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Buffalo, NY - The choices never come as a surprise: the young Asian woman is viewed as
a bright college student; the guy wearing his cap backward always lands in the police lineup; the overweight women are expected to play bingo and to bowl. “It’s interesting how, with just a few cues, we make up a
whole story about someone," Valerie Walawender told high school students at her recent "Faces in the Crowd" workshop. "And it's phenomenal how consistent the stories are.”
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After running 100 diversity workshops, Walawender can easily predict the names and the stories that people will create for the masks and the
"pop-up" people she uses as props. So, it was no surprise when Steve Olender, 14, held the mask of a dark-skinned man to his face and told Brandon Schultz, 16, a few things about his personal. "My
name is Ali, but my friends call me Al." Olender said to Schultz, also a City of Tonawanda High School student attending a conference on Alternatives to Violence at the Buffalo Convention Center. “I came from
Saudi Arabia, but now I live in Newark and I drive a taxi”.
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Olender was among 20 teenagers and teachers at the workshop who responded stereotypically, following Walawender’s instructions to say the first thing that
came to mind to describe the person whose life they were asked to construct.
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Her workshops are one version of Diversity Training 101, an issue that’s much on the minds of business leaders, policy makers, educators, people in the arts.
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- Locally, Adelphia Communications launched a diversity focused drive to recruit workers for a job force expected to reach 1,500.
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- The New York State Department of Minorities was recently renamed the Department of Emerging Majorities.
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- Television networks employ people to oversee diversity in programming (though critics say they do it poorly).
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While the United States, officially, prides itself on welcoming people of all nations, citizens can become contentious when unfamiliar races and faces
confront one another. Another group attempting to bring the issue to the fore is Child & Family Services Theater for Change, which presented incisive skits to the Network in Aging that included the following
interchanges:
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- ”I don’t want any (offensive term) taking care of me," when an aide arrives to care for an elderly person.
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- .”Don't you think he'd be happier at temple?” a member of a senior citizen center referring to a new arrival who is Jewish.
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- “I have to talk to the housing director about putting that Korean couple next door to us. I don't know what it is that
they cook, “ a woman to her husband.
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No matter how offensive or unpleasant the dialog sounds, it's grounded in reality, said Darleen Pickering
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Hummert, director of Theater for Change, who visited senior centers and residences to research material. From the nodding heads and tears shed
during the performance, it appears that Hunmert has hit a nerve; "It's stuff you see all the time, but people are afraid to mention it,” said LaVerne Minns, marketing director at Bassett Manor, a senior
residence. In fact, Lana D. Benatovich calls it the Assumption Game.
“We think we know people just by looking at them,” said the regional executive director of the National Conference for Community and Justice. To prove her point she asked Network in Aging attendees to guess a strangers marital status, where they were born, whether they are bilingual, if they have a chronic illness and whether an elderly person lives with them. When it became obvious that no one can do this successfully, she drove home her point: “We have no idea what's going on with anybody else unless we go through the process of learning. We have to give people an opportunity to speak for themselves.”
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Walawender, whose Faces in the Crowd program was recently endorsed by the M.K. Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence in Memphis, Tenn., contends that quick
judgments -- those first impressions -- are universal and, probably, unavoidable. And sometimes based on insignificant cues.
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A photograph of a woman with a slightly upturned nose, for example, causes people to label her as having an "attitude," said Walawender, who has
given her program at Rich Products, the Beverly Hills Holiday Inn, and the Simon Wiesenthal Center/Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, as well as to dozens of non-profit groups and social agencies.
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As students from Dunkirk, Cleveland Hill and Sweet Home high schools gathered into a circle, she invited them to discuss what
they learned by taking on another life for a few minutes while peering through their masks. "I felt upset at times," Said Brandon Moser, 17, a member of the Tonawanda High School Ahimsa Club, which is dedicated to non-violence. "Sometimes our judgments are mean because we don’t have enough information. I always thought that if you just looked at somebody you got their story, but this made me realize that you don’t.” “It made me think of how you judge; people by: their clothes, whether they hang with certain people or listen to certain music.”
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Though Walawender, a former art teacher who now lives in Forestville, tries to be acutely aware of not making judgments, she tells a story to show how easily it happens. When she was an exhibit designer at the Miami MetroZoo, her supervisor was a. black man with "wild dreadlocks”. “I always admired him," said Walawender, who admits that she imagined that he'd brought himself up from the Miami slums. But then, one Christmas, she was invited to a party at his mothers house. “Somewhere along the winding driveway: With the palm trees, somewhere in the house with the white furniture and the white carpeting and the original Salvador Dalis, somewhere along the way,” she said, “I realized that he did not grow up the way I imagined.”
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"We don't have that much conscious control of our thoughts, what we can do is look at the validly of what we're doing," said Walawender, who told
students that it’s possible to reorient their attitude by using the Three Vs: Verbalize (remind yourself of the story that you've told yourself); Visualize (think of the person interacting with different
groups) and Visit (get to know the person).
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Walawender believes that people can, at the very least, become aware that they are judging each other based on stereotypes rather than on knowledge, she said.
"People want to be right and they want to be accurate," she said. "So, if they are confronted with inconsistencies, they are inclined to reexamine their thinking.”
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And those overweight woman mentioned at the beginning of this story? In real life, one is a college professor, another is a politician. It's unknown whether
they like to play bingo or to bowl.
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