"Walking on eggshells, walking on water": generating student writings toward an understanding of Criminal Justice and race in America.

I teach in the Writing Studies Program at Roger Williams University in Bristol, Rhode Island. A private university founded in 1956, it is often described as "up and coming." The student body is about 95% white, mostly from New England, mostly middle-class. The College of Arts and Sciences is the biggest division on the 5,000 student campus, but there are growing schools of Architecture, Business, Criminal Justice, Education, and Engineering. And it has the only law school in the state of Rhode Island. This past spring semester, 2004, the College Republican group on campus awarded what it apparently hopes will be the first annual "Whites Only" scholarship at an event which garnered national media coverage and which has, at least for now, galvanized--sporadically electrifying--the campus by forcing many students, faculty, and administrators to take up, willingly or not, long-neglected questions and long-denied problems. The flyers advertising the keynote speaker and the award ceremony read "Diversity is a Disease: Liberty is the Cure" and "Equality is for Losers: Liberty is for Winners." To celebrate Black History Month, the College Republicans' "conservative monthly periodical" featured headlines like "How the Civil Rights Movement Destroyed the Black Community" and "Racist Dems"; photographs of Al Sharpton, captioned "Bigot"; and of Jesse Jackson, captioned "Man Whore." On page seven of the February 2004 issue is a full-page application for the "First Annual Roger Williams University College Republican White Scholarship Award," including the directions for the essay competition: "In 100 words or less, write why you are proud of your white heritage and explain what being white means to you.... Must attach recent picture to confirm whiteness. Evidence of bleaching will disqualify applicants." (Hawk's Right Eye, February 2004).

What concerns me today is not so much what these flyers, newspapers, and contests said but the context into which they have been dropped, or the cultures from which they grew. My dual metaphor is necessary even as it might be self-contradictory. The flyers reading "Diversity is a Disease" are, of course, problematic on their own terms, but they become even more problematic when they are the only flyers on the wall: the words' power amplify and reverberate as if they were shouted into an empty chamber, or dropped plink, plink, plink into an empty bucket. When I see the problem this way--as a problem of surrounding silence--the question I ask is: How can we change school culture to encourage more liberal and progressive voices to speak out, since many young traditional liberals, like Martin Luther King's white moderates, have not yet seen "that human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability [but] comes through tireless efforts and persistent work" (King 296)? But when I see the problem another way--not as silence, but as a surge of volume that spikes from a low-frequency, usually-unheard-but-present-nonetheless murmur--the question I ask is this: What is the nature of the school culture that allows these particular sentiments, and not others, to flourish? Is the culture too sterile or is the culture too fertile? Either way, what can teachers do?

I designed and offered the course I am about to describe in 2002, two years before the offering of the whites only scholarship. Harvard law professor and author Randall Kennedy had come to campus to talk about his then-new book Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word; and the College Republicans had sponsored (with yet another series of provocative flyers) the first of two appearances by fight-wing, politico-celeb Ann Coulter. These campus events made me, who had arrived as a fulltime faculty member in the fall of 2001, see that much of the student body here was unaccustomed to discussing race or gender: It was as though neither feminism nor discussion of "the color line" had ever occurred here. Why was there a backlash against feminism where very little had even existed, and how could I help students who were nearly viscerally uncomfortable talking about racial difference and racism? As a new professor in the growing Writing Studies Program, I chose to offer two sections of a second-semester Critical Writing course: One section was titled "Women in America: Writing toward Public Voice," and the other, "Confronting Crime: Writing Toward an Understanding of Criminal Justice and Race in America." I devoted one section to Criminal Justice majors, even though I am not an expert in the field myself because it seemed to me that young police-officers-in-training are a vital contact point for bringing about change in one of America's most powerful and persuasive institutions with a direct impact on how racial difference is perceived and experienced on a daily basis. That young people interested in careers in law enforcement might be somewhat more conservative in their ideas about race than others made them my most valuable point of contact. That the course, as a writing course, is required as part of my university's core curriculum assured me of a classroom that would be at least diverse by major, and, I hoped, would help increase the numbers and interests of students engaged in understanding the continuing role race plays in each American's life. So even before the events of this spring, I wanted to help change the campus climate, to make an intellectually viable space that would encourage and sustain both mainstream students and students of color to matriculate and graduate together. What follows is a description and discussion of my course, and especially of the student voices in it. I offer the design of the course even as I wonder and worry about its effectiveness in changing campus culture, an assessment whose measure I have not yet been able to fully Imagine, much less realize.

