Johnnella Butler: I think it’s important either way. I’ve taught on predominantly white campuses and on campuses like this which are growing in their numbers of minority students. Either way, it’s still the United States. We still have the same issues. The way in which we approach teaching about race, and the immediacy of it, may change as the population becomes more diverse.
Priscilla Wald: There’s no question that diversity leads to conflicts of perspective and those conflicts in turn lead people to think about things that are invisible if you’ve got a homogeneous population. But I agree that the discussion is important either way. We have a changing demographic not only at the University but also in the nation, and a changing understanding of social justice.
| Al Black: In sociology, we have to raise issues of race and gender in class. The percentage of blacks or other minorities on the campus would make no difference. It also seems to me that the dominant group in society needs to learn a lot more about race because it is incredibly naive. And increasingly, minorities, especially African Americans, are coming to the University without adequate knowledge of their own background. For these reasons, it is crucial no matter what the demographics. |  |
A&S Perspectives: In the classroom, how do you begin to tackle such a complex and potentially volatile subject as race?
Black: The specifics depend on the class, of course, but whatever the subject matter, you have to be very careful not to present facts without explanation. Students have a tendency to use the facts to reinforce their stereotypes. It is critical that you get to explanations very quickly.
Also, it’s not just important how we present material but also how we provoke students such that they will be interested in the subject matter. One of the things I try to do is present provocative issues about which every student in the room has a position. Now the reading and whatever I’m saying is no longer irrelevant, it’s extremely relevant, because the students use it to strengthen their argument. They begin to participate in a dialog because they care about the issues being discussed.
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Elena Pereyra: I agree. I think it is dialog, it is the engagement, that students need. However, this dialog must extend well beyond the intellectual level. It must be based on human to human, heart to heart interaction. Even President Clinton stated in his second inauguration speech that "race is an issue of the heart." He is correct. |
Wald: I teach literature, a subject that traditionally has been taught through aesthetics. It has seemed to be about aesthetics, often assumed to be an apolitical category. I think that one of the things that is really urgent to get across to students is that this is not apolitical, this is not neutral, that that assumption of neutrality is exactly how certain kinds of oppressions outside the literary world have worked.
In addition, I think literature is about storytelling, about competing stories. When students read different people’s stories in relation to official stories in the United States, they discover that people see history differently. Race comes very much to the sur-face in those kinds of comparisons.
Shawn Wong: I think a lot of students coming out of high school think multicultural literature—that buzzword—is a category of American literature. I try to remind them that multicultural literature is American literature. I sometimes focus on the literature of ethnic enclaves, whether it is Chinatown, or the Japanese camps, or William Kennedy’s Irish Albany New York, so that they can compare the social history of those ethnic enclaves in the U.S.
John Palka: Introducing race into the classroom becomes very challenging when dealing with the sciences—and that includes a very large fraction of students on this campus. Most of those students are very career-oriented. They want to learn the subject matter that is going to get them ahead, get them into medical school or graduate school or whatever the case may be. They view almost any discussion that isn’t on the straight and narrow as some kind of deflection from their main course—something that shouldn’t be happening in this class. So the ability to bring issues of race into the classroom is really rather different in science classes than it is in subjects which themselves are about these issues.
Wald: I would even go further and I’ll use literature as an example. If you’re teaching an African American literature class or an Asian American literature class, students expect to talk about race. But if you bring up race when you’re teaching Victorian literature, the students respond by saying things like, "You’re politicizing my classroom." My point is that the classroom is already politicized. What I’m trying to do is unveil that. I’m wondering how others of you have dealt with that.
Palka: My own response to that has been to collaborate with my wife in creating a class, "Concepts of Nature," that has historical and cross-cultural elements in it. That’s in the course description, so students can’t say that I didn’t warn them. It’s what I felt obligated to do, because I couldn’t find ways of bringing the issue in a very persuasive way into my bigger classes.
Butler: I start most of my classes by asking students why they are taking the course. Depending on what they say, we discuss whether or not that is what they will really get from this course.
Wald: But I suspect that most students assume that race will be discussed in the class.
Butler: Yes, even though race is one of many connected variables.
Wald: It interests me that when we as faculty walk into a classroom, we are positioned by race, by gender, by age. . . by all kinds of things. So the student already has some expectations. I’m white. So when I walk into a class in American literature, the question comes up, "Why are we talking about race in this class?" Even when the course description mentions that race is going to be part of the course, students don’t always read the course description.
