MICHEL DEGRAFF: So at the end of the course,
what I've been wanting--
and I think that was achieved for the greater part-- is
to have students become very analytical when it comes
to the use of language, race, religion,
gender, as technologies, technologies
to create hierarchies of power.
But if you think of something that Steven Biko once said,
Biko once said that the most efficient tool of the opressor
is the mind of the oppressed.
So after the students to understand how when you grow up
in a society where there are various hierarchies that
are imposed on that society based on tools,
like how we perceive race, how we perceive language varieties,
how we perceive gender, how we perceive religion,
and we ourselves--
both myself as a faculty of MIT, but also the students,
are students coming from different social groupings--
we bring those hierarchies with us.
And often, it's implicit-- not aware of that.
So at the end of the course, one thing which became clear to me
is that the students became more aware of how
these cultural phenomena and the use of them
and the position of them are used as tools to maintain
those hierarchies.
So what became clear to me is that
towards the end of the course, the students
were indeed very self-conscious of the uses of culture,
of race, of religion, of issues about migration
in creating those walls.
And I think now they have tools that they
can use to break those walls within themselves, but also
within the social groups.