For the first evening of Middlesex’s annual Diversity Symposium on January 29, the School welcomed filmmaker and media educator Jean Kilbourne, who spoke about how harmful messages and stereotypes in ads can negatively influence people’s perceptions of themselves and others.
Turning to another facet of identity, the school community reconvened on January 30 to hear Dr. Michael Baran, a cultural anthropologist who has researched race and diversity issues for the past 20 years in several countries and has taught at Harvard and the University of Michigan. In preparation for Dr. Baran’s visit, students and faculty played the interactive iPhone application that he created called (Don’t) Guess My Race, which helps demonstrate that racial identity cannot be easily discerned.
“Is race real?” Dr. Baran asked at the outset. After reviewing the course of human evolution and how environmental conditions affect physiological changes, he concluded, “There is nothing biological that corresponds to race today. But if race isn’t real, why do we think it is?”
The ideology of race being biological can be traced in the U.S. to the country’s early involvement in the slave trade and to manipulated, “scientific” studies that categorized people by appearance and potential. Studies of children have since found that race is a learned concept that they develop from social cues and language. The net result, he said, is that “the same, old ideology gets reproduced from one generation to the next.”
Race may not be real but the consequences – overt racism and unconscious bias – definitely are, Dr. Baran confirmed. Researching how race is perceived and described in Brazil (sometimes called a “racial democracy”) and then in America, he found that race is a complicated matter everywhere. Whenever people were asked to identify their own race, ethnicity, nationality, and religion could all be part of their answer – not just skin color. The idea for (Don’t) Guess My Race grew out of these results as a way to help others realize that “you can’t look at someone and know who they are,” Dr. Baran stated.
Going forward, he encouraged everyone to have open conversations about race. To that end, the School divided into small discussion groups and then returned for a final Q&A session. While Dr. Baran allowed that the world will likely never be a place where differences are completely ignored, he still has great optimism that it can become a more inclusive, safe place where race does not negatively impact a person’s future.