VI. Creative Assignment

There are four creative assignments in each chapter. Each week choose one of the assignments. It is a requirement, however, that every week you choose a different type of an assignment, until you complete all four types. Then you begin the cycle anew. The sequence in which you choose the creative assignment is not significant. Every four weeks look through all the creative assignments in the chapters and select the creative assignments you like the most for each week. By the end of the course you will have written three Focus on Culture reflections, three film analyses, three relationship problem analyses, and three skill exercises.

Focus on Culture

Read Steve’s chapter insert, and answer all the questions posed. Then write a one-page reflection on what you think about the issue and how it pertains to your communication experience. Please refer to at least THREE concepts from the chapter in your response.

PERCEIVING RACE

Race is a way we classify people based on common ancestry or descent and is almost entirely judged by physical features (Lustig & Koester, 2006). Once we perceive race, other perceptual judgments follow, most notably the assignment of people to ingrouper versus outgrouper status (Brewer, 1999). People we perceive as being the “same race” we see as being ingroupers. Their communication is perceived more positively than the communication of people of “other races,” and we’re more likely to make positive attributions about their behavior.

Not surprisingly, the perception of racial categories is more salient for people who suffer racial discrimination than for those who don’t. Consider the experience of Canadian professor Tara Goldstein. She asked students in her teacher education class to sort themselves into “same race” groups for a discussion exercise (2001). Four black women immediately grouped together; several East Asian students did the same. But the white students were perplexed. One shouted, “All Italians—over here!” while another inquired, “Any other students of Celtic ancestry?” One white female approached Dr. Goldstein and said, “I’m not white, I’m Jewish.” Following the exercise, the white students commented that they had never been sorted by their whiteness and didn’t perceive themselves or each other as white.

Whiteness has been questioned only recently. Whiteness often can mean “natural” or “normal” to individuals who are white, but for scholars interested in whiteness and for people of color, it means privilege. In her book White Privilege, Peggy McIntosh lists 26 privileges that she largely takes for granted and that result from her skin color (1999). For example, as a white person, McIntosh is able to swear, dress in secondhand clothes, or not answer e-mail without having members of her race or other races attribute these behaviors to bad morals, poverty, or computer illiteracy. This perception of verbal and nonverbal communication may seem mundane, but as McIntosh says, it is part of white privilege, “an invisible package of unearned assets which I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was meant to remain oblivious” (p. 79).

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

• What race do you identify with? How does your race affect your perception of ingrouper versus outgrouper communication? How does your race affect other people’s perception of your communication?

• Is race an ethical way to perceive how others communicate? Do you think some races have more or less privilege in their interpersonal communication? If so, why?