You don't always know what to expect on the first day of class.
Having already attended two classes earlier in the day and having the great pleasure of meeting Professor Neil Reisner, I already knew I was in for a real treat. The next 2 1/2 hours would prove to be a unique experience.
Multi-Ethnic Reporting. Hmm, sounds interesting and exciting! For our first assignment, we split up into groups of 3 and 4, making sure not to look at our paper with instructions until we were told to. Professor Reisner explained the assignment and with each word he read, I convinced myself more and more how unfair and mean this assignment was.
We were given a company and equally qualified employees, whom we were to assign to various positions from company president to human resources manager and we could only base our decision on the person's race and gender. How inappropriate!
So my group and I decided to assign people to the positions based on the greater percentage of population because we were too uncomfortable to judge these make-believe people by their race and gender. Plus, we didn't want to offend anyone in class when it was our turn to explain why we assigned a certain person to the position.
But what came out of some people's mouth was definitely shocking. I mean, I guess that was the point of the exercise, to get us to realize that we can be racist without even meaning to. It was an uncomfortable assignment but very eye-opening.
My group was the only one to not put the Asian man as the accountant. We did that purposely because we knew everyone would put him in that position since "Asians are extremely smart in mathematics." And we ended up being right.
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