Learning Difference

This evening I led a discussion following a showing of the film of Anna Deveare Smith’s Twilight at one of the undergraduate housing complexes here at UC Davis.

My co-leader bailed; she had a calculus test. (I’d rather be almost anywhere than in a calculus test, so I let her go happily.) But I don’t interact with undergrads very often and was a little nervous. The group ended up being about 35, about 30 more than I was expecting.

After the film it emerged that two of the students had been living in LA at the time of the Rodney King riots; the father of one of them was a policeman. She was a little shaken by the portrayal of the cops in the film (well, it’s true they don’t come off so well). It was good for the other students (and me) to hear her perspective; her father spent over two weeks with almost no sleep.

We then did an exercise where each person wrote down a time they had felt out of place—followed by something they might say to the people that made them feel this way. The cards were shuffled and everyone read out a different person’s card.

Here are three at random:

“When I moved to a new school, I felt out of place. I would have told the other students to give me a chance to show what kind of person I was, rather than judging me.”

“I felt out of place around my boyfriend’s hispanic and black friends. I grew up in a wealth white/asian community, while my boyfriend grew up in a poorer diverse community. Although I never felt any classism or racism toward his friends, I never felt totally accepted as a person. I was always seen as a “rich white girl.”

“After the elections, I was in a study group with some of my long-time study friends. They all happened to be Republican and chided me about my Democratic beliefs and my opinion of the outcome of the election. Though at the time I felt uneasy and out of place, I know that if the elections had turned out the opposite way, our feelings toward each other would have been reversed.”

I learned a lot this evening. These students have much to teach me. We need to keep talking to each other, all of us…