Release date: Nov. 20, 2003
Contact: Deb Hammacher, Associate Director, University Media Relations,
at 404-727-0644 or dhammac@emory.edu

Professor Teaches That Race Relations Go Beyond Black and White

The complexities of race and ethnicity around the world are tackled with gusto by Emory University sociologist Regina Werum in a course that pushes students to go outside their personal paradigms and see race and ethnicity beyond black and white.

Werum, an associate professor and German native, created her "Race and Ethnicity" sociology course five years ago. While offering an international viewpoint, she covers the spectrum of conservative and liberal social theories with a deep immersion in how history shapes the issue today. Her goal is to allow students to better understand relationships between racial and ethnic groups by applying sociological concepts, and to understand that the nature of these relations requires an historical and comparative international focus.

Students who have taken the class say Werum's in-depth knowledge and passion for the subject, in addition to her perspective on the subject as a German, make for an exceptional class.

"Each lecture challenges my perceptions of the world," says Colleen Brady, a junior biology and women's studies double major from Michigan, who is taking the class this semester

Students that take the course typically represent an "incredibly diverse slice of the Emory community," and many are the children of immigrants, Werum says. "All of the students who come to the class bring something to the table in their personal experiences."

The first assignment for students is an ungraded essay on why they took the course, "which is often eye-opening in how people share the details of their lives, and how race and ethnicity have shaped their experiences. It helps me to figure out how to draw them out as individuals," Werum says.

Despite such a personal approach, Werum says she works "to get students out of a 'me, myself and I' mentality of viewing everything in terms of how it affects them as individuals. I seek to draw a picture of how the world operates and give them a better sense of the world at large than when they walked into the classroom."

While the bulk of material in the course deals with the United States, they also study race and ethnic relations in other areas, such as Yugoslavia, Haiti, Africa and the Middle East, to understand the extent to which patterns of race and ethnic relations have similar causes in different societies.

Topics covered include race and ethnicity as a social construct; slavery and its effects on race and ethnic relations; the relationship between race, class and gender; social movements organized on the basis of race and ethnicity; and immigration, genocide, poverty and segregation.

Celeste Lee, a 2003 graduate of Emory who took the course in 2001, says she and her classmates were introduced to a new way of thinking about race relations that were unfamiliar to most of them. "The class goes beyond the common race analysis of black and white," says Lee, now a graduate student in sociology at Duke University. "The class challenged our preconceived notions and made us think."

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