Is it possible to speak up against racism without being caricatured as "the angry black woman?" How can women balance going to graduate school or building a career with starting a family?

In a panel discussion Nov. 12, four women from the Cornell community addressed these and many other complex questions. About 30 people attended the discussion, part of the all-day Women of Color conference held in Robert Purcell Community Center.

While three of the four panelists were Cornell professors, the discussion was more personal conversation than academic forum. In response to a question about how women can balance the conflicting needs of career and family, the panelists drew heavily on their own experience.

"As a woman and as a mother, I also struggle," said Laura Brashears, visiting assistant professor of sociology. "Every week I go through questions of whether I should be working or whether I should be home with the baby."

For some women, the question was further complicated by societal pressure.

"A week before we graduated from high school, my best friend had a baby," said Kakwireiosta Hall, Akwe:kon's residence hall director. "I grew up in a community where it was very common, if not expected, to have children very young, and that was the direction that a lot of women went into."

As "the rare one out of the bunch" to attend college, Hall has had to create her own path. Trust, she said, has enabled her to feel confident about her decisions.

"I think the important thing is to not overwhelm yourself with the pressure that there's a right choice and a wrong choice," she said. "Just trust that where you are is where you're meant to be."

For Hall, it took a drastic step to come to this moment of self-understanding: deactivating her Facebook.

"It was amazing," she said. "I was able to focus on myself and not look at myself in the context of everyone else around me."

Before signing off Facebook, Hall said, she was concerned that she had not yet gotten a master's degree. But Carole Boyce Davies, a professor of Africana Studies, English and comparative literature, pointed out that it's "never too late" to start a career.

"I have a very good friend who started medical school at 32. Sounds pretty late, doesn't it?" Davies said. "But when she finished medical school, she made more money than I do!"

When a listener asked for advice on dealing with discriminatory comments from others, Sofia Villenas, professor of anthropology and director of Cornell's Latino Studies program, suggested "surrounding" oneself with allies. That way, she said, one doesn't have to single-handedly take on every issue of discrimination one comes across.

"It's so important to pick and choose your battles," Villenas said. "You're going to have to let some things go, and some things your allies will have to take care of."

Davies agreed. While she acknowledged that racist insults and other such "micro-aggressions" (a term she credited one of her students with coining) could be difficult to ignore, she cautioned listeners that reacting to every single insult can exert both a mental and physical toll. She said that upon meeting the first black woman mayor of a small town in Ohio, she asked her, "How do you survive? How do you manage?"

The woman's response? "I say to myself, 'every day when I step out I'm going to run into 40 fools,' and I start counting down."

Elisabeth Rosen '12 is a writer intern for the Cornell Chronicle.