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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Students Search For Hatred, Find Help Whitworth Group Learns About Race Relations During ‘Tour Of Prejudice’

Putsata Reang Staff writer

About two months ago, a group of Whitworth College students jumped on a train headed for prejudice.

They found it in Chicago.

The all-white group got stranded in a predominantly black neighborhood on the school’s first “Tour of Prejudice.”

“The tables were turned,” said student Sarah Armstrong. “For the first time, we were the minorities.”

Armstrong was one of 16 students who returned with a faculty adviser Jan. 31 from an eight-city national tour. Their mission was to learn about discrimination.

At a school forum Friday, the group shared its experiences from journal entries and poetry.

The students bunked in hostels along the way. While looking for shelter in Chicago, several people stopped to warn them of potential danger.

“We were scared because of our color,” said Megan McEwen, adding, “But it ended up a really good experience, to see the amount of people who wanted to help us.”

Despite historical tensions between blacks and whites, students said people in Chicago were willing to offer anything from directions to cab fare. The incident gave students a better understanding of the discrimination people of color experience daily, they said.

The group spent more than 100 hours riding rails on the month-long tour taken during their semester break. The trip included stops in San Francisco’s Chinatown, Martin Luther King Jr.’s home in Atlanta, and the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

The classroom-on-rails was the brainchild of James Waller, associate professor and chairman of the psychology department.

Waller said he wanted students to experience the kind of prejudices they can only read about in books.

“There’s a deeper sense of empathy that comes with a knowledge of what these groups have gone through and continue to go through,” Waller said.

Much of the trip included personal accounts from tour guides on events including the Japanese-American internment during World War II, and a Holocaust survivor.

Stephen Brashear said his most memorable moment was visiting the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. He spent 15 hours over three days touring the exhibit while others on the trip visited different attractions.

“It was so overwhelming to see how people could dehumanize another group of people,” Brashear said.

The exhibit made him reflect on his own biases.

“I know I’ll never understand prejudice because I don’t experience it,” Brashear said. “I can only be aware.”

Although students say discrimination is pervasive in Spokane, Brashear said traveling to major historical sites gave more lasting and deeper impressions.

The trip is over, but for Melissa Schnase, the lessons won’t end.

Schnase, studying elementary education, wants to use her experience in a teaching career.

“When I have people of different races in my classes, I’ll know how to deal with that,” Schnase said.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color photo

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: A SIMULATION Part of the Whitworth forum on “A Tour of Prejudice” included a continuation of a campus-wide segregation simulation in which students and faculty were separated based on the color of their eyes. Several students balked at the segregation experiment, and many debated its effectiveness. But for the students on the tour of prejudice, the real lessons lie half-way across the country.

This sidebar appeared with the story: A SIMULATION Part of the Whitworth forum on “A Tour of Prejudice” included a continuation of a campus-wide segregation simulation in which students and faculty were separated based on the color of their eyes. Several students balked at the segregation experiment, and many debated its effectiveness. But for the students on the tour of prejudice, the real lessons lie half-way across the country.