African-American Studies professor committed to discourse change

American culture is not as simple as black and white, says Craig Werner, professor of humanities and African-American Studies.

In a fall lecture titled “Beyond Black and White: The New American Multiculture,” he posed a challenge to public constructions of culture and the surrounding world.

Werner finds that discussions of race and ethnicity traditionally organize themselves in black-and-white terms. He has consequently makes an effort to address the radically diversified American multiculture, adjusting his way of teaching and thinking to an America no longer like the one in which he grew up. “We have to understand that what began in our public consciousness as a binary black and white never answers reality, but our intellectual constructs are built around that to a huge degree,” Werner says.

Werner describes his ideas as the answer to a simple promise made to a student of American-Indian descent who asked Werner why theoretical language was often applied to discussions of culture, presenting it in a misrepresentative and unrealistic way. While ideas often resonated with the student’s own cultural experiences, the limited scope addressed a world no longer in existence, according to Werner.

Consequently, he made a commitment to move beyond traditionally held constructs of culture and to address the “real” United States in both teaching and discourse.

Werner disagrees with the trend of academia, which tends to impose a theoretical language upon the traditions it attempts to explore.

“We need to educate ourselves into those traditions as they’re viewed internally,” he says.

In terms of how to address the current perceptions of culture, Werner proposes the deconstruction of the views that have long dictated the direction of education.

“When you start putting tradition together, I think it’s absolutely crucial that we move beyond our training to understand that almost all of us shape the world in accordance with the world we came out of, but it’s not the world we’re moving into,” he says.

Werner describes the exploration of cultures and traditions as the understanding of the connections between experiences and views across a multicultural spectrum. The quintessential American multiculture, according to Werner, consists of patterns of woven threads connecting seemingly separate traditions.

The reconstruction of one’s world view, a daunting task, is a crucial step. “If your rhetoric and reality are out of sync, the problem is with using your head,” he says. “It’s not that reality is not doing the correct kinds of things. Sometimes we still act like we have the key to all mythologies.”