Social Reflection With a Slant

WITH less than a month to go before our second annual A.W.A.R.E. week, I can hardly believe how blind the Harvard community is to its own ethnocentrism. Most of us are aware of the evils of racism and avoid at all costs the appearance of prejudice against those of different color, religion, or sexual orientation. But we are blind to the more subtle and pervasive issue of ethnocentrism in the classroom.

To find an example of this blind spot, we need look no further than the most popular course on campus this semester, Gen. Ed. 105, "Literature of Social Reflection." Taught by renowned psychiatrist Robert Coles '50, the course offers a reading list of predominantly white male authors, like James Agee, George Orwell, and Raymond Carver, although it does include a smattering of women and minorities, such as Ralph Ellison, Tillie Olsen, and Flannery O'Connor. The authors and texts, supplemented by occasional movies and documentaries, are divided into categories like "Ordinary American, So-called Working Class Men and Women: Several Angles of Vision," "Intellectuals and the Religious Search" and "Ways of Seeing Race."

The syllabus sounds promising, but the lectures often cannot live up to their billings. Certainly, Professor Coles' literary expertise is impressive and his timely anecdotes are entertaining. He is a fluent, engaging speaker, completely at ease talking about his favorite authors and their works. Problems arise, however, as soon as we discover the assumptions underlying his twice-weekly monologues.

Professor Coles seems to take for granted the homogeneity of his student audience. His lectures are geared towards an audience of middle-to-upper class whites who have fairly similar experiences within a limited variety of backgrounds. He uses this assessment to create a common vantage point from which to study the readings, unconsciously presenting an "us vs. them" attitude which ignores Harvard's much-touted respect for diversity. Students generally refer to the characters in the stories and the subjects of the nonfiction books as "those people," a disconcerting phrase that emphasizes the distance between different ethnic and socio-economic groups. This makes those students who don't fit into the white middle class very uncomfortable.

For example, in a recent lecture on his book The Old Ones of New Mexico, Professor Coles read a long section about an elderly Mexican woman's thoughts as she approached the end of her life. Then he asked the audience to think about the differences between their lives and her life: differences in culture, language, geographic location, social status, education. As is customary in this class, he asked for reflection on differences, not similarities; he asked his audience to create a distance between themselves and the people they meet in the readings. He doesn't seem to expect the students to emphathize with the characters.

"I don't really like the lectures," I heard one student say. "They make me feel guilty." Lectures do seem designed to produce guilt. This sense of guilt is not productive or constructive, the kind that sparks a re-examination of societal structures and behavior. This guilt is self-complacent, rooted in the fact that we Harvard students were born privileged and "those people" weren't. And that's as far as social reflection goes.

SECTIONS are even worse. While I sit through lecture with a vague feeling of malaise, the weekly one and a half hour section completely unnerves me. Sections vary greatly in tone and quality, to be sure, with more than 40 offered every week, but as a minority student in a class discussing "white guilt," I am becoming more disturbed as the semester progresses. It is not an enjoyable or comfortable situation.

In section, students usually stick to plot summaries and close readings of the texts. Personal experiences play virtually no role in interpretation. But we still manage to have protracted discussions--employing several dozen "those people"--that usually skirt around the bigger social issues. For example, during a half-hour discussion of Carver's "Cathedral," nobody proposed that the story might be about prejudice. Instead we discussed the problems of communication between one man and his wife.

SO far, the course has disappointed me. Where I expected a probing exploration of the themes and topics presented in the readings, I have found superficial discussions of poverty and the class system, and near-complete exclusion of gender or ethnicity. Although the literature we read is powerful, the social reflection that is supposed to accompany it is weak and ineffectual.

Perhaps I should have known better. I should have been able to read the ethnocentric slant of the course in its syllabus: "...Still others whose work will be read or viewed have tried to understand not only how various 'different' people live, but to what ultimate...moral and religious or philosophical purpose, if any, they adhere."

I still have hope that the well-meaning Gen. Ed. 105 staff will become more sensitive to the ethnic and cultural diversity of their students. The 800 students in the class deserve it.