University of Connecticut students and professors gathered in the Class of 1947 Meeting Room for Dr. Noel Cazenave’s talk about his memoir, “Cazenave Eyes,” on Thursday, Nov. 5.
The sociology professor discussed his experiences growing up in the Jim Crow South, working at predominantly white institutions like UConn, and how to protect yourself against racial trauma.
The event was sponsored by the Africana Studies Institute (ASI), the African American Cultural Center, the Office for Inclusion and Civil Rights, the Well Being Collective and the African American Faculty and Staff Association. After a brief introduction by Evelyn Simien, a professor of political science and director of the ASI, Cazenave took to the podium and asked the audience if “y’all [are] ready for some mischief.”
Cazenave urged anyone who thinks racism is a major problem at UConn to reach out to the organizations who sponsored this event, and he hopes that his book talk could be a new beginning on the discussion of racial trauma.
Cazenave also stated that higher institutions like UConn are hostile places for people of color and this hostility has caused him great emotional and mental stress, along with the difficulty of being successful in academia. Sometimes, a good laugh is needed to deal with this hostility, according to Cazenave.
“Sometimes you have to laugh to keep from crying,” Cazenave said. “So, laugh, cry and curse with me this afternoon.”
There were two moments in Cazenave’s life that led him towards being a professor and researching and challenging racist structures. The first one was during the 1966 fall semester, when he was an incoming student at Dillard University, a historically black college in New Orleans. It was on Dillard’s “plantation style campus,” built by white philanthropists, and during the beginning of the Black power movement that he resolved to “kick the system in its ass.”
The second life-changing moment occurred during 1995, when Cazenave proposed his white racism course to the sociology department. People at UConn were furious about the title of the course. According to Cazenave, a columnist at the Hartford Courant thought he “deserves to be beat up a bit” over the proposed course.
Next, Cazenave discussed his time as an associate professor at Temple University in Philadelphia. He shared stories about conflicts with white faculty members in the sociology department, such as the time people came together to propose a course on white racism until a white colleague interjected and said the course should be about race, a concept Cazenave believed is “inherently racist.”
Cazenave also shared anecdotes about racist incidents he endured at Temple, like how guards would stop him and ask for ID when he wanted to take an elevator to his office while his white colleagues did not get the same treatment. He called these actions probe and control tactics, but he noted that the modern term for them would also be microaggressions.
Noel Cazenave poses against a bookshelf. Cazenave has been a professor at UConn since September 1991. Photo courtesy of Noel A. Cazenave on LinkedIn.
After Cazenave secured tenure at Temple, he felt burnt out and said, “I got to get out of here.” That is how he ended up at UConn in the fall of 1991, “angry and worn out,” he said.
Cazenave talked more about the adversity he saw from fellow faculty members. According to Cazenave, his department head opposed the idea of studies in racism, and his fellow faculty members chided him for showing too much anger at a campus protest about police killings.
After a racist incident on campus occurred in 2021, faculty members suggested the sociology department could act as a resource for students in the burgeoning anti-racism movement, which Cazenave responded with “if the students wanted to learn about racism, they should go anywhere but the sociology department.”
To conclude his talk, Cazenave shared a few lessons he learned over his more than 40 years challenging racism: never underestimate your power, don’t be defined by your enemies, take your anger against oppression and make it compassion for the oppressed, celebrate your successes, protect yourself against burnout and live an authentic life.
Matt Calise and Chengzhe Xu, both of whom are third-semester doctoral students in sociology, said they liked how Cazenave connected his life experiences with broader social frameworks.
“I think he does a really good job of connecting his own personal experiences to broader social structures in a way that most memoirs tend not to do,” Calise said.
“He makes me think that his methodology or his experience is applicable,” Xu said of Cazenave. “There’s definitely a universal way to reflect on your experience and try to turn it into a change of the academia or social issues.”