January 8, 2001

Whitworth Launches 2001 "Prejudice Across America" Study Tour

After a semester of reading about the history of race relations in America,18 Whitworth College students will spend most of January meeting with people who lived the history or who are writing today's chapters. Visits with a civil rights leader who was standing beside Martin Luther King, Jr. when he was assassinated, a Jewish Holocaust survivor in Los Angeles and elementary school students in a distressed South Chicago housing project are just a few of the stops on the 2001 itinerary of Whitworth's acclaimed "Prejudice Across America" study tour.

Whitworth Psychology Professor Jim Waller started the tour in 1996 to give students first-hand exposure to the corrosive effects of racism as well as efforts to bring about racial reconciliation. He repeated the tour in 1998 when it received national attention and was recognized by President Clinton's Initiative on Race as one of "100 Promising Practices" nationwide designed to promote racial reconciliation. Waller's recent book, Prejudice Across America, chronicles the 1998 tour. It was released in October by University Press of Mississippi and is already in its second printing.

This year's tour visits the same eight cities as the 1998 tour, Waller says, but will include more interaction with individuals and organizations on the front lines of race relations.

"We're going to spend a lot more time in the communities we visit with people doing the work of racial reconciliation," he says. "I think it brings us into more active discussion about the problems of racism in America and some of the solutions being pursued in different communities around the country."

Waller and his students depart on Jan.8 and will travel, mostly by train, coast to coast through eight cities that bear witness to America's ongoing struggle with racism and reconciliation. Along the way, they will make more than three dozen stops, including the Japanese-American National Museum in Los Angeles, Chinatown and the Tenderloin in San Francisco, a south Chicago housing project, the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, the Eisenhower Center in New Orleans, the Civil Rights Institute and Sixteenth Street Baptist Church Museum in Birmingham, the MLK, Jr.,Center for Nonviolent Social Change and Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., before returning to Spokane on Jan. 31.

According to Waller, however, the tour highlights will likely be interactions with individuals involved in racial reconciliation. The group will meet with a Los Angeles leader of the Mexican American Legal Defense & Educational Fund, a Jewish Holocaust survivor, leaders working to revive impoverished sections of San Francisco and Chicago, representatives of Operation New Birmingham, the president of the International Justice Mission in Washington, D.C., and the Rev. Samuel "Billy" Kyles, who is pastor at Monumental Baptist Church in Memphis and who was with Martin Luther King, Jr., when he was assassinated.

After each day's activities, the tour participants will hold a "debriefing" to discuss what they've experienced. Waller says he made an effort this year to recruit more students of color in part to ensure that the diversity of voices heard during the day were also present in the nightly discussions. Students of color won't be "put on the spot to represent their race," Waller says, but they can enrich the discussion with their perspectives. They also will find, he says, that racism in America is far more complex than even they realized.

"Students of color are going to be exposed to discrimination that other groups face, and that will be helpful to them in processing their own experience," Waller says. "They're going to recognize that racism has gone beyond a white-nonwhite issue to something much more complex."

In general, Waller says, students take away from the tour a greater sense of the problem of racism in America as well as some hope for eventual redemption and reconciliation.

"They talk to people who live on the front lines and still experience daily the effects of racial, ethnic and religious discrimination or exclusion. So, they leave with a heightened sense of the problem," Waller says. "But what they also get, and what I've concentrated on with this tour, is exposure to people who are working on solutions to the problems we're talking about."

Waller joined the Whitworth College faculty in 1989 and has been recognized for outstanding teaching and research on racism, Holocaust and genocide studies. He is also the author of Face to Face: The Changing State of Racism Across America (1998).

Founded in 1890, Whitworth is a private, liberal arts college affiliated with the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). The college enrolls 2,000 students in more than 50 undergraduate and graduate programs at its 200-acre Spokane, Wash., campus.

Contacts:

Jim Waller, professor of psychology, Whitworth College, (509) 777-4424 or jwaller@whitworth.edu.

Greg Orwig, director of communications, Whitworth College, (509) 777-4580 or gorwig@whitworth.edu.