Wheelock College in Boston establishes Race Amity Center to foster dialogue, learning

Race Amity Center in Boston fosters dialogue

A new National Center for Race Amity opens this month in Boston to foster learning and discussion at the community level about race.

Wheelock College received a $400,000 grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation for the center. William Smith, who most recently was executive director of the Center for Diversity in the Communication Industries at Emerson College, will head the new center.

Part of the center’s work will involve a national expansion of a program Smith developed that trains college students to moderate discussions on race.

Organizations including Harvard University and the United Church of Christ have participated in Smith’s “Campus Conversations on Race” program so far. And Smith hopes to develop a network of 250 colleges using the program over the next three years.

“This does not require them to be an expert on race,” Smith said. “The whole idea is, this is not the work of experts, because there are no experts. It’s every person trying to make things better … the everyday person living the experience bringing the expertise of their own lives to the conversation.”

The center’s goal is to expand Wheelock’s mission of improving the lives of children and families by developing new educational curricula on race and ethnicity, including activities based on the college’s family theater program, said Jackie Jenkins-Scott, Wheelock’s president.

Although other groups have created discussion programs on race, Wheelock’s combination of conversation, education and theater expression appears unique, said Andrew Grant-Thomas, deputy director of the Kirwan Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State University.

Smith said that one of higher education’s primary tasks is to prepare young leaders and professionals for the increasingly pluralistic 21st century.

“The winners are going to be people who can be able to deal multiculturally,” Smith said. “Those are the people who will succeed because they understand and become literate in various cultural nuances, backgrounds, perspectives and points of reference.”

On the Net:

www.wheelock.edu

www.campusconversationsonrace.org