RICHMOND – Michael Fowlin can capture and hold the attention of a room full of adolescents for a full hour and 15 minutes. And he can open their minds.
He did that Tuesday as the keynote speaker at Richmond’s 4th Prejudice Awareness Summit, an opportunity for 260 area middle-school students to recognize and tear down the boundaries between them.
The summit, held at the Virginia Holocaust Museum, was presented by Jewish Women International and the Junior League of Richmond.
An actor with a doctorate in clinical psychology, Fowlin presented his one-man show, “You Don’t Know Me Till You Know Me.” The show revolves around the proposition that tolerance is one thing _ “Oh you’re black, that’s cool, now stay away” _ but inclusion is something else entirely.
Fowlin took on a variety of characters in a fast-paced show. His characters used several slurs to drive the message home.
As “Jermaine,” a talkative black 6-year-old with attention deficit disorder and dreams of becoming the president, his character got in trouble for blowing up at another child who told Jermaine that black people couldn’t be president because of their appearance.
Fowlin took on the persona of a football team captain who happened to be gay. “You think gay people choose to be gay?” he asked sardonically. “It’s not bad enough being a black man in this mostly white, racist society?”
Another character asked: “How come everybody else on the planet gets to keep their cultural identity except for white people?”
Just watch BET or Comedy Central, said the character, Frank, dressed in a trench coat. Black comedians make fun of whites and no one calls it prejudice, he complained, but for white people, just bringing the issue up for discussion is treacherous.
“Just because you’ve been oppressed, or your people have been oppressed, it doesn’t give you the right to be the oppressor,” Frank said.
As Sabine, Fowlin played a glib high school girl with a Jewish father and a Korean mother, who dealt with issues of racial, religious and gender-based discrimination.
As Jose, he played a depressed Hispanic teen grappling with an abusive father, the death of his mother, and peers who taunt him with a racist comment.
After the performance, small groups of middle-school students talked about their own experiences of discrimination.
They ran the gamut from girls shunned from sports teams to a Jehovah’s Witness made to feel like an outcast. But for most of the students, their experiences revolved around race.
Kaitlin Gauthier, in seventh grade at Richmond’s mostly black Albert Hill Middle School, said as a white student she’s unwelcome on the dance floor at school functions. “Whenever I go out on the dance floor people say I’m the white girl and white girls can’t dance,” Gauthier said.
Tyneshia Burton, a black seventh-grader, befriended a white student during sixth grade at Richmond’s Henderson Middle School, but was shunned by her black peers. “Whenever I get good grades, I’m always picked on and it made me sad that even black kids are prejudiced and people would say that I was white,” she said. Changing schools improved her situation, Burton said.
And when Tyler Douglas, also black, started school at the private and mostly white St. Christopher’s School in Richmond, his fellow students asked him questions that left him feeling unwelcome.
Douglas ticked off a battery of queries: “Can you jump really high? Do you listen to mostly rap? Do you drive an Escalade?”
At 13-year-old Kyle Tate’s school, Matoaca Middle in Chesterfield County, the issue comes back to that of tolerance vs. inclusion. “In the mornings if you get there early you have to go to the gym,” he said. “And on the right side of the gym you see mostly Confederate shirts and on the left side you see mostly blacks and Hispanics.”
A high school student helping to facilitate the group suggested that perhaps later in the day Tate could work on a plan to bring those students together. A key element of the summit is that students take what they have learned back to their home schools.
Educators familiar with the summit say it’s a successful tool for bringing home hard-hitting lessons about prejudice. In some cases, students have returned from the summit to perform skits, make posters and lead student assemblies.
For Tyler Douglas, what made his transition to St. Christopher’s easier was the support of some fellow students.
But Melissa Suggs, a seventh-grader at Henrico County’s John Rolfe Middle School, said she has failed in that regard before.
Suggs said at her school there are racial issues, but kids are also ostracized for being homosexual or having a disability. Suggs said she has never engaged in an act of discrimination, “not to their face,” but she has lacked the courage to stick up for kids when other students pick on them.
“After this,” she said, “I think it’s going to be totally different.”