ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, September 1, 1996 TAG: 9609040022
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: RALEIGH, N.C.
SOURCE: MARTHA WAGGONER/ASSOCIATED PRESS
To feel hopeful about race relations in this country, listen to the children. ``Racial hatred is old,'' says 13-year-old Jonathan Leak of Durham, who is black. ``Nobody really does that anymore - not kids.''
But Jonathan and other children created jarring images of their own worlds of black and white in an experiment called ``Black Self/White Self.''
Elementary and middle school students from two schools imagined themselves in skin of the opposite color. They posed for pictures for photographer Wendy Ewald. Then they wrote and drew on the pictures to illustrate who they were as themselves and who they would be if they were another race.
``I was surprised at how direct the kids were, and how much you could see from what they did about what society is like, really,'' Ewald says.
Whites are smarter, richer, happier, the pictures seem to say. Michael, who is black, drew himself with angel wings when he's white.
Black children are more interested in sports than books and are very concerned about money, the pictures indicated. For example, only the black children used money in their photographs.
``For their white self, they would have it,'' Ewald said in a telephone interview from her home in Red Hook, N.Y. ``Or in their black self, as if that's what really mattered to deal with the world.''
Leak posed kneeling and holding two $5 bills and one $1 bill in front of him. ``Cash rules everything around me!,'' he wrote. As his white self, he was on bleachers, which he says represented Wall Street. He wrote ``Big Dreamer'' on one side.
``Black Self/White Self,'' which has been conducted in four classrooms at Shepard and Pearsontown Elementary School in the past two years, was part of the larger project of ``Literacy Through Photography'' that Ewald began in the Durham city schools in 1989 before the city and county schools merged three years later.
``We always talked about race and what it was like to go to school with kids of only your race,'' Ewald says. ``Kids had a lot to say about it. When the schools merged and class makeups were going to change, I started thinking more about it and thought about the idea that in order to empathize with people who are different from yourself, you really have to imagine what that life would be like.''
The students' photographs are ``compelling just for what they said of kids' perceptions of themselves,'' says Alan Teasley of the Durham schools, who has worked with Ewald on introducing the program into classrooms.
``In some cases, it was sad what people thought about themselves,'' Teasley said. ``It's sad that an African-American child would imagine himself as more successful in the white self.''
But Robert Hunter, who teaches art at Shepard Middle School, says the students portrayed race relations differently when they talked than in the pictures. It was almost as if the pictures show life the way it is, while in discussions, students talked about life the way it should be.
In discussions, ``the bottom line seemed to be, we're all the same. If blacks want to do this, if whites want to do that, they can,'' Hunter says.
Ewald says students had detailed ideas about how they should look - whether a shirttail should be tucked in, whether one pants leg should be up. But black children were more certain about who they would be as white than the other way around.
That's probably because black children ``are used to understanding how they are seen,'' she says. ``If you are a member of the dominant culture, as white children are, there is no reason to wonder how other people see them.''
Jonathan Leak, who was in Hunter's class two years ago, says he has no problems with white people.
``If you cut off the skin and all, everybody's the same inside,'' he says. ``It's what's inside that counts.''
Chris Stollings, a white 12-year-old who pictured himself as this country's first black president, says the project changed views.
``Most said white people lived in big houses and were rich,'' says Stollings, who points out that he lives in an apartment. ``And most people said black people didn't do as much. It kind of opened a lot of my friends' eyes to what was happening. We kind of understand each other a little bit better.''
Books often were props in white selves, while sports equipment usually was drawn onto the pictures of black selves. Heather, who is white, read a book as her white self. As her black self, whom she named Karina, she jumped rope.
Rachael, who is black, put her hopes and aspirations in her white self. As the white Nicole, she has many black friends, is rich and lives in California with her dad, who spoils her.
Another black student, Antonio, shows a defiant look to the camera, arms extended, and writes that he wants to be a doctor. He created a far less flattering image of his white self: bent over, head hidden in a hood, faceless. ``Don't know where I am,'' he wrote on the picture. ``Live in an alley.''
``In talking to him, I came to understand that was a symbol for being without a community, which is how he saw suburban or rural white children,'' Ewald says.
As his black, real self, Damien doesn't like going to school. ``Maybe once and a while, I might feel like going to school,'' he wrote. ``I don't like doing work until my hand hurt.''
As his white alter ego, Brent, he lives in a three-story house with his mother and father, both of whom are doctors. ``I love school,'' he wrote. ``I like all my teachers.''
In ``Literacy Through Photography,'' students learn to take pictures, develop and print film. They then write based on their photographs.
Ewald, who has published three books, has worked with children and photography for 25 years in places as diverse as Appalachia, Colombia, Mexico, South Africa, Morocco and India.
This fall, she goes to Holland where she has been commissioned to produce an exhibition on identity. She will use ``Black Self/White Self'' as a starting point for that work.
``I'm going to work with Dutch children on the same thing,'' she says, pointing out that that country is changing rapidly with immigrants from Morocco, Turkey and Surinam.
And what lesson will she take with her from the Durham project?
``How important it is to understand how we are seen as well as how we see others.''
LENGTH: Long : 127 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: AP. 1. Only the black children used money in theirby CNBphotographs. Jonathan Leak, a black 13-year-old, posed kneeling and
holding two $5 bills and one $1 bill in front of him. ``Cash rules
everything around me!,'' he wrote. As his white self, he was on
bleachers, which he says represented Wall Street. He wrote ``Big
Dreamer'' on one side. 2. In the experiment, Chris Stollings, a
white 12-year-old, pictured himself as this country's first black
president. The project changed his views about race. "It kind of
opened a lot of my friends' eyes to what was happening. We kind of
understand each other a little bit better," he says.