AEJMC Trailblazers of Diversity Interview with Mary Ann Weston

Speaker 1: Today is Wednesday, August 8 2018. My name

is Melissa Garza and I am interviewing Marianne Weston professor emeritus of associate professor

emeritus at McGill and Northwestern University for the AMG, AMC trailblazers of diversity oral

history project. Thank you, Marianne for agreeing to do this interview. And I would like you to know

that the interview will be housed at the Briscoe Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

Speaker 2: Yes.

Speaker 1: So we'll also post

the interview on the internet. So I'd like to begin by asking about your early years,

and how you got interested in journalism. In your time in Detroit, perhaps?

Speaker 2: Okay, well,

I guess my first interest in journalism was when I was in high school,

and I happened to go to a wonderful and diverse High School in Omaha, Nebraska,

Central High School, where there were many, many different kinds of people. And we were all there

together. And so that immediately thrust me into a diverse environment. The journalism program there,

as it turned out, was excellent. And my teacher there, Harvey sahlberg, was the one that really

sort of helped me pursue my interest in journalism. So when I graduated, the only place I

wanted to go was Northwestern University, because they had a good journalism program. I did and

continued on with journalism from there. Why journalism? Unlike,

I think a lot of people who always say, Oh, I love to write, I do love to write. But the

impetus for journalism, I think, was that I love to get out and see new things and meet new people.

And having a profession that would allow me to do this and also allow me to do

something that was useful in the world, I think was what solidified my interest.

Speaker 1: So if I just could follow up

very quickly on Omaha, Nebraska doesn't spring to mind immediately as the most diverse place

in the United States. Can you describe the actual diversity that you saw there in your high school?

Speaker 2: Yes. And remember, Omaha was the

birthplace of Malcolm X. There is a long standing African American community there, as well as

let's see, in our high school, there were African Americans, Native Americans, Japanese Americans

whose families had been relocated during World War Two Hispanics, mainly Mexican Americans.

And everyone was this was a high school in the middle of the city. And it was

what they called Open enrollment. In other words, anybody could go there who wanted to enroll as

well as people who happen to live in a certain area. So it also was very good academically, so

a number of people from other parts of the city, the South Side, where there were a lot of people

from the Czech Republic, the north side, African Americans, and also Jewish students decided to

come to Central so it was a very big, not meant not melting pot, really, but salad bowl mixture.

Speaker 1:

So you became interested in journalism in high school? What was your first professional job?

Speaker 2: My first professional job

was not in Omaha, because I went to the local newspaper, the world Herald and asked for a job.

And they said, Keep in mind, this is the late 50s, early 60s. They said we haven't

had a woman in our newsroom since World War Two, and we're not going to start with you.

Speaker 1: So they actually said that to you.

Speaker 2: Yes, they did actually. So

similarly, the wire services at that time had no women in their bureaus in Omaha at least.

I, with the help of some contacts from my father, I went across the river from Omaha

to Council Bluffs, Iowa, where I had actually lived as a very small child,

and I got a summer job at the Council Bluffs not Curl, which is still there, I believe and it was

the local daily newspaper for Council Bluffs. So that was my first journalism professional job.

Speaker 1: Was that

before Mattel or after Madonna was the summer of my first

Speaker 2: summer after my first year at macdill

Speaker 1: Okay.

So what kind of stories did you become interested in there? What did you work on? Do you recall?

Speaker 2: It was

one of those summer rotations where I started out proofreading and learn that all the brides

that summer carried stephanotis I think that's where you pronounce it in their bridal bouquets.

And I then rotated through a number of jobs writing mostly feature stories,

you know, police stories off the blotter, religion stories, etc, etc. I think concerning diversity,

the newsroom, of course, was all white. But concerning diversity, one of the things I found

was, as I was looking for something else in the religion writers and desk drawer,

I found a copy of the Green Book, which is now fairly well known. Is

was a book showing African Americans who were traveling in the south where they could safely

go and stay, because at the time, the South was still segregated civil

rights law hadn't been passed. And this was a total revelation to me.

Speaker 1: Okay, so this is the summer, your first summer

after? After middle? Right? Right. So then, how long were you there? Where did you go next?

Speaker 2: Oh, goodness, my whole resume.

Speaker 1: Or just give me

the high points. Yeah. You went to Detroit and what your? Yes.

