Lecture addressing bullying held at Richmond

The education system, both private and public, systematically bullies marginalized groups, Yale scholar Dena Simmons said in her talk in the Brown-Alley Room Tuesday night.

“The education system violently silences and disadvantages those who do not fit into normative socio-cultural conventions,” Simmons said.

Violence surrounds our children and especially those children who grow up in violent parts of the inner city, said Simmons, who grew up in the Bronx. “We learn early on how to be brutal and how to be brutalized,” she said.

Simmons was raised in an unsafe part of the Bronx before being sent to the Westover School, a boarding school in Connecticut. At the time, she still had the “scent of poverty" clinging to her clothes, she said. While there, she encountered racism, sexism and a system that attempted to force her to conform to European conventions, she said.

“Bullying is an abuse of power,” Simmons said. “It’s a way of preserving the power of the privileged.”

Our schools institutionalize a system of gender classification that leaves those students, who don’t identify with a gender, feeling marginalized, said Simmons, who described herself as a gay woman of color. “The education system bullies students like my younger self,” she said.

Many students are bullied for being different, and this can leave students damaged, both physically and emotionally, Simmons said. “Systematic bullying is engrained in the fabric of our country,” she said.

Simmons talked about her Teach for America experiences while working at a school in the Bronx and said teachers often turned a blind eye to bullying. Some even believed it toughened kids up or that it was just a natural part of growing up, she said.

She remembered, with sadness, a student named Victor who was bullied for displaying effeminate traits, Simmons said. “Dealing with this issue is a social justice imperative,” she said.

The lecture, “Bullying: Ain’t Nobody Got Time for That,” was sponsored by the WILL program, and was attended by more than 80 people.

Simmons is currently the associate director of school initiatives at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. She is a 2004 Harry S. Truman Scholar and a 2010 Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow, and has given two nationally broadcasted TEDx talks.

“I thought her talk was very important considering the bullying problem our country faces,” Matt Davison, Richmond College '17, said. “She brought up some really interesting points.” Antonio De Mora Vazquez, RC '17, said: “I believed she made some good points at the beginning, went on throwing out too many statistics and ended up seeing bullying everywhere. The topic of the talk was good but the delivery was poor because she was reading off the paper.”

Simmons finished her speech by saying, “It is our job to question, to challenge and to curb the problematic violent policing of difference because, at the end of the day, ‘ain’t nobody got time for that.’”

Contact reporter Eamon O'Keefe at eamon.okeefe@richmond.edu