Boulder – The e-mail spit hatred, but the four-letter words and racial slurs rolled off Mebraht Gebre-Michael’s tongue as she sat in front of the cameras, the note sitting on her lap.
The message, sent to the black University of Colorado student, threatened her life, called her the n-word and a “monkey.”
And soon, thousands of people in Boulder will hear it.
“I’ve read (the e-mail) to myself over and over, but reading it out loud to other people is entirely different,” Gebre-Michael said. “It’s hard, reading the vulgarities and allowing other people to hear those words.”
As part of a one-time shot to grab the consciousness of the mostly white CU campus – and Boulder, in general – a handful of professors and students at the university are betting that provocative television programming can help change the racial atmosphere at the school.
Efforts at “multiversity” – shorthand for multicultural university – in part scrapes at past wounds at CU, where black enrollment has stagnated amid racially motivated assaults and threats. The shows, too, highlight the work that professors are doing to promote racial understanding on campus and in the city.
Four of the eight half-hour programs are on rotation, airing at 9:30 p.m. Sunday through Friday on Boulder’s Comcast cable system, Channel 63. The first show aired in late February.
“We’re not going to solve all the problems with this, but at least this is a start,” said Bella Mody, a journalism professor at the school who developed the shows to be similar to ones she created while teaching at Michigan State University several years ago. “Maybe people will begin talking about these issues.”
Assisted by a few dozen CU journalism students, Mody and a handful of colleagues who study race and ethnicity tackle topics ranging from “Why is Boulder so white” to racial incidents on campus, such as the threatening e-mail that Gebre-Michael received in November.
Other topics include how minorities can establish racial identities on campus and in Boulder, the challenge of teaching about race and ethnicity and how CU can attract and retain urban black students.
Mody – who financed the shows with a $5,000 university grant that has yet to be renewed – plans to air them in perpetuity unless more are created. They eventually will appear online at www.colorado.edu/journalism.
None of the professors or students who participated were paid for the work.
“The shows are telling people that you need to pay attention to students of color here, that there are problems but there are good things going on here every day,” said Christopher Bell, 32, a doctoral student who edited the programs. “The problems in Boulder have been around for 25 years, and they had to be addressed.”
Added Gebre-Michael: “I don’t worry about myself, but I worry that it will happen again to someone else. Maybe these shows … can help us work toward understanding and reaching out to one another.”
Staff writer Robert Sanchez can be reached at 303-820-1282 or rsanchez@denverpost.com.
