Managing Student Reactions to Controversial Issues in the College Classroom

White students (white males in particular, in my experience) frequently manifest these reactions. For example, one student said, "If it was so great in Cuba why don't you go back?" when a Cuban student reported that race relations were not a problem there (a debatable idea). Another male, at a Black History Month program, said, "We found out everything we needed to know in Hebrew school, why do you need a black college?" A white male said in response to a discussion about racism in hiring practices: "These kinds of changes take time." Another asked an African-American student, "Why wasn't your mother as motivated as you are to find out about her history?" This is a clear example of victim blaming that reflects a lack of knowledge about the many distortions and omissions in American history. 17 Ethnocentrism and lack of empathy are not limited to white students. In a Freshman class, after viewing Phil Donohue's "The Human Animal" (a film in which several families discuss crises with which they had coped) an African-American student said, "I didn't think it was all that sad," and others nodded in agreement. Yet depression, suicide, and tearfulness were a part of each of these segments. Similarly, an African-American student in an Abnormal Human Behavior class said, "We don't even need to talk about homosexuality because everybody knows that's abnormal!" These students' comments suggest that if a group's perspective or interpretation of reality does not corroborate their own world view, they quickly reject it as irrelevant. They seem to believe, furthermore, that all people should experience and respond to events and challenges in the manner chosen by people of their own particular race. They present examples of discrimination and atrocities visited upon their group to minimize the concerns of the group in question. [Lillian H. Jones] noticed that in her classes: Students often respond by making negative statements on the student evaluation. This can occur when there has been insufficient preparation for the introduction of controversial topics. One semester in my Introduction to Psychology classes students said (on student evaluations), "She hates black students"; "She is racist, she hates white people"; and "She's always talking about her own opinion, racism has nothing to do with psychology." In this class, I had mentioned race and racism in only one of thirty-two classes; as a result, the students were insufficiently prepared to process this material. A w