A&S Perspectives: Do students’ responses vary greatly depending on whether the course has been advertised as exploring racial issues?
Wald: Absolutely, yes. If it is in the title of the course, a different group of students enrolls and the dynamic is a bit different in the class. But I think it is at least as important if not more important to bring it into the classes where students are not expecting it. It’s shaping their experience in ways that they don’t see. Some students are thrilled by the discovery and really fascinated and excited about talking about things they had felt but hadn’t really understood. Other students don’t want to open that door. They particularly didn’t take a class because it was going to be about those issues.
Pereyra: As a student, I have noticed that when a class is discussing issues of race, the first stage students go through is their sense of discomfort. They are disquieted on some level. Yet it is really an essential prerequisite before one can get to dialog. The teacher must impress upon students that discomfort is part of the process of learning. Overcoming one’s own narrowness and stereotypes will replace the disquietness with an appreciation and respect for the dignity of others. This is nothing monumental—it is natural.
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I would add that the students we will attract in the next few years will be a more enlightened group and will not be as tolerant of the rhetoric that they hear in the literature or from professors. They will be of a different caliber because they have been raised to be global citizens and are coming in with a very global perspective. They are broad minded and will be less tolerant of racism, classism, and sexism. |
Wald: Well, I certainly hope you’re right.
Pereyra: I think it is real.
Wong: Last year, when I chaired a task force on the proposed Cultural and Ethnic Diversity (CED) requirement, we conducted research to find out how many students had actually taken classes related to ethnicity, race, or gender in the absence of requirements. We chose 100 or so appropriate courses at random—there are actually many more. We found that 60 percent of the students had already taken one of these courses, which was very intriguing.
I think our point of view, based on those findings, was that the ethnic studies requirement would really be a temporary thing, just like mandatory ROTC requirement that the University once had. You could really see the handwriting on the wall, that it would get to a point where students would take these classes on their own in order to prepare themselves for the 21st century.
A&S Perspectives: How did the proposal for this CED requirement come about?
| Wong: The discussion of an ethnic studies requirement has been going on on this campus for at least seven years. It started because of a racist incident on campus. Students initiated the idea of the requirement; they thought that one five-credit class was the answer. It went through several stages and was defeated by the Faculty Senate three different times. It became clear to the CED Task Force that the long-range plan should be to transform the curriculum. |  |
Butler: I think that we as faculty have a real responsibility in the next 15 years or so to bring about that kind of thinking among our colleagues. I don’t worry about the students. The students ask for it. Even those students who are real hesitant about it and challenge it, really are challenging it a lot of times out of fear, because they are being told by faculty that they shouldn’t care about this.
Wald: That is exactly right. I feel that there is a backlash going on right now across the country, against bringing gender and race into the classroom.
Pereyra: And that’s expected as part of the transformation. That level of educator will become antiquated in the future and will not be able to attract truly dynamic students.
Wald: I don’t want to see people becoming "antiquated," just open to dialog. Unfortunately, I think the backlash is quite pervasive.
Pereyra: I hope not. Educators must challenge this fear—and it is fear. If not, professors will not be able to raise truly capable people.
This gets back to a point that Johnnella made. It is the professor who plays the key role—not the institution and not the politics. I believe it takes really courageous educators. I respect the qualified professors I’ve known on this campus who have taught in a way that is not only knowledgeable but is wise. Students need that. Students need confidence, and they receive this in large part from their professors. Professors who are aware and broadminded should continue evolving as humanistic mentors.
Wald: Yes, it does take sticking to it despite backlash. But can we address backlash in some very pragmatic way? Can we devise a strategy to address a backlash that I agree comes from fear and self-protection? I experience it broadly, both here and at Columbia University where I taught previously. And I’m experiencing it in the world at large.
Recently, I addressed a group of psychoanalysts about race and racism. They were concerned that "all this PC stuff is shutting down our conversation." And by PC stuff, they meant talk about race, gender, and identity politics. Their feeling about this, as a group of liberal intellectuals, was that that was what was shutting down the conversation. These are people who describe themselves as part of the early feminist movement and the civil rights movement.
Everybody thinks that everybody else is shutting down the conversation. How can we get people to talk more to each other?