Speaker 2: Okay. That was after I graduated.

During high or during college, I had a variety of jobs, including a suburban paper, outside

of Chicago, the Lake Forest paper, which gave me a very interesting view of what was

then considered to be high society of Chicago. The paper at that time had two society pages,

one for people in the social register, which was a compendium of the high society,

and one for people who weren't in the social register. Anyway, after I graduated

Speaker 1: from Adele, I, what year was that?

Speaker 2: That was 1963. So way back.

After I graduated from Adele, I spent time

traveling in Europe. And then I got a job on a paper in England, in the county of Surrey,

which is outside London, and work there for a time after that, went to Spain for a short time,

and eventually came back home to the states where I got a job on the Detroit Free Press.

Speaker 1:

So anywhere they are in 1967, when the riots occurred, right. Tell me about that experience.

Speaker 2; Well, it was. It was traumatic,

and it was radicalizing, I think, for the whole staff of the Free Press. The Free Press,

I realized later was perhaps more progressive than a lot of papers. It had many women reporters,

a number of people of color, who were reporters and editors, not high in the hierarchy, but at

least they're in the room. during the riots, of course, it was all hands on deck. And so everyone

covered a number of things during the riots. And this was what I think a number of people

seem to think was their first time in combat, their first time under fire.

The Free Press became, as newspapers did in those days, became a center for other reporters

coming into town because this was a national story. And I remember somebody on the phone

who was trying to get an interview with a police officer, I believe police official,

she had come from I think maybe written I'm not sure. And she said it's okay officer.

I've been under fire before I know how to handle myself in a war zone.

And I thought this is Detroit, but it was somewhat of a Warzone I think concerning my own role. The

one of the things that I like to look back on is I, along with another reporter at the Free Press,

Judy Brune wrote a series of articles called the poor pay more. And it was a

it was research into how people who live in the inner city, the ghetto,

the places where poor people live, which was, in fact, mostly black and Detroit

have to pay more for the necessities of life because they had to go to corner stores,

they didn't have transportation to go to the big supermarkets. The supermarkets in the suburbs

were much cleaner, brighter, charged less. So I documented that in a series of stories.

And as it would happen, it ran the week before the riots started.

And, in fact, one of the corner stores that I had written about burn not burned, it was attacked,

it was looted. during the riots. The owner of the store sued me and the free press for

inciting people to loot the store. They said in the suit, it had been burned. In fact,

it hadn't although it had been flooded by the water from the many fires nearby. And they sued

me for telling me how that store had overcharged its customers had sold them things that would not

be sold in other neighborhoods. Needless to say the suit was eventually withdrawn.

I think it was withdrawn, eventually, at least settled, it never went to trial.

Speaker 1: So just to clarify something.

What I hear you saying is that prior to the riots prior to the Kerner commission report, there was

representation at least somewhat of minorities in the newsroom at the Detroit Free Press, correct?

Speaker 2: Yes, there was,

I would say considerable, reputable representation.

A couple of stories I wrote. Before the riots Well, before the riots, I wrote one on

outstanding African American women in Detroit. And among them, this is one of my treasured memories

was Esther Edwards, who was the older sister of Barry Gordy. And who was heavily involved,

she was one of the executives of Motown Records. So to interview her, I went to what is now

the Motown museum called hitsville, USA, on West Grand Boulevard in Detroit and interviewed

her and, you know, saw the whole place, she was very proud of what they were doing and

introduced me to Barry Gordy and the other people there and said, Oh, I wish you could meet this.

This little boy that is doing such wonderful work. We call him little Stevie Wonder,

Oh, my gosh, Stevie Wonder wasn't around just and so I never got to meet him.

But the Free Press did a lot of stories like that. They did stories on housing integration.

I went to a suburban meeting where this was an all white suburban,

it was thought that an African American couple was going to move in. In fact, they did

no violence erupted, although there was great, great hostility in the community toward them.

And we never ended up doing a story in the paper about it. But the free press was doing

a lot of those stories. They, as I said, I didn't realize at the time because I had no

model to compare it to but they were much more progressive, I think then a number of papers.

Speaker 1: And you

mentioned also that there were a number of minority journalists

already on the paper prior to the riots. Yeah, correct. Because of course, one of the

narratives that we have is that everybody got hired after the Kerner commission report that yes,

when. So this is interesting, and although you've qualified that by saying that they

weren't in high positions, they were at least some bright African or African American women as well.

