Cultural Stereotyping
Because I want my students to recognize the complex, under-the-surface power relations that exist in any institution, and to aid them in reading, responding to, and when they choose so, resisting the various forms of power and privilege that may be imbedded in taken-for-granted assumptions presented through institutional / societal narratives, I make a point of presenting alternative narratives and stories—or at least, complicating the implicit stories that we may initially tell ourselves about the others in our world.
My objective with this activity is to help make students aware of their own cultural assumptions (especially around where people come from), and how this can lead to stereotyping others, and/or making assumptions that are simply not true. Originating in PCW but now also folded into my WRA:101, this exercise entails a series of in-class writing/discussions based around their responses to the following questions:
- “I see X (on the MSU campus) is from _____, so I think X is _____.”
- Then I follow up with: “People see that I am from _______, so they think I am ________.”
The responses are done as writing, by each student privately, but I do invite them to share out in-class. Sometimes the sharing ends up being things like: “I see that X is from the UP, so I think they like snow.” Sometimes it can be more overtly stereotypical, as in: “People see I’m from China, so they think I am rich.”
From here I ask @ where our ideas about other people come from (e.g., social media, movies and TV, parents, etc.), and especially, how we might change these assumptions (e.g., by getting to know people more deeply). Because the other thing that quickly emerges, as we name and track the ideas we have about others, and the ideas that others have about us, that so many are false (e.g., that all Chinese students are good at Math).
This can help set the tone for a variety of short-term and longer-term assignments, like interviewing one another as a source of information for a paper, and/or toward the project where students are asked to examine aspects of MSU culture, or even, of their major. Within the context of the disciplinary/professional literacies project, for example, students might unpack assumptions they make about who is in certain disciplines: computer engineering, jazz music, nursing, and the like. This can be put in relationship to actual statistics they look up (for instance, from the Bureau of Labor Statistics) as well as discussions that focus on intersectionality (Kimberle Crenshaw’s video) and affinity bias in the workplace. Underlying such exercises is the premise that a diverse workplace fosters creativity and innovation: something that students might further examine through such articles as “The Critical Role of Workplace Inclusion” (in my WRA:101, we read / skim / talk through at least one scholarly article as a class, so that students can thus recognize the strategies by which the writers of such pieces convey their ideas; an article like this then does the ‘double work’ of both supporting rhetorical analysis of a scholarly article, and connecting to course discussions / activities on diversity and inclusion).
This is not to say that the ensuing discussions may not be difficult; indeed, there may be moments when issues related to race and nationality can collide in uncomfortable ways. My classic example is the moment when my Dominican Republican student asked the question: “But aren’t there any dark people in China?” after a young Chinese woman talked about using her parasol (her “cultural object”) to preserve her “white” skin. Though delicate, the conversation that followed deepened the students’ understanding of racism in the U.S., the Dominican Republic, and especially, in China, where the prevailing (and lighter-skinned) Han families are privileged over the ethnic (and darker-skinned) peoples in the north and south. Such “glocal” discussions intersect not only with matters of race, but class privilege and politics; for example, the relative wealth of some, though not all, of our Chinese students; and the tenuous relationship of Taiwan to the rest of China. Hearing others’ stories can be a powerful impetus for change. In his final course reflection, in fact, one (Chinese) student wrote of the tensions between what he had heard for 20 years growing up in his home country, and what was now in embodied in front of him, in the stories and multimodal, cultural examples of the Taiwanese student (“Who do I believe now?” this Chinese student asked).
Reflective questions:
- What questions does the above example raise for you, on how cultural stereotyping might be brought up in your class?
- What are some other ways you might do this?
- What steps might you take, to help ensure your very attempts to open up discussions on cultural (and other) stereotyping doesn’t end up reinforcing the very assumptions you mean for you and your students to interrogate?