Black: I agree with Priscilla. I’m not as sanguine about students as some folks around the table. I see a growing conservatism in some segments, and the global perspective that Elena was talking about in a very small segment, but mostly I see a lot of naivety
It is my impression that both white and minority students are desperately in need of information about the history of ethnic groups. The whole issue of multiculturalism for example, the notion of respecting and appreciating people’s culture, strikes me as a terribly naïve position. Of course we can respect people’s culture and differences if there is no cultural conflict. When we start talking about critical features of a group’s culture, and these features are in conflict with our own culture, then people are not tolerant anymore.
I say to my students often, and especially the white students, "I’m not going to wrestle with you and your attitudes. But I am going to pick the information for this course and I’m going to pick information that is critical. And I know that if you learn that material, you’ll be forced to confront your own attitudes."
The necessary information, the
necessary understanding, the necessary exposure strikes
me as not being there. There’s tremendous resistance
to a lot of things that I’m trying to teach. I see
this even with black students and I’m very concerned
because the extent to which they don’t identify with
their history is the extent to which they participate
in what I would consider to be self-destructive
activities. So I’m not so sanguine.
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Butler: I’m more of an optimist about students than Al. Because even when students come to us close-minded, as they sometimes do, I think faculty can make inroads there.My big worry, which is why I have spent the better part of my career dealing with curriculum change, is faculty. Because faculty have been the ones who are the most resistant. And if faculty are resistant, we may just as well go home and close up shop as far as talking about what we are teaching in terms of race and gender in our classrooms. |
A&S Perspectives: Has your work with curriculum change involved other faculty?
Butler: It’s all about involving faculty. A lot of the work has been done with funding from the Ford Foundation—one grant for the UW, and another along with Evergreen State College for statewide projects. The goal has been to work with faculty on incorporating material on people of color into the curriculum. Faculty, to come to that, really had to admit that they didn’t know a lot. We had intense workshops. Johnny [Palka] participated in one of those ten-day workshops.
Palka: That’s the genesis of the course that my wife and I are developing.
Butler: But there you need time for faculty to sit down and talk with one another, to debate things. Faculty need time to reflect, to recommit themselves, to think about pedagogy in the classroom, to think about the kinds of students they have in the classroom and those students’ needs. And I think that should be a priority of the University—to provide the time for faculty to do that on an ongoing basis.
Wong: What we’re talking about here with curriculum transformation is one professor at a time. About 70 professors on the UW campus have gone through it, so we only have 2,730 to go.
Black: We must include ourselves in this transformation as well. I have been most knowledgeable about the literature and sociology of race with regard to African Americans. Now a significant number of the students in my Race Relations class are Asian, and they expect that the instructor will have knowledge of their group, as do the Latino students. So all of us need to recognize that we need to broaden our perspective.
We’ve also got to learn to dialog. Blacks and whites in the classroom sitting next to each other—they are not having a real dialog. And if the instructor is black, white students are often afraid to even talk in the classroom. It is difficult to get students to really confront critical issues. When you raise issues like the feminist movement, for example, some students think we’re not supposed to be critical, we’re not supposed to ask questions. We must get this dialog going and we must increase the quality and character of the dialog.
Palka: It seems to me that there is a great deal of fear surrounding this issue, and it affects most of us, both faculty and students. For example, we have a program in Biology that aims to get minority students into research labs, which is oftentimes the stepping stone to a professional career. We’ve had a terrible time getting minority students to apply for this program. It’s very hard for minority students to put themselves in a situation where everybody else is white—that’s kind of an intimate situation where you’re the person who stands out. If you are not very confident of your intellectual skills, then you will fear being shot down.
Butler: On the other end, a lot of faculty and students who are white feel as though they lose something when we pay attention to issues of race. In fact, you don’t lose when you open your mind to other people and to an understanding of the structure and social construction of race. You grow in your own sense of your own complexity. We’ve sort of lost sight of that. Everyone is thinking, "What is my territory? What I am going to lose if I pay more attention to teaching more about other cultures in my class?" But it’s not a losing game.
Wong: The bottom line is that we want students to be able to ask "the question"—whatever the question is for each student.
When I was an undergraduate, it occurred to me one day to ask "the question." And the question was, are there any Asian American writers? As an English major, no professor ever mentioned one. I set about trying to find an answer and ended up naming the canon which eventually led me to teaching a subject that I taught myself outside the classroom.
So my aim in the classroom is simply for students some day to be struck with the question. The nature of the question is really up to them. Our role is simply to give them the skills to be able to answer the question—inside or outside the classroom.