Speaker 2: Yes. Yes. Let's see. Susan Watson was hired,

I think, shortly after I was and she was an outstanding reporter and became a columnist,

had a regular column in the free press for a very long time. Let's see, there was another reporter

who had just graduated, I think, from Columbia. Or maybe she left to go to Columbia, I forget.

But anyway, she was unfortunately killed in a car accident very shortly after. So this didn't happen

in Detroit, but I, you know, deprived the world of someone who would have been a very good reporter.

We had other African American reporters I know are, are the free presses,

classical music critic was African American. I don't recall exactly how many or who, but it

was certainly something that was on the radar of the people at Free Press Well, before the riots.

Speaker 1: So it sounds

like there was no need to challenge any of the diversity, or did you not there?

Speaker 2: No. So at least,

to my mind, as my consciousness was developed at that point.

Speaker 1: And so and you were on the

team of the staff that won the Pulitzer Prize for the coverage of the riots, z?

Speaker 2: Yes. And it

was the Free Press staff that won for local reporting. So I guess we all shared,right.

Speaker 1: So when did you leave the Free Press?

Speaker 2:

Well, let's see. I left in probably 72 or 73. When we moved to Evanston, Illinois. Okay.

Speaker 1: So is this

the beginnings of your transition to academia? Or,

Speaker 2: yes, in some ways,

it was also my transition to motherhood which coincided. But,

let's see, one thing I should mention, and that was that the Free Press had

the riots were in July of '67. In November of 67, the free press and all the newspapers in

Detroit went on strike. And that strike lasted nine months. So a great deal happened, you know,

a lot of the things we talked about happening in 1968, the Free Press couldn't cover. I was

on a fledgling TV interview show that covered a number of these things, including Martin Luther

King's visit to grosse point, which was a suburb, an all white suburb of Detroit,

which caused a certain amount of controversy as well. So I was still doing some journalism,

but not at Free Press. Anyway. So we moved to Evanston in 73. And that changed things a lot.

Speaker 1: That was to follow

your husband's career? Yes. Yes. And he was not a journalist.

Speaker 2: I think he was, and he was, he is a lawyer, and he

got a job as a lawyer for Northwestern University. And I think another impetus for

his pursuing and taking this job was that Evanston was considered and

for the time integrated suburb it had voluntarily integrated its schools, its public schools,

several years before, and as a couple of two young children, this appeal to us greatly.

Speaker 1: Right. So

how did you end up in academia? Exactly. Okay.

Speaker 2: It was,

I guess, you would say, circumstance and proximity. After doing a number of things,

freelancing, working at a museum, dedicated to Native Americans, and doing some

adjunct teaching at Northwestern, eventually, in the late 80s, I was hired full time on the staff

of macdill. And this too, I think, had to do with diversity because their faculty was very heavily

white and male, maybe all white and maybe all male, I'm not sure. No, it wasn't all male. Sorry.

And so I think my hiring had something to do with the fact that I was a woman.

Speaker 1: So talk a little bit about your

work on diversity. You have a, you started a class there. You've done a lot of research on Native

Americans, and you did the CO editing, the US news coverage of racial minorities. So I'll just let

you talk about how you got started with maybe that class on diversity, how to happen, what kind of

reception Did you get for these projects, right.

Speaker 2:

As I say, the Faculty was overwhelmingly white and male when I started and the contrast between

that and newsrooms where I had worked was striking to me, it was also striking that

there wasn't a lot of diversity in the curriculum. So it wasn't necessarily because of resistance

as much as nobody had decided to do it. So I guess, sort of chronologically, I tried

to bring in diverse speakers and make assignments to my students that would bring them into diverse

environments. When I was teaching, reporting and writing courses. I started teaching a course on

the history and issues of journalism that had been taught for a long time by a very highly esteemed

colleague, Dick Schwarzlose, who was just a fabulous colleague. And as I looked at the class,

I decided, I, you know, to suit my own interests. And what I thought were the needs of the students,

I brought in a great deal more diversity, a great deal more on women and feminism, a great deal more

on people of color and their impact on their representation in and their struggles with

the mainstream press, primarily, it was focused on the mainstream press, although we did bring in

some of the other papers and efforts as well. So all of these efforts were received, passed

positively by my colleagues, and about your students and students pretty much as well there.

