Michael Benitez Jr. is a social justice educator, speaker and activist-scholar, integrating hip hop pedagogy, academic inquiry and personal experience. His presentations provide critical and multicontextual frameworks for empowerment and education, addressing issues of diversity and social justice; cross- and intercultural development and multiculturalism; knowledge representation and equity; and identity, leadership and youth development.
Through experiential initiatives and critical practice, Benitez exposes the unpleasant truths of national and global diversity issues dealing with race, gender, and other intersecting topics tied to the injustices of the human condition.
At the same time, he examines the state of activism across campuses in a non-threatening, yet passionate fashion. Benitez considers college campuses to be the safety nets for transformation and change, and challenges the complacency students grow used to and how institutions cultivate apathy among our youth.
Benitez is co-editor of the anthology,
Crash Course: Reflections on the Film “Crash” for Critical Dialogues About Race, Power and Privilege, a collection of essays by some of the country’s most prominent anti-racism writers, scholars and activists. His most recent writing on culture centers, anti racism and social justice was published in
Culture Centers in Higher Education: Perspectives on Identity, Theory, and Practice (Stylus, July 2010).
Currently, Benitez is a doctoral student (Ph.D.) at Iowa State University focusing on Educational Leadership and Policy Studies with a concentration on social justice and higher education. He previously served as Director of Intercultural Development and the David A. Portlock Black Cultural Center at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania and adjunct faculty in the Graduate School of Leadership and Professional Advancement at Duquesne University.
He completed both his Bachelor of Science with a minor in African- and African-American Studies and Masters of Education at the Pennsylvania State University (PSU). There, Benitez served under the College Assistance Migrant Program, where he helped revive the program’s migrant education efforts. Later, at Dickinson College, as Director of Diversity Initiatives and Social Justice, Benitez established the “Diversity Monologues,” an annual program aimed at highlighting the creative talents of students while addressing diversity and social justice issues.
Speech Topics Include:• Diversity and Social Justice: Making the Connection, Building Community
• A Framework for Inter- and Cross- Cultural Collaboration
• Leadership and Diversity: How Leaders can help Eliminate Organizational Bias
• Repoliticizing Multiculturalism: Cultivating Conditions for Sustained Intercultural Relations and Authentic Dialogue
• Revisiting/ Redefining Activism in the Age of Conformity
• The Institutionalization of Activism and Manifest Apathy: Empowering the Disempowered
• Waking up to Privilege Systems: Best Practices in Multicultural Social Justice Education
• Black and Brown Relations in Higher Education and America
• Hip Hop Pedagogy as Praxis for Transforming Consciousness and Engagement in Education
• More than Beats and Rhymes: Hip Hop as Agency for Transforming Consciousness and Activism in Education
• Identity Politics and Whiteness in Latino/a- culture: Deconstructing Conditions of Race in 'pero somos Latino/as'
• Latinos, Activism and the Politics of Racialized Identities
