O T T O G YOU’VE Y L L U F E R A C E B T H G U A T BY ROBIN HICKS
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rofessor of education and alumni award winner Tiffany Wheeler ’90 remembers the moment she became aware of race. As a fourth grader away at camp for the first time, she found herself in the novel position of being the only Black child among her peers. All was well until a hurtful question posed by another camper made her jarringly aware of his perception of their difference — a negative difference. It was something she’d never felt before growing up in what she describes as the fairly diverse and integrated community of Albion, Michigan. “The summer camp incident made me realize that race matters, even to elementary-aged students,” Wheeler explains. It would become the first of a lifetime of exchanges that undermine and diminish.
Writing about her journey as an educator, Wheeler depicts the steady presence of prejudice and how it presses against progress, even for a high-achieving student and a seasoned professor. She helps to clarify how a society or community that is defined by whiteness, often under the guise of being neutral or the norm, remains dominated by the unspoken values of white supremacy. The macroaggressions and microaggressions (to use 21st century parlance) reiterate values passed from generation to generation. For fear and prejudice to prevail — or to be extinguished — as the lyrics of Rogers and Hammerstein remind us (controversial in 1949), “You’ve got to be carefully taught.”
the magazine of TRANSYLVANIA UNIVERSITY
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