Several group members noted that they have used the "Sorting People" activity that was produced by PBS in conjunction with the film Race: Power of An Illusion, but that students complained that the small pictures made the activity difficult. I had the same issue and so I created a classroom exercise that would help the students get the concept without the grainy low-res photos. The great thing is that you can change this from year to year so that the celebs are always current.
I use this activity to start a discussion on the social construction of race and to point out how a racial group is really just part of a system of human-made categories. We talked a lot about how humans decided where to draw those lines and how biological difference was much more complex than racial categories. The activity gets students up and moving and really challenges them to think about racial categories in a new way.
The class prep
The first step was to come up with a list of popular celebrities. I had a student assistant help me with this one to ensure that the famous people would be recognized by people other than myself. We tried our best to represent a variety of races and ethnicities. in the process, we googled celebrity bios to find out how they self-identified - and only tried to use those celebrities who we had a self identification for. We then created a Power Point with 40 color photos. A sample of that slide show is below.
The Activity
- I printed out the power point slides in color and then cut them up and placed the celebrity cards into a box.At the start of class I passed the box around and students randomly selected a photo.
- Once everyone had a photo, I asked students to line up based on the skin color of their celebrity from light to dark (The first time I did this activity, students thought I wanted them to line up based on their own skin color! So you need to make it clear that they are lining up based on their celebrity card.
- After the students formed one big line, I asked them to say the name of their celebrity. We started from lightest skin to darkest skin, but you easily go the other way around. I wanted other students to listed and picture the celebrities in this continuum. The students were pretty good about knowing who these people were but I had a cheat sheet in case they didn’t know whose card they were holding. Sometimes the student didn’t know the celebrities real name but would instead say something like “Olivia Pope from Scandal”. That was fine with me because most other students knew who this was by that description. I did not put the names on the cards because I didn’t want the name association to influence where they placed unknown celebs (For example, we know that Latino or Arab surnames can influence how a person reads another person and what group they classify in).
- After each student read the names, I told them I wanted to make two groups: White celebrities and black celebrities. I then asked them where to draw the line between the two. This was obviously difficult because it can’t be done but I forced them to do so and asked everyone to vote on their choice. We had a good conversation about how they came to their decision.
- Now I made the class stand on opposite sides of the room. I then selected some people on each side and asked if their celebrity might now be misclassified? We discussed this in depth.
- After that ,I asked students to raise their hand if their celebrity was Asian. Hands went up on both sides of the room, so we discussed. I repeated the same question for Latinos. Hands again went up on both sides of the room.
- (Finally a time-consuming option would be to collect the celeb cards in order and then rearrange the original power point to show how the students drew lines and made categories. This would be good to further show visual difference)
Though I like this activity, it does require a large room, talkative students, and a dynamic moderator.
If you don’t have this, you could also have students do the exercise in pairs or small groups. You could give each group the same exact set of 10 to 20 celebrity cards and then ask them to tape them up to the wall or to a posterboard in order. You may stimulate interesting discussions among the students, especially if they decide on a different order. If you are teaching an online class, you make the initial power point and send it to the students and ask them to rearrange the photos, save the slide, and post it back to the discussion board. Feel free to adapt a version of this activity to your classroom and have fun!
[I still think that the PBS activity can be useful. You can find it here: http://www.pbs.org/race/002_SortingPeople/002_00-home.htm ]
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