9635

Transformation, multiculturalism, and community

MIX (Multicultural Inquiry eXchange)
School for Transformative Learning, California Institute of Integral Studies

This case study reports how a group of thirteen doctoral students engaged racial diversity as the central tenet of our discourse over the period of thirty months in which we studied processes of transformative change in human systems. Our case analysis is created through a process of collaborative inquiry[1] and hermeneutic interpretation [2]in which all of us participated. Our narrative captures themes that describe our experience of the relationship between multiculturalism and transformative learning in the context of learning community.

We are the MIX, the Multicultural Inquiry eXchange[3] Our group is the second residential doctoral cohort in a new school that has been developed by a small institute for graduate studies in the United States. We chose a name for our group as a symbol that expresses one of the expectations in our graduate programme: that in addition to learning as individuals, we are expected to form a community that itself becomes a learning system. Our curriculum and our faculty’s ways of work emphasise collaboration and the expectation that we learn about the transformation of human systems, in part, from our experience as a human system. The name that we created, the MIX, reflects the content of our learning system’s inquiry.

To understand the relationship between transformative learning and multiculturalism it is important to define these two terms. Transformative learning is a process through which meaning perspectives[4] are changed. The process involves identifying and challenging hidden assumptions. Being part of a multicultural group gives individuals access to diverse cultural perspectives, providing a context that surfaces hidden assumptions and presumptions.

In the United States, the term multiculturalism has permeated the public discourse. The difficulty is that there is no common understanding of what this term means. David Lionel Smith[5] warns us of the hazards associated with vague definitions of multiculturalism: ‘The word multiculturalism purveys something for everybody. Universal and specific, inclusive and exclusive, democratic and despotic, sublime and ridiculous, empirically real and theoretical, multiculturalism embraces everything and precludes nothing.’ If the word multiculturalism is bandied about without a well thought through working definition, it runs the risk of reinforcing the melting pot mentality. The melting pot metaphor suggests that the diverse people who have settled in the United States have melted into one type of person, an American. This mentality is undesirable for a number of reasons, one being that it makes marginalisation invisible. The difficulties with defining multiculturalism experienced in our larger society were re-enacted in the MIX.

As a group we never reached consensus on our definition of multiculturalism. In practice, however, we did focus on issues of race in our multicultural experience. We define race as a social construction that, as it exists in the United States, functions as an index for institutional power and access.

Our creation story

Our inquiry is grounded in our creation story. We began our work in 1993 with a week-long residency We were a cohort of nine students - eight white and one African-American. Through a process of tumultuous and searing internal debate, the original members of this learning community agreed to challenge the school to acknowledge that its goal for the group could not be accomplished. The students could not learn effectively from their own experience as a human system when that system was so impoverished in its representation of the diversity in the larger culture of the United States. The school supported this analysis by providing recruitment scholarships and accelerated admissions procedures.

Thanks to an incredible organising effort to which almost every member contributed, the MIX was able to attract three African American women, two African American men, a Latina, a Latino, and a Chinese American woman - eight new people of colour in all. Since that time, although we lost four students during the first year of our programme, whites have been in a minority in the MIX. At the end of our core curriculum, we are six white students and seven students of colour.

A process of transition

The following pieces were written by members of the cohort at various times during our thirty months together. They illustrate transformations of self identity within relationships based on race. To begin, Michael Pinto’s and Victor’s narratives exemplify our first deconstruction around notions of multiculturalism.

Michael writes:

Shortly after our cohort convened in August of 1993, Victor voiced concern about being the only person of colour in the group. Though I heard his words and certainly felt some of his emotions, my overriding feeling was ‘Let’s not get into that.’ It was like, ‘That’s your problem Victor, not mine, so don’t drag me into this thing. I’m here for my own reasons and racialisation of issues is not one of them.’

What I have experienced over these two plus years is a dance between the two of us. I have come to understand that I must reach out to people of colour if I want them to be in my life, and that I must be proactive in confronting racism. At the same time, I have learned to better understand my own ideas and beliefs and to explain them more clearly to people who might otherwise disagree with them.

Victor writes:

When I first met Michael Pinto and learned that he lived in Laguna Beach, I immediately developed a chasm of mistrust. He seemed to me to be a neat and idealistic man, with enough power and naiveté to be dangerous to people like me, whom I reckoned he thought he understood. His ignorance was not going to be my bliss.

Over the course of this first six-day meeting with Michael, my impressions of him became considerably more complex. As I learned that he had taught high school in Watts for many years, I assumed that he might have a body of experience that could be a bridge between us. I was suspicious though, of his motives for teaching in the black community, and about the unconscious racism that he may have brought into that context.

Now that more than two years have passed since Michael and I first met, I have discovered that gradually a remarkable thing began to happen for me: I began to develop a description of Michael that was thicker. My view of him became less and less stereotyped and more and more attuned to the particulars of Michael as a person. I found myself less concerned with the differences between the ideologies that I embrace, and the ones that move Michael. I became more interested in the bridges between our respective values, and the prospects of our working in coalition around issues that speak to each of our hearts in compatible ways. I find that the frequency with which I heard Michael say and/or do what I might have said/done myself seemed to increase as the year went on, and the second year wound its course.

These two men began by seeing each other merely as categories and significantly expanded their ability to see one another as persons. Not only were they able to engage a new meaning scheme for each other that is less dependent on stereotyping about race, but they were sometimes able to see situations from each other’s perspective. This represents, in our view, a paradigmatic example of Mezirow’s goals for transformative adult education, namely, the enhancement of meaning perspectives which are more inclusive, discriminating, permeable and integrative of experience.

