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About Unlearning Stereotypes -- Civil Rights and Race Relations Project

The Unlearning Stereotypes -- Civil Rights and Race Relations Project of the New York Civil Rights Coalition is a schools-based program that helps equip students with the critical thinking skills and information they need in order to challenge common stereotypes and myths about people because of their color, religion, national origin, disability, sex, ethnicity, or sexual orientation. The program was initiated in December 1989, following the racially-motivated killing of Yusef Hawkins, a black teenager, by a group of youths in Bensonhurst, a predominantly white section of Brooklyn. We developed a special course on "civil rights and race relations" to be taught in the high school in Bensonhurst. To teach the course, we dispatched two lawyers, a black and white team, who took over a regular high school class at the school, once a week, every week for an entire semester.

From that single class at one high school, the New York Civil Rights Coalition's Unlearning Stereotypes -- Civil Rights and Race Relations Project program has grown into a city-wide project involving dozens of volunteer teachers each semester who are recruited and trained by us and placed in some 40 public schools, in every borough of New York City, including two junior high schools in Manhattan. These volunteer teachers include lawyers, law students, police officers, family court judges, and people from diverse occupations and professions. They are assigned to each school as a team -- usually bi-racial and co-ed -- to meet with the same high school or junior high school class every week during the course of a semester.

Our volunteer teachers do NOT lecture, and they do NOT proselytize. Modeled after our pilot program in Bensonhurst, our volunteers use Socratic teaching methods, role-playing, and courtroom scenarios, including mock trials, along with debate exercises, to engage the students. Through these methods, students who were once "passive learners" become interactive learners, avid debaters, reasoned discussants, and thoughtful conversationalists.

Backed up by a curriculum that is always changing and keeping pace with new knowledge and developments in race relations and current events, NYCRC's Unlearning Stereotypes -- Civil Rights and Race Relations Project is an effort to involve professionals, law and graduate students, community leaders and concerned citizens in a school-based program that can help improve race relations among youth. It is a much heralded program that engages students in discussions that carry over to the cafeteria, the schoolyard, their neighborhoods, and back to their homes. As they continue to talk about human relations problems and social issues, the youth of our city begin to see that the strands of our diversity are the bonds of our commonality as human beings. Because we ask that they refer to each other by their names, students from various neighborhoods and backgrounds get to know one another and, thereby, once seemingly impenetrable barriers fall. There is laughter in the classroom as well as vigorous, animated discussion.

Through our classes, and because of the empathy, motivation and skillfulness of our energetic and devoted volunteer teachers, students learn from each other, and examine the underlying causes of intergroup conflict; in the process they also learn about civics, civil rights, and world and American history. Students are not graded; instead they evaluate the program at semester's end, through written evaluations, which they submit anonymously to the New York Civil Rights Coalition.

The program is supported by tax-deductible private donations, from foundations, corporations, and the public at large. Questions about the New York Civil Rights Coalition's Unlearning Stereotypes -- Civil Rights and Race Relations Project may be addressed to the program's administrator, Michael Meyers, Executive Director of the New York Civil Rights Coalition, at (212) 563-5636 or the Acting Project Manager, John Nidiry, at (212) 563-5636. Requests for information can also be made through our website.