It was some grumbling about whether this was going to be on the test and that kind of thing in the

history and issues class because it was a required class, and people who might not be interested

in diversity were, however, I think it resonated with the students of color. In fact, just

last year, which has been how many decades since I started teaching this class,

I had a note from an African American woman student who had visited Ida B. Wells,

birthplace in Holly Springs, Mississippi. And it reminded her of the class that I taught,

not terribly well, at that point, because I was just, I think she was in perhaps the first

history class I taught. But she still remembered that experience, and contacted me, she is now

PhD on the faculty of a university in Georgia. And that really touched me that

something like that resonated with students over such a long time. So I tried and,

you know, continued all the years that I caught to try to keep diversity as a major component of that

class. Then, I also began a class called reporting and reporting across race and culture. And the

idea there was both to teach PE teach students about various racial and cultural theories and

differences, but also to get them out of their reporting comfort zones, and get them into a

situation where they were able to report cultures and races that were very different from their own.

Speaker 1: Do you have

a recollection of approximately when you might have introduced that course?

Speaker 2: No, I don't. I'm really sorry.

Speaker 1: Do you know I

suspect it was the 90s. The mid 90s. in there. Yeah. I

Speaker 1:

had there been a course like that before that you were aware of at Northwestern?

Speaker 2: at Northwestern.

I don't know about the whole university.

Speaker 1: In the middle.

Speaker 2:

No, no, not at least not in my experience. Now, maybe farther back there hadn't been

Speaker 1: and as far

as proposing a core a new course. You didn't meet with any resistance or know.

Speaker 2: The way of course was proposed,

I'm sure it's similar in a lot of other places is you wrote out a syllabus, your goals, your, the

way you were going to teach it the materials, you were going to use all of that and you submitted it

to a committee, and if the committee approved it, it would be round on a trial basis for a certain

length of time and Then it never was added to the, to the permanent curriculum. But it was taught as

a I don't know what they called it the add on sort of elective special topics, topics. Yeah.

Speaker 1:

Excuse me. And so just to give a little bit of demographic information

that most of your students were white,

Speaker 1: Most of them at Northwestern, it is a

relatively expensive school. And yet, you felt more or less a positive reception to these

overtures, Introduction to to others that probably most of them had not had much contact with.

Speaker 2: That's right there.

I think Northwestern over the years has tried very hard to, to have more students of color,

and it's succeeded more or less over the years. So the classes were never all white.

And in fact, a class like this would, I would attract perhaps more students of color than,

you know, some other class would. But we also had a number of students, I was really surprised

at students who would come from all white private schools or schools in the suburbs,

and had really no experience with diversity.

So some of them would be quite challenged, I think, by a course like this.

Speaker 1: Okay. So talk a little bit about

your research interests. I know, you, Native Americans, there's another interest of yours.

And you actually worked at an art museum for a while. So talk a little bit about that.

Speaker 2: This, before I went to McGill, or before I

went on the faculty there, I worked for a time at a museum in Evanston, that housed a collection of

Native American artifacts that had been donated by a local person. And it became

the place for all the children in the Chicago area to go to learn about Native people.

I of course, learned a huge amount about Native people

and their cultures and their diversity from my time at the museum. So when I got to Northwestern,

and I was looking at research projects, I did a number of them. But one of the

ones that stuck with me the most, the ones that I pursued most deeply, were

representations of Native people in the mainstream press. My rationale was the mainstream press was

for, you know, probably most to all of the 20th century, the main way people got their news.

And since a fair because native people are not a huge swath of the population,

then it means a good number of people don't have direct experience with natives. So

how do they learn about them? Well, they learn certainly from popular culture,

that they are supposed to learn the reality of Native Americans from the press. So what

was the press doing? How are they portraying this reality of Native people? That was what I

set out to research. This was in the very early days of the internet. So we didn't have the

kind of search tools that we do now. And so I ended up focusing my research around

certain events that happened that hold native people into prominence in the press. And I

started in the 20s. And I went through various events up to the African, maybe 90s, maybe 1990s.

And just looked at, what stereotypes were perpetuated, if so what they were, if not,

how native people were portrayed. And it proved to be a really good model. I think.

It was a model that I then started to apply later on to

images of Arab Americans because it appeared to me really, in the first decade or so,

of the 20th century, I didn't get much beyond 911. But in the first part of the 20th 21st century,

Arab Americans were undergoing the same sort of stereotyping that natives were.