That students interested in criminal justice might be more committed to a position that values material rather than intellectual solutions to problems motivates my first three course objectives: Generate commitment to the world of ideas; think critically about social structures and the role of the individual in shaping or resisting those structures; recognize the centrality of writing as a means of developing understanding and taking a position. I assign students a single, fairly typical criminal justice textbook entitled The Color of Justice: Race, Ethnicity and Crime in America. Its chapter titles determine the topics available for students: "Minorities and the Death Penalty"; "Juvenile Justice and Race"; "Minority Policing," etc. Students, in groups of three or four, choose one topic to work on throughout the entire semester, creating the substantive link between each written assignment that is necessary in creating students' confidence in themselves as critical thinkers able to participate in public debate. As one young woman student, Megan Bradley, wrote in her course evaluation in answer to my question about constancy of topic: "I feel like through all the papers and the research, I am truly close to being an expert on juvenile justice without actually being one. This is really helpful to me because I am going into a field where I need this information and want to implement the programs I talk about in my final paper, so I think this was a great class and the concept behind it really influenced me and I think I will take it with me on my way to hopefully changing a few things in the system." And Mike Karwin, a young male student wrote: "My topic was perfect. I do not see how this class could have been any better for me in developing my mind and becoming less ignorant. I think that if I was forced to choose different topics for my papers I would still blindly support the death penalty and I would be riding out this class with a C+ maybe a B-because my papers would be lacking the passion I put into my ideas." In this way, my students are empowered, made confident, and valued, even as they have learned, as another student, Andrew Combra, put it: "In America, there are greater social consequences of being black than there are of being white."

One of the most important lessons I have learned as a teacher is to give substantial time to whatever it is I say that I value. The syllabus makes clear how we spend our time: "The process for each assignment is the same: we will review the assignment together as a class; we will read and discuss at least one common text as a model; your small group will consider how the rhetorical strategies can be applied to your own topic; you will write an initial draft that will then be peer reviewed by the members of your group at least twice; you will turn in a packet that includes the final "product" and all the supporting documents (sources, notes, drafts, peer reviews, self-assessments)." In class I value drafting and peer review by spending two full workshopping days on each assignment: Students learn this way that I take peer review seriously, which really means that they learn that I value their responses to each other seriously. In my comments on their papers, I usually include at least one quotation from either a peer review sheet or their self-assessment, so they know that I check and value their words. At the same time, though, I spend most of my time at work in conference with individual students, which means they learn that I value their writing, their thinking, and them. While obviously one-on-one conferences are always important, I have found them to be especially so when dealing with students' ideas about race. For example, I often need to force a student to articulate a negative stereotype, piece by piece, in all its ugly glory: "What do you mean, exactly, when you say, with air quotes, 'Standard Black Man'"? And the answers come: "Criminal," "drug dealer," "unemployed," "young," "violent," "absent father," "angry," "rhythmic." This work is better initiated in a one-on-one conference for most students, although both the content and the willingness to speak it in order to change it must--and does--eventually become public. Conferences with me often become a kind of verbal prewriting that is then developed and shaped in subsequent drafts and assignments. While these conferences are time-consuming, every student wrote that these conferences were the most important part of the course in helping with their writing and thinking.

Still, the conferences serve the writing. It is, however, the sequencing of the assignments that I think makes this course valuable and adaptable no matter the nominal discipline. The logic for the assignments is simple: Focusing on just one topic, students must write a series of papers, cumulative in nature, each building on the insights and knowledge of the preceding ones so that by the end of the semester, each student is able to design and execute her or his own final project, including its audience, purpose, form, and style. If I say it once, I say it a thousand times: "There's supposed to be an organic relationship between one assignment and the next." In response to my evaluation question about whether the sequencing was helpful, Bradley wrote, "The sequencing of the papers makes absolute sense to me. I feel like each paper got a little harder and harder as we went, and I think that is how it should be. It also helped develop my confidence as a writer because it started simple and I actually wasn't getting great grades, then as it got more difficult, my grades went up, which made me feel really good about myself. I would not change the order at all." Kandi Grace said, "The sequence of assignments ... was excellent ... when it came time to do the final I was already really comfortable with my topic and knew what I wanted to do. I did not have to go out and gather any more major information to be able to even start the paper. Overall it was a better way of doing things. It allowed us to build knowledge about the same topic ... and use different styles of writing to express our views and our newly gained knowledge."