Above was a glimpse of the shift that occurred for two individuals in their perceptions of each other from stereotypes to individuals. Michael Bell, an African-American, points out that this shift was not unique to Victor and Michael Pinto:

Important transformations have taken place which allow us to dialogue in a manner that would have been impossible at the beginning of our time together. Over the course of the past two years, each of us has experienced significant and deeply personal interactions among cohort members. These interactions have often focused on the different lenses and knowledge bases which we as individuals call upon to make meaning of our experiences. This meaning making is partly based upon ethnicity and cultural heritage. We came to a realisation that, at least at times, colour is backgrounded and who we are as complex people was foregrounded.

The unique opportunity to participate in higher education and not be an isolated person of colour in a white classroom was named by the MIX as ‘critical mass.’ Students of colour found that having a critical mass of other students of colour supported greater self-esteem, deeper learning and a richer sense of the diversity and complexity within their cultures. Shakti describes her experience:

Through the sharing of emerging scholarship with other people of colour, I have rocked in my bosom the stories I’ve shared with my Latina and Asian sisters. Together we recall the ancient wisdoms that abound among our peoples. Our mutual support has emboldened us to create theory - out of our own lives, out of our ghettoes, our barrios, our farms and ranches, out of the tales of our grandmothers - getting closer to ourselves, and to each other has filled us with a new power. We say to ourselves, ‘I can, you can, we can.’

Our experience cannot be tied up in a neat package, however. The closer we look, the more complexities emerge. Contrary to Shakti’s experience, Jean felt profoundly alienated from some of the people of colour throughout the two year programme:

As we all know, the people in our group who referred to the need for critical mass and acknowledgement of needs for people of colour did not address my obvious absence from their web of concern. In short, what I am saying is that I both defend my own views here (which differ) and reject the notion that people of colour can be grouped and spoken about in these ways. My life experience and my experience in the cohort says that people of colour are extremely diverse in their ways of learning and knowing, thinking, perceiving, etc.

Meili, a woman born in China and raised in both the Chinese and Japanese cultures, noticed the power of having another person of the same culture in the room. After Yongming Tang was with us for one day as a faculty guest, Meili noted that as the lone voice of her culture(s) the rest of the time in the cohort her culture remained largely invisible:

As a marginalised multicultural element in American society, I found a parallel situation in the MIX ... In the end, the multiculturalism I experienced didn’t really include my culture because I failed to bring it in.

Expecting to learn about the perspectives of people of colour, white students have most deeply and transformatively learned what it means to be white. Mat offers a glimpse of a white person becoming more conscious of what it means to be white, in his reflection following the first weekend:

I felt pretty pleased afterwards, but I realised it was mainly because I was hiding something from myself. I had finished the weekend without publicly saying anything foolish or racist. There too, I found racism: the privilege of white people to have to fear only something as mundane as exposure rather than something as dangerous as incarceration and death because of the colour of their skin.

Eileen, a white woman, articulates more of a sense of what was learned about being white:

We, white folks, are so embedded in the whiteness of our so called ‘dominant’ culture we often have an enormously difficult time seeing beyond the boundaries of our vision, we need to be ‘rocked’ out of our whiteness through experiencing contrast and dialogue. Cultural embeddedness is a major obstacle to transformative learning and emancipation of personal limitations in perception. In our cohort we have used the metaphor of ‘like fish to water’ to convey how we white folks make presumptions that others, particularly people of colour, are swimming in the same water, when in fact their pool maybe very different. In other words, white folks have a hard time initially seeing the racism of everyday life until it is brought to their attention. Once they ‘get it’ (i.e. see the racism everywhere), they then need to build skills and learn what to do to become agents of transformation and practitioners of anti-racism.

The theory behind the experience

In her poem, ‘For the white person who wants to know how to be my friend’ Pat Parker begins,

The first thing you do is to forget that I’m Black.

Second, you must never forget that I’m Black ...(in Anzaldua[6])

To better understand our experience, especially that of the white participants in the MIX, we use Frankenberg’s[7] analysis of the social construction of whiteness. Reviewing the historical discourse on race in the United States, she identifies an evolution through three stages. This country’s original discourse on colour explained differences in race by physiology, genetics and culture - essentialist racism. The second movement constructed frames that popularised the idea that we are all the same - colour-blind racism. Implicit in this view is the belief that anyone who can not make it in this society bears sole responsibility for that failure. Frankenberg’s third movement - race cognisance - focuses again on difference and refers to the impact of social structures upon people. In the beginning of our work together, many of the white participants were in Frankenberg’s second phase and were moving to the third phase by the end, learning how to enact Pat Parker’s advice to white persons.

Our multicultural learning community of people from diverse racial backgrounds contributed to our transformative learning with regards to race in three ways. First, the people of colour learned more about internalised oppression and gained greater appreciation for the diversity and complexity within a multiplicity of cultures. Second, the white participants learned what it means to be white, surfacing the assumption that the white perspective is universal - that being white is synonymous with being human. Third, we all gained a better understanding of the complexities of racism in a multicultural community. In many ways, our experience was a microcosm of the macrocosm of the world. Although our experience was difficult, challenging and cannot be tied up in a neat package, we believe our learning and transformation can contribute to the public discourse on multiculturalism and transformative learning.

Further reference

Heron, J (1992) Feeling and personhood: psychology in another key. Thousand Oaks, CA, Sage Publications.

[1] Group for Collaborative Inquiry and thINQ (1994) Collaborative inquiry for the public arena. In A Brooks and K Watkins (eds)