Remember before the Summer of 2009, when we were still living in post-racial America?
Between the arrest of Harvard University’s Henry Louis Gates Jr. in July, and Joe Wilson’s “You Lie” comment during Obama’s health care speech last month, it’s tough to figure out how to have a productive conversation about race, whether in the news media or in a classroom.
Philip Rucker of The Washington Post illustrated this idea recently when traveling along the road that divides Wilson’s (mostly white) district and Democratic Rep. James E. Clyburn’s (mostly black) district. Rucker found that views on whether Wilson’s outburst had to do with Obama’s race were sharply divided.
I wanted to show my students at American University’s School of Communication how it was possible that people living on either side of one road could see recent events in radically different ways. In preparing to teach them, I asked Jennifer Woodard, an assistant professor at Middle Tennessee State University, what she thought.
“Joe Wilson’s outburst was more than just ‘incivility,’ and it has everything to do with race and gender privilege in this country,” said Woodard, who specializes in race, gender and media. “I think that Mr. Wilson’s emotions got away from him and he forgot himself and saw just a black man and not the president. And black men and women just are not high on the hierarchy of respect.”
In talking with Woodard, I was reminded of her teaching exercise, “How Do You Play When You Don’t Know the Rules?” I tried it in my own class earlier this year and got some interesting results.
Woodard’s “Rules” exercise involves splitting a class up into small groups, each with a fictional “culture” that determines their behavior. For example, one of the groups says only the word “Yes” and is highly sociable and hugs everyone. Another group says only the word “No” and avoids all physical and eye contact with outsiders.
Each group knows only about its own culture. Not surprisingly, when the groups interacted, mayhem ensued. The “Yes” students kept trying to shake hands with or hug the “No” students, which made the latter become hostile and the former feel rebuffed.
“This exercise evened the playing field,” Woodard said, by allowing students to experience cultural difference without personalizing it. In the exercise, students see “how being the marginalized culture makes you feel lost and how cultural misunderstanding is so easy.”
Could it be that the South Carolinians in Rucker’s story — and all Americans, to extend the metaphor of the unbridgeable dividing road — are trying to play the game of interpreting Wilson’s comment with totally different sets of rules?
My own students don’t agree on how to interpret Wilson’s outburst, and I don’t expect them to. But I want them to keep Woodard’s “Rules” exercise in mind as they go out and report. This is what one of my students, Geena Wardaki, a junio
r majoring in journalism, did recently when going to Anacostia, a historically black neighborhood in Southeast Washington, D.C.
Wardaki, whose father is an Afghan immigrant and whose mother is white, said that while riding the Metro train there, she had not thought about her own race. That changed, however, when she got outside. “I became more aware of my own race when I was clearly in the minority,” she said.
Once she looked below the surface, Wardaki said, she noticed that people in Anacostia were less hurried than in downtown D.C., said “hi” and stopped to talk to one another.
“I felt as if I had left the city and was in a small town,” she said. “People here seemed to belong to more of the ‘Yes’ group instead of the ‘No’ group, which I would generally classify people in D.C. as. Even though I had not left D.C., the cultural dynamics of the interaction had completely changed.”
Just as the Post‘s Rucker had found different worlds on either side of Columbia Road, Wardaki had only to cross the Anacostia River to find people playing by a different set of rules.
We, as journalists and teachers, should not just focus on when the rules, whoever’s they are, get broken in headline-grabbing ways.
To have productive conversations about race, we should be explaining to readers and students how the rules of different groups evolved. We must understand and contextualize such differences rather than just writing them off as by-products of a group’s skin color.