Let me now briefly describe each assignment, explain the relationship between each, and offer a sample of student responses. The first formal assignment is a media analysis. (I have already asked students to summarize the textbook's introduction and the chapter from which they've taken their topic). It is first because media is what most students are familiar with; it is based on a close reading and so does not require immediate research; and, of course, media is where many of our white students' ideas about African Americans, Latinos, and whites themselves come from and so needs to be troubled for them. I emphasize the way that the media represents people; it represents, in some ways, a demographic: People on death row, police officers, drug dealers, juveniles, attorneys, female prisoners. To help students understand the importance of media analysis, the assignment is framed by Douglas Kellner's lead article in Gender, Race, and Class in Media: "Media stories provide the symbols, myths and resources through which we insert ourselves into this culture. Media spectacles demonstrate who has power and who is powerless, who is allowed to exercise force and who is not. They dramatize the power of the forces that be and show the powerless that they must stay in their places or be destroyed.... Learning how to read, criticize, and resist media manipulation can help empower oneself in relation to dominant media and culture. It can enhance individual sovereignty vis-a-vis media culture and give individuals more power over their cultural environment" (5-6). The assignment calls for a three or four page analysis of a movie, television show, or newspaper article in terms of not only the effectiveness of the support and language used but also the claim itself in terms of its most theoretical and quotidian implications relative to the topic chosen. Since topics and groups were both still fluid this early in the semester, let me describe the second assignment and then provide examples of each and how they related to each other.

The second project is called "Interpreting Statistics to Make a Claim" and requires that students investigate the numerical "reality" behind the media-imaged demographic they have already analyzed. Again, the assignment is framed by an extended quotation of method and purpose by Joel Best: "Bad statistics simplify reality in a way that distorts our understanding, while good statistics minimize that distortion. No statistic is perfect, but some are less imperfect than others. Good or bad, every statistic reflects its creator's choices" (161). The assignment calls for students to write a three or four page essay in order to "analyze and interpret a set of statistics in order to make or refute a claim relevant to your chosen topic." The first step is to pose a question, to think of a "lesson" that can be taught through numbers. To help them evaluate sources, I encourage them to find mission statements or other reports and to analyze that language as they have just done in their media essay. Students have offered the following insights: Andrew Combra wrote: "While [the film version of Jim Carroll's] The Basketball Diaries, for example, creates an image of poverty and crime engulfing a young white boy, statistics clearly show that, in reality, whites are significantly less likely to be surveilled, arrested and incarcerated than young black men, even though rates of drug use for white high school students are substantially higher than the use-rate for blacks." Another student wrote: "While Bad Boys (I) glamorizes police brutality in ways that 'empower' the black officers, statistics indicate that police brutality and deception is a serious and racially-inflected problem that is neither glamorous nor funny. Or, in the case of Providence, Rhode Island, the police department simply refused to keep statistics on traffic stops." The second project, then, recasts the first assignment and the students' response to it. Because there is often a discrepancy between the image of the problem and the "reality" of the problem, students are left asking "why" their media sells the images it does. The dissonance sets in here. The shifting of student perspective begins.

The third project is framed not by an academic voice but by Langston Hughes's poem "In Explanation of Our Times":

   The folks with no titles in front of
      their names
   All over the world
   Are raring up and talking back
   To the folks called Mister.
   You say you thought everybody
      was called Mister?
   No son, not everybody....

I remind students that "So far, you have looked at your topic from a broad cultural perspective and from a more 'objective' perspective. While statistics, maps, and charts can provide 'objective' overviews of an issue, personal experiences from those involved tell the 'inside' story in a more intimate way that makes clear the daily, individualized implications of social conflict. Your third assignment asks you to gather and analyze personal experiences--your own or someone else's.

Write a personal narrative in which you demonstrate your understanding of how grand social forces and daily individual lives intersect." For many students, this becomes a pivotal assignment, one that enables them to trace the relationship between an idea and its lived expression. Having exposed themselves as being caught between projected images and quantified realities, the personal voice paper coming at this time affords students the opportunity to assess their own privilege and to recognize the validity of experiences they have not lived. Megan Young, a young woman who had been working on media images of racial difference, surprised herself by making a wonderful cutout of two heads, one representing herself, the other, a young black woman who had unexpectedly appeared on the soccer field one day. Each head had four thoughts springing forward in descending order of importance: For my student, the first image was a manicured finger locking a car door, representing, to her, racial stereotyping and discrimination. This was how she chose to represent the sad fact that, for her, the first image that came to mind was "Oh no, a black girl, what do I do?" (She told me she had then embarrassed herself by making a comment about the whites going to this side and the coloreds to the other--referring, of course, to the jerseys worn at practice). The primary image on the mind of the young black visitor was, simply, a soccer ball. For this young woman, the ability to express her own racism and her own privilege--and discomfort--was pivotal. To do so in pictures rather than words was both embarrassing and empowering for her.

