Frederic Callens in Little Rock
A blog written by Walter Nunn, programmer who hosted Frederic Callens in Little Rock during both of his IVLP visits.
Mr. Frederic Callens, Director of Anti-Discrimination in France, who reports directly to the French Prime Minister, was chosen as a rare repeat visitor in the IVLP Gold Star program after coming to the U.S. in 2008. Following his earlier visit, he rose rapidly to his current national position with a concentration on minority issues. He moved from Toulouse to Paris upon his promotion.
Little Rock is the only city on his current tour that he also visited in 2008, and he was interested in comparing the status of minority issues today. His itinerary also included Washington, D.C., Phoenix and New York, so Little Rock is the smallest and in some respects the most representative stop. His local programmer, Dr. Walter Nunn, wrote and carried out his program both times.
Arrival -- I met Frederic at the airport, and I immediately realized that the first time he came, he required an interpreter, but now he speaks English well enough to converse without one. I’m sure the southern accent makes this task harder, but he’s too polite to admit it. Fred, as he prefers to be called, has a home stay with Dr. Francine Bruyneel, a pediatrician, and Patrick Mathieu, a Skippy Peanut Butter retiree, a jolly native French-speaking couple from Belgium and France, respectively. They are long-time Little Rock residents.
His one repeat appointment is today, at Little Rock Central High School, site of the famous 1957 integration crisis. Nancy Rousseau, the principal, recalled his 2008 visit. Today he met with a second-year French class in an open-ended q & a session with the students, predominantly African American. They were interested to find out that the primary minority issue in France was the integration of immigrants and their descendants, mostly second- and third generation Muslims from Africa and more recently, from eastern Europe, such as Romania. He discovered that the racial ratio of 60-40 black-white at the school is essentially the same as his previous visit. A few adventurous students posed their questions in French, which Fred commended for their effort.
A photographer from the Arkansas Democrat Gazette and a reporter from a local t.v. station covered this classroom discussion. The newspaper carried a photo of his speaking to the class.
This week is Diversity Week at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, and this afternoon focused on Native American culture. The head of the Quapaw tribe brought a group of students from Oklahoma who talked about growing up in a mixed culture and pulled audience members into a demonstration of a few of their dances and the symbolism. The Quapaws greeted the white explorers who came to the Little Rock area. Mr. Callens, thoughtful and a little shy, didn’t volunteer to dance but enjoyed his first encounter with American Indian youths and saw some similarity with the Muslim-white adjustments in France. Fred also visited the Sequoyah National Research Center at the University, which is an extensive collection of Native American literature, publications, history and artifacts.
Local Hospitality –He had home hospitality tonight with Kathleen Madden, a staff member, who crammed 12 people into her small apartment with a wide range of ethnicities, religions, races and sexual preferences.
Today is a reminder that visitors often have to monitor their work back home. I found out that as soon as he left the country, Prime Minister Manuel Valls has scheduled his first speech on the subject of discrimination to be delivered the day Fred leaves Little Rock. Fred obviously has a lot of input on this event, and about this time he has started pecking furiously on his phone between appointments and, I discovered, late into the night.
Sophia Said of Interfaith Dialogue and Education is a native Pakistani and Muslim whose work is most closely related to Fred’s situation of whites and largely Muslim immigrants back home. Sophia told a touching story of her not wearing a chador (head scarf) most of her 20 years in the U.S. and then deciding she didn’t have give up this highly visible symbol of her faith. Her husband, a medical school physician, became embarrassed about her going to the staff Christmas party. The result was a “teachable moment” symbolic of Sophia’s work in bridging the gap between Christians and Muslims in Little Rock. The conversation between Fred and Sophia on this subject was perhaps the most moving one of the Little Rock visit.
The Family Council is a conservative advocate of Christian values, including pro-life and traditional heterosexual marriage. It’s the most vigorous Arkansas lobbying organization in favor of religious freedom legislation that, along with Indiana, received national attention recently to the Arkansas General Assembly. Fred’s style is to listen and ask a few questions rather than challenge or serve as a devil’s advocate, although he was once a journalist. He’s definitely laid back but is taking in everything.
Lunch is with Loretta Alexander, an African American career health care administrator and researcher who is also the senior member of Global Ties Arkansas. We ate at Dave’s Country Kitchen.
We had a break until the next appointment, so we went to Starbucks so Fred could write some more on the PM’s speech. Fantastically perfect weather for sitting outside sipping coffee and watching Fred writing intensely.
Met the Mayor, Mark Stodola, who weighed in on the religious freedom issue a few days ago and was on the Rachel Maddow Show advocating that individual cities should be allowed to ban discrimination against gays.
Met the state’s leading civil rights attorney, John Walker, who has successfully sued schools and employers to eliminate racial discrimination. That was immediately followed by the organization of a community group to protest the state’s takeover of the Little Rock School District because six of the 48 schools have found to be below the state’s required level of academic proficiency. The meeting is in John’s office, and 18 people, predominantly African American, agree to protest the takeover by picketing the state Board of Education majority that narrowly approved this highly controversial action. My family members are joining the protest, and this is the first time I’ve ever had a chance to take a visitor to the formation of community action group. It’s a programming milestone and an unusual opportunity for a visitor to see democracy in action this close.
Whew! This has been a full day. Instead of going to a local pub with his host family, Fred is exhausted and has more writing to do, so he goes home. And so do I.
In the morning, Fred meets with the Arkansas Public Policy Panel, which is on the other side from the Arkansas Family Council on the religious freedom issue. Then he goes to the Clinton Presidential Center to discuss potential international internships from the Clinton School of Public Service, which has the country’s only master’s degree in public service. The Clinton School in turn accepts graduate student applications from overseas, so this meeting is a joint opportunity.
Fred’s program concluded with an interesting interview with the new (10 months) Police Chief Kenton Buckner on the subject of police violence in the wake of Ferguson and other widely publicized police killings. Chief Buckner is an African American from Louisville and has an aggressive program to prevent police killings of civilians: the patrolmen are being trained by a nonprofit race relations group on appropriate responses to provocations and tense situations, body cameras will be put on all patrolmen, the Chief goes to a different black church every Sunday, he encourages and accepts all the speaking engagements he can, and he has an open door to any citizen with a complaint. Fred and I both find this an amazingly proactive approach to improving police-citizen relations. Fred has taken the most copious notes of any appointment.
Farewell dinner at Francine and Patrick’s house that includes me, Global Ties Arkansas director Toni Carr and husband Jim, which is preceded by a brief but intense discussion with state Senator Joyce Elliott, the only black woman in the Arkansas Senate, about Arkansas race relations. The dinner is highlighted by several rounds of toasts to Fred, the PM’s impending speech, and improved relations with minorities in both countries,
It was a great visit from my perspective, learning about Fred's work, seeing how much he has advanced since his last visit and coming up with two great new resources in the persons of Sophia Said on Muslim-American relations and Police Chief Kenton Buckner on preventing police-citizen violence that we'll want to use again. And being present at the formation of a community action group was an unusual opportunity that cannot be replicated.
