Dr. Earl Ofari Hutchinson — owner of one of the silkiest, most authoritative/demanding, most respected voices in the Los Angeles black community — made a curious appearance before the Parks, Recreation and Community Services Commission last evening in Council Chambers.
The question of “why” never was answered.
In a departure from his renowned political agenda, his heavily promoted lecture, advertised as “Words Matter,” was a cautious, generic venture into the nasty world of bullying, mainly by student-types.
A muscular thinker who never is bashful about asserting forcefully and confronting, this time Dr. Hutchinson’s never-quite-knitted-together presentation meandered more than it instructed.
He opened with a brief, vaguely centered thrust about the life-ending perils of campus bullying, and how bullies frequently are merely copying behavior patterns of their elders. Rather swiftly, he handed off to his Ph.D daughter, Dr. Sikivu Hutchinson as the expert in the family on these edgy, pervasive types of social patterns.
An intellectual like her father, her socially-oriented power-point punctuations, headlined “Beyond Kumbaya,” were equally unadventurous — for example, “children who are bullied or exhibit bullying behavior have lower academic achievements.”
Under the rubric of Slurs That Ignite Bullying was an exercise in Words I Can’t Say But You Know What They Mean, Dr. Sikivu Hutchinson listed “the N-word, the B-word, the F-word,” plus a slurring phrase that she said she could say aloud, “You’re so gay.”
Racism and sexism received considerable attention from her, and some in the audience were introduced to another, “heterosexism,” which “is the only accepted orientation” at some schools, she said.
