Project News

A Phoenix mother says her 9-year-old son was forced to walk through his class as his teacher and fellow students yelled at, humiliated and berated him during a lesson on school segregation. 

Dr. Neal A. Lester. is a Foundation Professor of English and the Founding Director of Project Humanities at Arizona State University. A popular public speaker, frequent radio guest, regular op-ed contributor, newspaper columnist and blogger, and discussion facilitator, Dr. Lester has an extensive record of lectures and keynote addresses, local and national media interviews, guest speaker events, scholarly consultations, conference presentations, and editorials.

The N-word has played a big part in American history, whether that is due to political and social history or in pop culture.Even if the N-word surrounds us in music and movies and our favorite artists use it, that does not give non-Black individuals the right to say it.

Lester said conversations about race are hard because they can make us feel uncomfortable, but that racism should make people uncomfortable.

The images are haunting and cruel and, these days, seemingly everywhere. They're uncovered in public figures' pasts and rolled out in fashion companies' collections, and for the people they affect the most, they're agonizing. But African-Americans in the Valley and elsewhere say that while blackface images can trigger raw emotions, they can also force important conversations to the forefront.

Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam wore blackface 35 years ago. As did his attorney general, Mark Herring. And a review of 900 college yearbooks showed that the practice was not rare. Among those caught up in the review was Nicole Carroll, who later became the editor of The Arizona Republic and is now editor-in-chief of USA TODAY.

Jefferson native Neal Lester recently received two special awards named in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Lester was awarded the MLK “Living the Dream” Award by the City of Phoenix, Ariz., and the Paradise Valley (Ariz.) MLK 2019 Diversity Award. Lester had also received an award named after MLK in 2017 from the City of Tempe, Ariz.

Many of us wish we could change something about our bodies. Some of us might want to be thinner, taller, or more muscular. “Many people base their sense of self-worth on their physical appearance, and how they perceive themselves to be in comparison to others,” said Benny LeMaster, assistant professor in the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication. “We too often internalize cultural hierarchies that tell us there is only one type of healthy body, only one shade of beautiful skin, and only two rigid gender identities, for instance.”

Every time junior Lauren McGinnis hears what she believes is “the most powerful word in the English language” — the n-word — being used, waves of discomfort and frustration wash over her. She did not think that asking her white peers in an Instagram post to remove the word from their vocabulary was an unreasonable request, but the derogatory replies that she received from her followers hurt deeply.

For many people, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s “I Have a Dream” speech is his landmark speech.But for ASU english professor Neal Lester, a more telling moment came in the speech King gave at a visit to Stanford University in 1967 in a speech called “The Other America.” “We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long and it bends towards justice," King said in the speech. The speech shows a complex, little-known side to the famed civil rights activist, Lester said. “I facilitated a program back in the summer that was on the anniversary of King’s death,” Lester said. “That was an opportunity for me to try to move people, and myself, away from these sugar-coated images that idolize King.”