Mike Karwin describes this assignment as "a little stop in the middle [of research] to help me reflect." Karwin found himself, not one of Hughes's "folks," not even a "Mister," but rather the "son" whose eyes and ears needed to be opened. Creating a personal narrative entitled "My Mind," he compared his mind to a nation engaged in civil war: "The land known as My Mind had been very peaceful since its creation twenty years ago, and its people were very happy with their lives. The land had many rich neighbors who helped make My Mind a rich nation as well ... the people of My Mind had set ideas about the world. Being surrounded by neighbors of the same caliber, the people had acquired identical beliefs.... But this year would have some unexpected events. War would break out in the nation of My Mind. His would be a war of values, a war that would surprise many. As mentioned before, peace had formerly flourished in My Mind, fueled by an agreement between citizens on a common set of beliefs. Unfortunately, the ruler began to see that racial awareness was starting to brew in his people's minds. If racial awareness continued to develop in My Mind, then this nation would lose the respect of many allied nations. This would be the catalyst for war. Now My Mind is in an age of reform. Many of My Mind's allies are surprised by this sudden change because they had always believed that this nation was very conservative in nature." Karwin labels his own (older) thinking as "racist" and notes that he realized "other nations were not as fortunate as his," and, acknowledging that the reform is not yet complete, he nonetheless makes special note that "some changes already established include not judging a man based on appearance alone ... and learning all the facts to a case before passing an opinion."

By the time these students return to an academic form, voice, and audience for their fourth project, they are prepared to do so in a focused and purposeful way. This assignment I frame with a nod to the Hegelian Dialectic: The first step is a fully annotated bibliography of ten sources from which three are chosen for dialectic synthesis. According to John McTaggart, "On examining the two contrary predicates further, they are seen to be capable of reconciliation in a higher category, which combines the content of both of them, not merely placed side by side, but absorbed into a wider idea, as moments or aspects of which they can exist without contradiction." Because students have already written from multiple perspectives, they are more adept at charting other scholars' disagreements and omissions. Their confidence, built through close reading, evaluative analysis, and personal voice connected to their single topic, now helps them manage significant amounts of academic material. But they must synthesize--they must be able to see beyond even the scholars they cite, and it is often the personal voice or reflective essay whose conscience echoes here. Student Mike Karwin's reflective essay states, "The nation ["My Mind"] still supports the death penalty, only now it feels that a few minor alterations in the current system will allow it to become more functional and fair," but his fourth essay changes that: "As I wrote the final essays, it dawned on me that my opinions have completed the full 180 turn from supporting the death penalty, to opposing it."

I provide no guidelines for the final project. Each student defines her or his own purpose, audience, and form. I received a full-length play; letters to Congress, prosecutors, district attorneys, and police chiefs; pamphlets encouraging active fatherhood; policies written about after-school programs, and straight-up academic essays, the best of which ends this way: "In America, clearly African Americans are walking on eggshells while whites walk on water" (Combra). But could even these final projects help me assess in a quantifiable way that I have successfully changed even one iota of campus culture as it pertains to thinking about race? Can I promise that the changes in attitude that might have happened will last and grow? Can I claim to have reached every student in my room? Probably not. I can only rely on my students themselves, and their voices tell me that they have "discovered a lot." As for long-term assessment of how to change campus culture--a change that is more urgently needed than ever if this institution is to attract and retain talented students from all backgrounds--I will have to wait until at least the spring of 2005, when the College Republicans will post a new series of flyers for their annual spring brouhaha. We'll see if their flyers hang alone, or if, perhaps, they might be lost on a wall papered with writing from students who have seen their places and raised their voices.

WORKS CITED

Bad Boys I. Dir. Michael Bay. Perf. Martin Lawrence, Will Smith. Don Simpson/Jerry Bruckheimer Films, 1995.

Basketball Diaries. Dir. Scott Kalvert. Perf. Leonardo DiCaprio. Island Pictures, 1995.

Best, Joel. Damned Lies and Statistics: Untangling Numbers from Media, Politicians, and Activists. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.

Hughes, Langston. "In Explanation of Our Times." The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. Ed. Arnold Rampersad. New York: Vintage Classics, 1955.449-450.

Kellner, Douglas. "Cultural Studies, Multiculturalism and Media Culture." Gender, Race and Class in Media. Eds.

Gall Dines and Jean M. Humez. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Productions, 1995.5-17.

King, Martin Luther. "Letter from Birminham City Jail." A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. Ed. James Melvin Washington. New York: Harper Collins, 1986. 289-302.

McTaggart, John Ellis. Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic. www.hegel.net

Walker, Samuel, Cassia Spohn, and Miriam De Lone. The Color of Justice: Race, Ethnicity, and Crime in America. Belmont, CA. Thomson Wadsworth, 2004.