Prejudice Across America

""How do I translate the experiences of racial, ethnic and religious minorities... to students who, like me, are not regularly victimized by prejudice or discrimination?"" In 1998, Waller, a professor of social psychology at Whitworth College in Washington State, found an initial solution to this problem by embarking on a three-week-long cross-country field trip with 21 white college students, visiting museums and memorials to America's unhealed wounds. It was a whirlwind trip: shortly after they visited the Japanese-American National Museum in Los Angeles (where they learned of the World War II roundups of Japanese-Americans), Waller and his students dashed off to the Museum of Tolerance across town, where they were rushed through displays about racism in America as well as the history of the Holocaust. A few days later, they learned about the American Indian occupation of Alcatraz outside San Francisco, then met an intimidating black tenant leader from Chicago's notorious public housing before venturing on to Memphis, New Orleans, Birmingham, Atlanta and Washington, D.C. It's hard to fault the ideals behind the trip, but Waller's project seems rushed, and the students' epiphanies often quite basic, as when they met a black Memphis cop who told of the slights and harassment she faces when out of uniform. Waller fleshes out the narrative with excerpts from his own and his students' journals, as well as extensive historical background on the cities they visited, providing more substance than the trip itself, but his prose style is flat. Though the trip was touted by the White House as one of the nation's ""Promising Practices to Promote Racial Reconciliation,"" this book will be most useful to those coming to the issue with as little political awareness as Waller's students seem to have. (Oct.)