On February 18th, Dr. Dewey M. Clayton, Professor of Political Science at the University of Louisville, was presented with the 2009 Eleanor Young Love Award by the Louisville Metro Human Rights Commission. According to the Commission, its primary goal is to “promote unity, understanding, and equal opportunity among all people of the Louisville Metro Area and to eliminate all forms of bigotry, bias, and hatred from the community.”

For Clayton, receiving the award was an honor.

“It’s not like I was going out of my way in trying to do anything other than just have my students get along with one another,” he states. “My task is not that difficult. We all live on the same planet. We breathe the same air.”

As a researcher whose interests include congressional redistricting, African-American politics as well as race, law and politics, Clayton has found that many of the remaining social divisions that make the Love award necessary are resolvable.

“Essentially, we talk about what separates us and unites us. And a lot of what separates us is superficial. We fear what we don’t know. [But] that barrier can fall because we’re human beings, and we need to work at communicating with each other and not just dismissing one another.”

To that end, Clayton employs several strategies in his courses to make each of his students more comfortable with subject matters that may be foreign to them.

Every semester, for instance, Clayton shows his students the documentary, “Eye of the Storm.” In it, an elementary school teacher in the late 1960s segregates her class by eye color to demonstrate the harmful effects of racial hatred. Via this experiment, her students – according to Clayton – learn valuable lessons about “prejudice, discrimination, and how it feels when someone treats you differently based on the color of your eyes – and hence, the color of your skin.”

Further, as an element of his Political Discourse class, students select historical figures about whom they give speeches. For Clayton, a recipient of multiple teaching awards, the empathetic act of “stepping into the shoes of someone else” is the pedagogical end-game.

“I have [the students] choose someone who is as diametrically opposite them as is possible,” he states. By giving such speeches, the students are encouraged to disassociate themselves from pre-set racial comfort zones and gender divides.

Clayton concedes, however, that the success of engendering such empathy and understanding – a stated objective of the Love Award and the Human Rights Commission – may not come easily.

“Clearly, we’ve made tremendous strides since the Civil Rights Movement,” he notes. “And the hope is that we will move so much further into the future.”

“[But] we still live in largely segregated communities. We still break down along racial lines. We still have a lot of room to grow.”

But despite the presence of varied challenges, Clayton is optimistic regarding the young generation of which his students are part. More specifically, he argues that they are more than capable of resolving lingering social divisions on their own.
 
And so from the willingness of the nation to elect an African-American president, to the impact of diverse music and pop culture on his students’ acceptance of each other, to the increasing existence of interracial interactions, relationships and families, Clayton believes the country is moving closer to a time when people will cast off the collars of ethnic pigeonholing, with everyone collectively calling themselves just “Americans.”

“We are,” he concludes succinctly, simply “not that different.”
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By: Abi Smith