Speaker 1:

Okay. So just to clarify, the museum that you work at was the Mitchell Museum of the

American Indian in Evanston, right. And approximate How long did you work there?

Speaker 2: I'm not sure. Okay,

several years, couple of years I came before going to Northwestern. Okay, full time.

Speaker 1: So and and did you use your native

Native American research work in your teaching as well? And I did, yes. And was that well received?

or How did the students accept that or it was, it was sometimes received with sort of puzzlement.

Speaker 2:

One of the things I did, this class started with talking about modes of communication. And

one of the modes of communication courses, oral communication. And I personally think

and thought then that oral communication isn't given enough credit. So I would

bring in some native artifacts that were used in, you know, traditional native oral communication,

a wampum, belt or something like that. And that puzzled the students a little bit because,

of course, they were totally totally in written and broadcast and that kind of

thing. Oral Communication didn't seem to have a place in their lives. So I was trying to show

its importance. And then, of course, just in the general history of mass communications, pointing

out where native people figured prominently how they were portrayed, it was all part of the mix.

Okay.

Speaker 1: So you also did this,

co edited the US news coverage of racial minorities, 1934 to 1996.

What was it like to work on that project, and that was very interesting.

Speaker 2: I worked with Beverly deep keever,

from the University of Hawaii, and the late Carolyn Martin Dale, Carol Martin Dale,

from Youngstown State. And it was a collaborative project in which we enlisted a number of authors

to try and assess in their research and their essays, coverage of various groups. And

so we did, you know, Asian and Pacific Islanders, African Americans, Hispanics,

Native Americans, etc. And I hope it's been a helpful book over the years.

Speaker 1: That's how significant span from 1934 to 1996. I'm

wondering, in the early years of that there, there must have been considerably less coverage than in?

Speaker 2: Well, I think we chose 1934

for a number of reasons. But one of them was the New Deal and how it changed a number of things

and brought people some people into the mainstream who who hadn't been

Now certainly didn't do it greatly. I know it did for Native people.

More than they had been again, I have to say, because they've still been marginalized.

But we had to have an arbitrary beginning point. And that seemed a good place to start.

Speaker 1: And then you touched on your

work on Arab Americans, the capitalists was that you looked at it before and after 911

was the catalyst for that project. 911, or had you already been working on it?

Speaker 2: No. I was, well,

I, I was looking to do more on Arab Americans, because I'm Arab American. And it seemed,

as I began to look more systematically at coverage, that there wasn't a lot also,

Detroit has one of the largest Arab American communities in the country. And the free press was

a good place I thought to start. So I combined both of those things and as a matter of fact,

I think my last visit to the free press for that project was a week before 911 Well, of course 911

changed a lot and changed everything. And so I was also coming up against a number of other

projects that I was working on, not research projects, but other things. So I after 911 did

a project looking at how Arab Americans had been portrayed immediately thereafter. And

what was interesting was the hostility, except in a few distinct cases hadn't really surfaced.

There was this great outpouring. You may remember George Bush initiated an iftaar. a

feast at the end of the Ramadan fast. At the White House, I think it was after 911,

not too long after he, in other words, reached out positively to Arab Americans. Obviously,

that changed over time. But the research project was a snapshot of that immediate post 911 window.

Speaker 1: So I do want to just back up, since

you mentioned to try it again, and refer back to your earlier comments about the progressive,

relatively progressive nature of the Detroit Free Press, certainly,

at that time, at least vcv many other metric major metropolitan daily newspapers. But I'm curious,

did you have any perception of how the Free Press compared with the detroit news?

Speaker 2: We had our prejudices?

perceptions? Yes, the person now I don't, I don't know that statistics. I don't know

how many people were in their newsroom. But the perception was that the news was more conservative

and quieter. It was certainly more conservative in its coverage. It was called to account I think,

by the African American community at various times because of its coverage.

Speaker 1: And just I apologize for asking

us out of order, but just tell me to continue with that. So when you began looking for a job?

You didn't apply to the news? Or did you only apply to the Free Press? No.

Speaker 2: Actually,

close friend from a deal was a Detroiter who was working for the Free Press. They

asked her to suggest some people to hire, she suggested me and a number of other people.

