About 1:00 p.m. this afternoon, I was walking to the library. As I crossed the street that hundreds of people cross each day, I noted a small group of students standing on the median of this busy street. They appeared to be talking and laughing. One young woman was wearing a campus t-shirt, as she could have been a tour guide or something. With her were two African-American men. I noted this because when I see African-American male students on campus, I look to see if I know them (the campus has such a small number of minority students, and I have had a very large percentage of them in my classes). I didn't recognize them. They continued their conversation; I crossed the street.
As I crossed the street, I looked back. A police cruiser had made a U-turn and come back to talk with the students who were standing on the median. He had his lights flashing. Suddenly, two more police cruisers appeared, also with lights flashing. Two officers separated the two men, each speaking with one of them. The third officer spoke with the woman in the campus t-shirt.
From my vantage point across the street, it looked as if the young woman was trying to explain (the situation?) to the police officers. The officers seemed to listen to her, but they did not seem to listen to the young men.
After about 10 minutes, the police officers drove away and the students crossed to the far side of the street.
It was a brief exercise in stereotypes and perceptions. (Early each semester, we spend one class session talking about stereotypes and why we believe them . . . as this helps students recognize the logical fallacies in their (and others') writing.
The students' responses:
- "The two guys were trying to rob the girl."
- "The girl called the cops."
- "The cops stopped because they saw two black men."
- "Maybe there was a robbery down the street and the cops thought it was those two guys."
- "Somebody broke into my car the other day; maybe it was them."
To be fair, I don't know why this incident happened. But I watched the situation from start to finish. I don't know if anyone called the police, but it didn't appear as such.
I think often about teaching students to write more effectively, and I am reminded every day that writing is not a skill that we learn just once. Writing is a skill that we have to learn over and over and over. We learn and relearn each time we sit down to write. Maybe challenging prejudices and preconceptions are the same. We cannot erase those stereotypes by just a quick exercise one time in one class. It takes learning these lessons over and over and over.
But even then, I don't know that learning how to overcome prejudices and biases is quite that simple. It's just not simple.
Wow, about your student responses. And this is really interesting, because I heard people commenting on this event a little bit earlier, before the police cars showed up, and their comments (I don't know if these were based on actual knowledge, or if it came from their assumptions) were that the two men were actually not students, that they were passing out flyers or promoting an event of some kind. Whatever it was seemed to have offended some people, and that generated the question of whether the median was campus property or public property. (One would think free speech would be protected on both, so I'm not quite sure why that was an issue, but both campus police and city police appeared at different stages as part of this discussion.)
No idea how factual that interpretation is, but it adds another dimension - fascinating how people create different narratives based on their fears and expectations!
Posted by: Pilgrim/Heretic | February 13, 2009 at 09:08 AM