It’s been exactly two years since then-Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama gave his speech on race at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia.
After all, who better to facilitate these discussions than a person whose polycultural heritage made him an inspiration to millions of people, particularly those who were grappling with their own identity issues.
Alas, Obama has had other things on his plate in the first year of his presidency, and it doesn’t look like we’ll have the conversation anytime soon. Unfortunately, the political climate in this country has helped to exacerbate racial and socioeconomic divides. We are now dealing with xenophobia and a constant fear of the Other, as exhibited by mediated discourses on terrorism, immigration and health care.
While we might not have the national conversation championed by Bill Clinton and advanced two years ago by Obama, we can have these discussions in the classroom. I believe as educators we have a moral imperative to discuss uncomfortable issues about race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, and other nuances of identity that come naturally in a heterogeneous society.
In my mass communication classes, I’ve shown students clips from a documentary called “Reel Bad Arabs,” which is produced by the Media Education Foundation. Some of my students were shocked that the films they grew up with—including Disney’s “Aladdin”—were replete with derogatory images of Middle Eastern peoples.
These clips were a starting point for discussion because we often view our own histories in a vacuum without seeing shared stories of marginalization. One of my students told me that her friends constantly made insulting comments about Chinese and Mexican people. She said she felt powerless to stop them from making such comments.
I tell my students that you often can’t change people’s minds by openly “calling them out” on making prejudiced comments. It usually has to be done more diplomatically as a way of slowly—but surely—making a person realize the magnitude of his/her comments. I don’t believe that there is a such a thing as innocent ignorance; it needs to be challenged on every level.
