TEDx speakers address issues of race, culture in talks at Southeast

The company behind the popular speakers series TED Talks joined Southeast Missouri State University in putting on a night of open-minded discussion Thursday.

Like Southeast’s speakers series this year, the TEDx theme, “Diverse Passions,” tackled race and culture in society and media.

Four presenters, all Southeast faculty, gave brief lectures about associated topics, in between which were breaks for audience members to discuss the positions they’d just heard.

Debra Lee-DiStefano, professor of Spanish, speaks about assumptions Thursday during TED Talks.Aaron Eisenhauer ~ Southeast Missouri State University

Debra Lee-DiStefano, professor of Spanish, focused on the issue of assumptions, which she said are entrenched in human society from an early age.

She highlighted the irony of teaching children not to judge books by covers or mistake glitter for gold while constantly doing just that in everyday life.

She suggested that people inculcate their children with — or allow them to be inculcated by — mass-media images. People learn to shape their perceptions, and therefore their prejudices, by internalizing the perceptions of others as articulated through billboards, magazines, television and other media.

Tamara Zellars Buck, associate professor in Southeast’s mass media department, speaks about how media matter Thursday during TED Talks.Aaron Eisenhauer ~ Southeast Missouri State University

She said culturally, people do it to solidify their sense of cultural mythology, but that comes with drawbacks.

“What happens is that’s a very contrived idea,” she said, pointing out if individuals fail to see themselves reflected in the orthodox cultural narrative, they begin to feel marginalized.

She said too often, what people say about an “other” society says more about a person’s own culture than the one ostensibly being described. This is because people tend to objectify others instead of allowing them to be a subject on their own, she said.

Allen Gathman, former biology professor, spoke about the intersection of race and genetics, arguing there is demonstrably little.

At first, he said, the process by which humans designate racial boundaries can seem like the scientific process of classification — except human beings aren’t birds, and humans’ genetic makeups differ in such infinitesimal amounts, concepts of race are effectively meaningless.

For example, a human’s DNA is only about two percent different from that of a chimpanzee, while the two most genetically dissimilar humans are at most one-tenth of one percent apart.

Even then, he said, 90 percent of genetic variation occurs within subgroups, not between them. This dynamic, he explained, could be understood as the differences between the Limbaughs and the Seabaughs within the Cape Girardeau subgroup.

In conclusion, he said, race is a social construct that fails as a biological classification.

Tamara Zellars Buck, associate professor in Southeast’s mass media department, spoke about how media matter.

She pointed out how everyone knows “boys don’t play with dolls” — except boys play with dolls all the time.

Anyone who’s been to a daycare center, she said, knows that.

She argued “the media” are responsible for advancing that idea.

“I hate people saying that,” she said. “‘The media.’”

She said it’s erroneously inclusive, as if all news and entertainment outlets were the same monolithic content provider.

Instead, she said, different media outlets frame content differently, and how society decides who ought to be feared or who ought to be celebrated is in that framing.

The danger in framing comes when fear enters the equation, she said.

For instance, she cited the coverage of AIDS. First it was a lifestyle problem, a gay problem only — a perception that changed only when people saw AIDS spreading to a larger demographic. Then it became an Africa problem only.

“It’s still an Africa thing,” Buck said. “When we’re afraid, we tend to want to contain the problem.”

Marketing professor Kenneth Heischmidt spoke about how graduates are literally one in a million, and how one might distinguish oneself from one’s peers when seeking to move ahead in the job market. He suggested international study as a prime method of doing so.

tgraef@semissourian.com

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