Collegio Online

Issue date: 2/14/08 Section: Campus Life

Media Credit: Shiho Itooka/Collegio Daryl Davis talks about the roots of racism on Thursday night, Feb. 7, in the Crimson and Gold Ballroom. The event was sponsored by the Office of Student Diversity and the Leadership Institute.

Simply talking about race and racism can make a difference, author and musician Daryl Davis told a PSU student audience Thursday, Feb. 7.

"Racism and discrimination are cancers," Davis said. "If you don't treat it, it will metastasize and spread."

Davis spoke to more than 100 students in the Crimson and Gold Ballroom of the Overman Student Center. He went incognito to Ku Klux Klan meetings and talked with the members, thus, he said, changing their lives.

Davis was raised mostly overseas while his father worked for the government, and was unaware of race and discrimination until he returned to the States and joined the Cub Scouts. During a Scout parade, Davis, the only African-American, was beaten with debris that onlookers found in the street.
This and other instances fueled Davis' pursuit for the absolution of hate and discrimination between races.

"He was a very good speaker, very bold, and definitely eye-opening," said student Cherelle Jones. "It shows that common individuals can do anything. He took an experience he had and educated himself about it."

As a professional musician, Davis had no intentions of rehabilitating high-ranking members of the Klan. Yet through conversations and knowledge about his and other races, Davis even broke down a former Imperial Wizard and they remain cordial friends.

He also altered the views of a family, and one of the daughters later married an African-American.

"Klandestine," his 2000 book detailing encounters with the Klan and the accumulated friendships, is the first KKK-related book authored by a black man that isn't about escaping a lynching. Since the book's publication, Davis has included a reformed family in a 2002 Martin Luther King Jr. celebration, revealing through televised footage that we as a global society can eliminate hatred between races.

To Davis, racism and hate are battles among individuals and the desire to be right in decisions we make.

"For me, an ignorant person is someone who makes a wrong choice because they didn't have the right facts," said Davis. "A stupid person is someone who has all the facts and still makes the wrong decision."

Continued...

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