I want to talk specifically about the article I emailed on Thursday, but I have a more pressing issue at the moment. I posted this entry about my class on Thursday to Blogging Pedagogy, and have received some excellent responses, but I was hoping that people might want to engage in further discussion of it during part of class today? This is also related to my final project, since what I plan to do is to start writing an article/paper on the teaching of visual rhetoric, which will begin with my reflections from my current class. (We've done A LOT of visual rhetoric). Here is my rather pressing post:

For my 309K class today [last Thursday], my students read an excerpt from a book by Sue Jewell called From Mammy to Miss American and Beyond: Cultural Images and the Shaping of US Social Policy. Essentially, the thesis of this book is that racial stereotypes are important because they affect the "status, availability, accessibility, and acquisition of resources by various groups in society" (Jewell 31). At the beginning of class, I asked students to list the characteristics of the "Mammy" stereotype, according to their reading of Jewell's texts. Then, I divided students up into two groups and told them that we were going to watch excerpts from the popular television show Grey's Anatomy. The excerpts we were going to watch all showed Dr. Miranda Bailey, the only major black female character on the show. I asked one half of the students to argue that Bailey fit the Mammy stereotype and one half of the students to argue that she challenged the stereotype. This part of the lesson went well. Arguably, Dr. Bailey's character does fit the stereotype, and she challenges it, too. It was a pretty simple lesson to execute: Pop Culture 101.

To conclude our discussion, however, I asked students to speak up if they thought that, in looking for the ways she fit the stereotype, we were pushing our interpretations too far (y'know, like English teachers tend to do). Most of them said no, we weren't pushing our interpretations too far. However, a few spoke up and said something to the tune of "You can make an argument that every one of the characters fits a stereotype—so why waste time doing it? And, anyway, the way that she shows those characteristics is so subtle. I mean, you really have to look to find them." I have to admit, I hadn't expected this response. I mean, I had them do a reading that explained why essentialized images, positive or negative, subtle or not, matter in our worlds. I didn't (but should have) re-read the passage from the reading that I quoted above aloud to the class. But, my question is this: what else could I have done? How can I make students more invested in understanding why race matters?

Another issue I had during our discussion was with their comment the subtlety of the image. The students seemed to be implying that it wasn't harmful or wasn't racist because it was hardly noticeable. A pop culture theorist (and here, I'm at loss as to which one, since I ignorant about much pop culture theory) would probably say the opposite, right? Subtlety makes the images insidious and, therefore, MORE harmful. I should have pushed them to talk about this more, but ran out of time. However, when I pick up on this conversation next week, I'm not sure how to do it. Help?