Making Multicultural Societies: Q&A With Hazel Rose Markus

Stories From the Field

Making Multicultural Societies: Q&A With Hazel Rose Markus

Hazel Rose Markus, SPARQ’s co-director and the Davis-Brack Professor in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, conducts fishbowl discussions in her Intergroup Communications course, co-taught with Dereca Blackmon.

SPARQ: How did the Fishbowl Discussions toolkit come about?

Markus: I had been teaching classes for many years on cultural psychology, gender, race and ethnicity, pulling in multidisciplinary perspectives that gave students a lot to think about. But they weren’t really having an opportunity to experience the impacts of these concepts in their own lives. Then I had the good fortune to meet Dereca Blackmon. She had taken a class at Stanford taught by Helen Schrader that was based on the fishbowl idea. Dereca said it was a life-changing experience for her and many other students. She thought that we could revive that class and make it part of the curriculum, and we did. With the toolkit, we’re trying to make these powerful conversations available to even more people.

SPARQ: How did the first fishbowl discussion in your class go?

Markus: We were nervous because there’s always the concern that highlighting differences among people in their backgrounds and identities might create divisions that weren’t there in the first place. What if we make students aware of problems they didn’t know they had, and that adds to their stress? But we thought the upside of learning more about how our selves are shaped by our social worlds was worth the risk. Plus, students were ready and willing to share their stories.

SPARQ: What topic did the first class discuss?

Markus: Gender. As we always do with fishbowl discussions, we had the students decide within that category what subgroups they wanted to sort themselves into. In that first year, they came up with men, women, gender fluid, and, in what became quite a memorable one, f*** gender. We all experienced the whole process of social group formation and became aware of how dynamic it is.

SPARQ: What were some the insights that students took away?

Markus: When the men’s group asks the women’s group about gender, they often ask what it’s like to be a woman on the Stanford campus. Many of the women’s first answers have to do with feeling like they’re not safe to walk or ride their bikes at night. That’s surprising for many men — to see the kind of worries that women have.

SPARQ: Do the conversations get tense?

Markus: There are some tears. There is some some anger. There is a huge amount for everyone to learn. All of us can say things without realizing how it sounds and feels to others. Communication is about expressing yourself, yes, but it’s also about listening and being tuned into how what you say might land on someone else’s ears.

SPARQ: What are some techniques for handling that?

Markus: If we’re going to have a successful multicultural society, we may need to walk on eggshells a bit, but we also have to give each other a break. It can’t be one strike and you’re out. We talk about being forgiving and flexible. And we talk about impact and intention when you’re communicating. If something you say comes out poorly and hurts someone else, you have to be aware of that impact, even if you didn’t mean it. We also set an important ground rule by telling students, “What’s learned here, leaves here; what’s said here, stays here.” We want them to feel safe sharing and to take what they learn out into the world without revealing personal details from the conversations they’ve had. The talks are also structured so you don’t feel personally responsible for your statements about other groups. It’s not an individual man asking questions of an individual woman; it’s a group of men discussing the ideas they hold about women as a cultural category and then posing questions as a group and vice-versa. That’s important to open people up.

SPARQ: What are highlights of the discussions you’ve held about economic class?

Markus: Students from families with less money were surprised to learn from students with higher-income backgrounds that even if you have money, it doesn’t necessarily make life easy or solve all your problems. The low-income students, many of whom were the first in their families to go to college, also tended to feel like a lot was riding on their academic performance, for themselves and their families. They often expressed gratitude to their parents helping them afford a chance to study at Stanford. Higher-income students, on the other hand, described an experience of being expected and pressured to go to an elite school and didn’t think much at all about being grateful to their parents.

SPARQ: What stood out in the conversations about race?

Markus: So many things — students talked about the many and different ways people threw racist attitudes at them, but they also spoke about the pride and positivity they felt about their connections to racial and ethnic groups. It can be very moving to hear these stories. In the beginning, colorism was surprising to me. A lot of students in many race and ethnicity groups talk about who’s lighter and who’s darker. East and South Asian students talk about being admonished by parents to stay out of the sun to keep their skin as light as possible. African and African-American students would tell stories about how the different shades of their skin make a difference in their family and in their interactions on campus.

SPARQ: What do you hope people to take away from a fishbowl discussion?

Markus: We want people to understand that race, ethnicity, social class, gender, sexual orientation, and other social distinctions are not just a source of problems, difficulties, conflict, or prejudice, but that these groups and our identifications with them are also sources of pride — your meaning, your motivation, and your sense of self. They’re very important. You start to understand that people in the same social category share some life experiences but also that they can be very different from one another. We also hope that people learn that identities are not fixed but very sensitive to the social context — they are multiple and malleable — and that in a diverse and multicultural world, this is a good thing. Most of all we hope they take away that making a world in which we all fit requires ongoing intergroup communication that is both brave and sensitive.