California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Created: March 30, 2001
Latest update: March 30, 2001
jeannecurran@habermas.org

The following picture accompanied the Los Angeles Times online article, "California Grows to 33.9 Million, Reflecting Increased Diversity", by Maria L. La Ganga and Shawn Hubler, March 30, 2001.

But the picture that appeared on the front page of my home edition will have to be scanned in for you to compare them. Of about twenty children in that photo, one appeared to African American, another Asian. By contrast in the online picture, of five children, one appears to be white.

This brought to mind a sculptor I had studied with years earlier, who had done a two-year-long study of imagery in Poland during the Second World War. She went on to study for a doctorate at the New School for Social Research, to turn her records from Poland into a book on the imaginary as constrained by the visual messages of the dominant discourse.

I had gone to the online version of this article, which proclaims that whites are no longer a majority in California, to find the picture from my home edition, so I could share it with you. I was surprised to see such a different picture online. My reaction to the smiling, happy faces of the children in the home edition photo (taken as they watched a "traveling animal show") suggested a primarily white group. In the online photo above, the children in the online photo are not nearly so close upon one another (for they are not grouped as an audience. Instead they appear serious and intent upon a classroom lesson. In this photo, the minority children are the majority, although that judgment is purely from skin color as caught in the photo, and could be grossly inaccurate, since they may consider themselves "white."

Discussion Questions

1. Consider the impact on people's general impressions of the tightly grouped crowd of smiling young faces watching the "traveling animal show." How does this version of school children impact the dominant discourse on diversity?

   jeanne's notes on one plausible response:

   To me the smiling children represent a learning environment in which none are excluded. Particularly the closeness with which they are bunched together in the photo suggests a community of people sharing happily with one another. Given the complaints generally in the last year that high school is a place where students are mercilessly teased and alienated, this is a remarkable slice of life that looks like that could never happen with these kids. Was the photo staged? Consider the raging debate over Chagnon's films of the Yanomami. Is this a slice of real life? Or is it a performance to deliver a message from the dominant discourse, that in nice suburban schools children are happy, peaceful, and eager to learn? We don't need to know the answer. We need to be aware that the answer is probably some where in between the two extremes in the real world, and the was must question what we see in visual messages as well as what we decipher from textual messages written or spoken.

   The J-Curve of Prejudice, Gordon Allport. The Majority May Not Rule - California Census results. Will put up later. jeanne, March 30, 2001.