March 8, 2007

Whitworth's James Waller Receives Humanitarian Award from the Chicago Center

The Chicago Center for Urban Life & Culture has selected Whitworth Professor of Psychology and Edward B. Lindaman Chair James Waller as the recipient of a First Voice Humanitarian Award. Waller collaborates with the center on his groundbreaking Prejudice Across America off-campus study program, which gives students first-hand exposure to the corrosive effects of racism and efforts to bring about racial reconciliation. Waller will be recognized in a June 2 awards ceremony at the Chicago Center, during its annual colloquium for faculty and staff from colleges and universities.

Each year the center presents a First Voice Humanitarian Award to a Chicagoan who has made a significant contribution to the city through his or her work in the community. This year the center added an award category that recognizes the center's relationships with its affiliated campuses. Waller is the first person to receive a First Voice award in the new category.

"Dr. Waller exemplifies the Chicago Center's first-voice emphasis in his teaching, because he takes his students directly into communities for his Prejudice Across America program, and he brings guest speakers and community leaders to the Whitworth campus," says Valerie Wallace, administrative director of the Chicago Center.

Past recipients of the First Voice Humanitarian Award include Chicagoans Margaret Burroughs, founder of the DuSable Museum of African American History; Earl Calloway, the fine-arts writer for the Chicago Daily Defender (the nation’s oldest African American newspaper); and William Walker, founder of the Chicago mural movement.

The Chicago Center (formerly Urban Life Center) equips college students and other participants to learn from diverse urban communities through innovative programs, seminars and internships. The center expands the traditional classroom with community-based, first-voice learning opportunities that prepare its students for greater self-awareness and global citizenship, according to the center's website, www.chicagocenter.org.

Waller's research and writing on racial prejudice, collective violence and social injustice have garnered national and international attention, and have moved him to the forefront of public dialogue on critical social issues. In addition to founding the Prejudice Across America study program, in 1996, Waller founded the Religion, Peace and Conflict in Northern Ireland study program, which was inaugurated in January 2006.

In March 2007, Oxford University Press released the revised and updated second edition of Waller's book Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing (the first edition was published in 2002). The book was selected as a finalist for the Raphael Lemkin Award for Outstanding Book Published in 2001-02 from the International Association of Genocide Scholars, and is used by universities worldwide in dozens of courses on Holocaust and genocide studies. Waller is also the author of Prejudice Across America (University Press of Mississippi, 2000) and Face to Face: The Changing State of Racism Across America (Perseus Books, 1998).

Located in Spokane, Wash., Whitworth is a private, liberal-arts college affiliated with the Presbyterian Church (USA). The college, which has an enrollment of 2,500 students, offers 53 undergraduate and graduate degree programs.

Contacts:

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

Valerie Wallace, administrative director, Chicago Center for Urban Life & Culture, (800) 747-6059 or valeriew@chicagocenter.org.

Julie Riddle, public information specialist, Whitworth College, (509) 777-3729 or jriddle@whitworth.edu.