Just completed two full days of training for the peer advisers; they will be helping our incoming students navigate college and the city in weekly workshops over the coming semester. I really like these students, and they seem to like each other, so I'm looking forward to an exciting semester working together. (Through this program I am exposed to a much wider range of students than in my classes; since there are no distribution requirements at our school, a professor's students are entirely self-selecting. The vast majority of our students wouldn't select a religious studies class if it were the last space open; through my work as coordinator of the first year program I meet many more!)
Part of today's training was devoted to a diversity workshop. The coordinator started by having students play a game about labeling and power. Signs with names of social categories were taped to people's backs, and they had to mill about trying to figure out who/what they were and interacting with others as who/what they were supposed to be. The categories ranged from professions (teacher, judge, politician, policeman) to racial and gender categories (Latino man, white woman, black man). Amazingly quickly, students figured out who/what they were supposed to be.
At this point they were asked to array themselves in a line from those who have power to those who don't. Predictably, one end was CEO, banker, politician, policeman, judge (some disagreement about how to arrange those last three); white woman did pretty well, too - better than teacher. At the other end (after some discussion) came black man, Latino man, black woman, and, last, Latina woman. (There's no right way to do this, but this choice confirmed why the appointment of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court means so much.)
The next task was to rearrange themselves the way things should be. They decidedly, quickly, that a line - any line - was a problem, and formed a circle. I was hearing John Lennon's "Imagine" in my mind and assumed it would stop there, but, interestingly, it did not. Everyone was uncomfortable at the simplifications of the game - a policeman could be black, a judge could be a Latina woman! This was what was supposed to happen; the simplifications had to be recognized as simplifications, useful for a game starting a discussion but harmful in society where too many interactions are governed by them. In response they didn't just throw all the gender and race labels into the center - what I would have done, but I can see that this could have seemed in its own way an erasing of difference. (The coordinator told me that some groups who play this game throw all the labels away, others form several circles...)
What they did instead, strangely, was start moving people around within the circle. Since the circle had been formed by looping the original line into a circle, the disempowered were still all on one side and the most powerful at the other, but the rearrangements weren't about mixing these up, distributing them across the circle, but about lining up an ideal chain of command or authority between different governing professions, so it was all on one side of the circle. The circle still clearly had a power orientation - the powerless weren't part of these utopian strivings. "A circle's a circle!" I wanted to interject.
What to make of the inability to imagine a real circle, a round table, to "imagine no possessions, ... no need for greed or hunger, a brotherhood of man, imagine all the people, sharing all the world"? Is it wisdom or cynicism, pragmatism or conservatism, Obama or post-Obama? Or perhaps they grew up with the Lion King's "circle of life" which glosses over the fact that it's still a circle of some eating others, in a song sung to the king of the animals. (South Park's "Circle of Poo" makes the point better.)
Or perhaps it's our inability to imagine true equality anymore. Had this been a class I was running, I would have raised the question about circles, asked them if they could imagine power as something which isn't hierarchical (some have it, others don't - indeed, some's having it seems to require others' not having it) but shared. Then some Marx, some Walden II, some Dewey. We'd have to talk about how societies make decisions about the general good and how these are implemented. And then a quick hop to liberation theology and pedagogy - for it may be only from the unity of the powerless than a unity with shared power is imaginable.
Of course, it is my class - we meet once a week for the whole semester - so I may well have a chance to return to this.
