State of Race Speaker Challenges Audience

Lee Mun Wah, documentary filmmaker and executive director of a diversity training company, took the stage for Emory’s 15th annual State of Race event, kicking off College Council’s third annual Social Justice Week.

Speaking to roughly 100 Emory community members yesterday evening, Lee engaged the audience in a diversity reflection exercise and a speech about diversity in America.

“We have a race problem in America, and I hope you came here not to talk about it, but to get started,” the Chinese American — whose titles include filmmaker, author and poet, among many others — said in Cox Ballroom.

The renowned educator, executive director of Stirfry Seminars & Consulting, said he aims to change the nation’s conversation on race. He was the subject of a one-hour special on Oprah Winfrey’s show and presented a TedxTalk titled “The Secret to Changing the World.”

One of his films, “The Color of Fear,” won the Gold Apple Award for Best Social Studies Documentary, while another — “Stolen Ground” about Asian Americans — won honorable mention at the San Francisco International Film Festival.

Equipped with knowledge about cross-cultural communication, awareness and conflict intervention strategies, Lee has advised thousands of government and social agencies, schools and corporations on diversity issues. He has consulted private schools and worked with students who have social and learning issues.

After a short performance from Issues Troupe, an Emory theater group that explores social justice issues on campus and society, Lee piqued the audience’s interest with personal anecdotes, including a moment in his youth when he threw his Chinese food away because his fellow students complained about the smell.

“For the first time, I realized that being different was being un-American,” Lee said. “It is only now that I realize that I threw a whole lot more than just my food away. I threw away the very best parts of me.”

He then led the audience through an interactive exercise that he called “What We Do Not See,” which he has conducted with Pentagon members and will soon bring to Ferguson town hall meetings.

Lee asked the audience of mostly students to stand up, find someone new and move their chairs to face one another. Then, he asked the pairs to share the assumptions they have about each other.

“I could easily do a talk. You could listen to me, but would you ever do this on your own?” Lee asked the audience. “We know how to talk about that conversation. We know how to hope about it. But we don’t know how to do it.”

For about 10 minutes, chatter filled the room as the pairs shared surprisingly comfortable giggles and intense eye contact. After that, the pairs were told to have one person face the front of the room and ask the other person, who faced the back wall, questions displayed on a projector such as “When others look at you, what do they see?” and “What do you wish they’d see? Why?”

“Today, I could have given you a formal speech,” he told the group after the exercise. “But I’m so tired of diversity being about awareness. I’m so tired of reading about it. I wanted to make it real.”

He told the audience a moving story about how his mother’s murder by a black man led him to think about race relations in a deeper way. “I had to face all the stereotypes that this country taught me about black men.”

Lee added that he hoped to teach the audience about listening.

“I strongly believe that this country doesn’t know how to listen,” he said, using presidential debates as a prime example of disconnected communication.

“When you see the people working in this school, look at them,” he said. “My father used to say, ‘They don’t even see us. They don’t even notice us.’”

College senior Steven Claude Dorsainvil started to tear up during Lee’s personal story about his mother.

“[The event] was more than I expected by far,” he said. “It will allow be to be more truthful when I approach certain issues ... I feel like we tend to shy away from certain questions certain times.”

Another participant, College junior Sakile Taylor, agreed that this event will help her be less afraid to ask people questions.

“I actually have never been to something like this,” she said. “Usually we talk about making people aware about the cultural differences. [Here], we actually got to engage people.”

The rest of the third annual Social Justice Week 2015, titled “A New Generation of Activism,” includes a movie screening of “Selma” on Thursday and a social networking night on Friday.

— By Karishma Mehrotra, Associate Editor

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