Previously:
As a White professor teaching sociology and diversity at a Historically Black college (Baltimore City Community College), I regularly dealt with sensitive and potentially divisive issues.
This particular day, one of my Intro Soc students raised a question on the second day of class. Why was the first chapter of our Intro Soc book – Society: The Basics (by John Macionis) full of racial stereotypes? What ensued was a learning opportunity for all of us.
As mentioned earlier, Andrea wrote a letter on behalf of the class expressing their concerns about Chapter One. After about three weeks , Andrea got a response in the mail from Dr. Macionis. She informed the class the author wanted to fly to Baltimore and meet with us. We were encouraged that Dr. Macionis would want to take the time to discuss our concerns in person. To my way of thinking, John knew my students’ life experiences were not typical of the average college student, and he knew he needed to hear what they had to say. In depth.
John arrived shortly thereafter and a group of us met him at our library. After introductions, my students began to make themselves heard in a respectful but heartfelt manner. Listening intently, he apologized to those students who saw his discussion of the Central Park Five in Chapter One as one more example of racial stereotyping. He made it clear this wasn’t his intent at all.
To elaborate, throughout Chapter One of the first edition of Society: The Basics, Macionis discussed the Central Park Five in a way that assumed their guilt. Chapter One even poses the question, “Why do people (e.g., these boys) do the things they do?” Macionis then continued his analysis of The Central Park Five. Knowing these five boys (four African-Americans and one Latino) were teens, knowing they were economically disadvantaged minorities, and knowing they were boys are the kinds of things a sociologist might take into consideration to understand this case better.
On John’s website, he states he still does work the old-fashioned way – by himself. He continues, “all the content…is done “in house” so you (the reader) can have complete confidence in accuracy and quality.” Unfortunately, John and I didn’t do our homework years ago. We assumed these young men were in fact guilty because that was the judgement handed down by the criminal justice system in 1989. What’s more, their guilt was accepted at face value by the mainstream media. Even Donald Trump jumped on the bandwagon at the time and called for the executions of the Central Park Five in a full-page newspaper ad that appeared in The New York Times.
One of the exonerated men, Yusef Salaam, recently shared, “Had Donald Trump has his way…we would have been dead.”
–to be continued
Note: I recently watched Ava DuVernay’s excellent television miniseries (Netflix), “When They See Us,” which got me thinking about this class. DuVernay does an excellent job of humanizing the five boys (now men) who were referred to as The Central Park Five, and years later were exonerated. I highly recommend it.
Check out:
Dr. Bucher’s Web site on Diversity Consciousness: Opening Our Minds to People, Cultures, and Opportunities
Buy Dr. Bucher’s book – Diversity Consciousness
Dr. Bucher’s Facebook page on Diversity Consciousness Links to more from Dr. Bucher