponsored by the Women and Gender Studies Program and the African and African American Studies Program.

Nash, whose third and most recent book is “Birthing Black Mothers,” discussed the role of birth doulas, particularly doulas of color, who she calls “agents of birth justice” and whose experiences she documented in the book.

Recent medical association acknowledgements and media reports have drawn greater attention to black mother and infant mortality rates, said Nash, who is the Jean Fox O'Barr Women’s Studies Distinguished Professor and professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke.

She referred to women of color doulas as “the necessary and perhaps only stopgap preventing black mothers and children from dying from obstetric violence.” Black mothers are four times more likely to die during childbirth.

“This outpouring of attention has made a singular point,” Nash said, “that racism is to blame for the life-or-death crisis that black mothers and their children face.

“I came to see [the delivery room] as a dense site of conflict, where bodies, politics, ideologies and desires dance around and sometimes collide with each other,” Nash added. “It is a space where actors, including obstetricians, midwives, doulas, patients and families with different investments in institutionalized medicine come into contact. And it is a space where ideas about illness and wellness, pregnancy and labor, timelines and medical intervention, interact and at times conflict.”

Tianna Cobb, a postdoctoral research and teaching fellow in Mason’s Department of Communication, moderated the conversation that followed Nash’s presentation. Nash met virtually with Mason faculty and undergraduates for additional discussion that day prior to the event. About 100 people attended the online lecture.

LaNitra Berger, associate director of the African and African American Studies Program and senior director of the Office of Fellowships in the Office of Undergraduate Education, presented the Sojourner Truth Community Partner Award to SisterMentors, a D.C. nonprofit that promotes education among women and girls of color.

The Sojourner Truth Faculty Award went to Jhumka Gupta, assistant professor of Global and Community Health in the College of Health and Human Services. Gupta’s work includes investigations of mental and reproductive health as it relates to gender-based violence.