In her journalism classes on multimedia, first at Emerson College and now at Boston University, Michelle Johnson presents a lesson on stereotyped images. She displays a 2005 picture from the News & Record in Greensboro, N.C., a summer feature photo of a young Black girl gorging on a slice of watermelon. Then she asks her students, nearly all of them White, “Would you run this picture?”
The initial reaction has grown predictable. “The bigger group has no clue. They don’t know what the problem is,” says Johnson, a visiting associate professor of journalism who arrived at Boston University last fall.
To provide context, Johnson shows historical images of caricatured Black people feasting on watermelon.
“Most, but not all of them, get it,” says Johnson, who’s African-American. “Every time I do this, a couple of them say, ‘It’s history. I don’t see what the problem is. It’s a picture of a little girl eating watermelon.’”
Without using the phrase, those students are characterizing the country as “post-racial,” a description the conservative editorial page of The Wall Street Journal has popularized since the election of President Barack Obama. They are saying the racism attached to certain images is, literally, history.
The neat division they imagine between the past and present, though, fades in another part of Johnson’s classroom exercise. She asks students to list any stereotypes about African-Americans they know. The classroom’s white board fills up. “They throw out every stereotype you know about Black people,” she says.
Dr. Christopher J. Metzler, an associate dean of Georgetown University’s School of Continuing Studies who gives speeches on campuses around the country, worries it is more than a minority of White college students that believe race no longer matters.