Some of whom ended up at the free press with me. So that was that was how I was actually

interviewing at the same time with a paper in Chicago and decided on the Free Press.

Speaker 1:

Okay. wouldn't have been the Chicago Tribune was it?

Speaker 2: It was Chicago today.

It was owned by the tribune at that point. Okay.

Speaker 1: Oh, okay.

So what kind of reaction Did you hear from students about the Arab American

representations and the analysis of them? Because I would imagine that's considerably different.

Speaker 2:

Yes. And I don't really have a clear reading on that. Because

at that point, I was also doing a lot of traveling for muddles, international programs, and global

programs. And for various reasons, my teaching had been cut back a certain amount. So

I never really got a clear reading, you know, certainly nobody jumped up and objected.

But there can be also, you know, a certain amount of passive disapproval. But I, I can't say that I

encountered that. I do remember one student and I can't remember what class it was in,

decided she was going to do something on Islam. And she ended up with a woman who was teaching

her how and why. devout Muslim women wear hijab, and put this was a Filipina student, she was,

she was not Muslim. And she put a hit job on her and my student came back and she said,

I wish I could wear what? So this was her choice, it wasn't my prompting,

and was spurred by a discussion between a pair of Americans in class I do not know.

Speaker 1: But potentially so.

So given today's changing news, media,

what importance do you feel is being put on diversity? Now?

Speaker 2: You know, I think it's kind of a two edged sword,

that the news media are so fragmented at this point that on the one hand, it gives

people of color, much greater opportunity, a much greater access

to media a much greater way to have their voices unfiltered, relatively on unfiltered heard.

But on the other hand, it gives those who have no interest in diversity who are hostile

to those points of view, a venue to simply access media that shuts those views out.

I think the mainstream press and the mainstream media are made. This may be,

you know, starry eyed idealism. But it seems to me that they have profited from the lessons of

the 90s in the early 2000s. To have more diverse staffs and more diverse points of view. I'm hoping

that's the case. But again, the mainstream media isn't as strong or persuasive as it once was.

Speaker 1:

So what do you see is the future of diversity in the news media? in the academy? I know that you

retired in 2005. But what's your perception, at least at this point?

Speaker 2: I see the mainstream media. And this is largely

based on my daily readings, of course of the times and the posts, but also a great deal of online

reading of a number of things. I think the mainstream media is fairly well

diversified, not as much as it should be. And I see still really distressing

images of Native people, Arab Americans, Islam, Asian Americans, Hispanics,

African Americans still popping up not as often not as blatantly, but it still happens.

I I don't know. You know, I can't Oh, dear. I'm sorry. I can't read the tea leaves. But

I think there are more diverse voices out there. That's my perception.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so but specifically, do you? Do you have a sense of what the academy and what we

as journalism educators are doing at this point? I mean, it seems like everything you were doing was,

you were a trailblazer. So, and yet, we see the outcome today, it's not quite matching,

or even close to matching our purpose, or the reality of the world that we

live in our demographics. Is there anything else that we can be doing?

Speaker 2: That's a great question. And as

I think, a provost at Northwestern said to me, when I was on one of the many committees

for diversifying the faculty there, it's a pipeline problem, as they say, in other words,

it's a matter of getting people interested, and then getting them into the media, once they have

completed their applications. Now, I am told that applications for journalism schools are up. Now,

that's positive. Economics work against people of color so often, not always, but very often. So

that needs to be worked on. I know. There are many programs, what there's one at the

Washington Post I know of that. mentor young people of color, who are interested in the media,

and also just interested in setting their sights for for college and university higher.

All of those things are important. Why hasn't it changed? Well, our circumstances have changed.

For one thing, we have a very different regime in Washington, that has led to a very different

public atmosphere. And that has a lot to do with it, too.

So, you know, because it hasn't changed a lot, doesn't mean it hasn't changed at all.

And I guess we have to just keep, keep working on it as hard as we can keep renewing our efforts.

Speaker 1: Okay, we have

a few more minutes. And I wanted to segue back to another point that you mentioned earlier. And that

goes to your impetus for looking at diversity issues, both professionally and in the academy

and that relates to your own background as an Arab American. Would you talk a little bit about

your family's history, and how that maybe affected your sensibilities and your viewpoint.

Speaker 2: Interestingly, hardly at all.

And the reason is, Arab Americans, of course, are, at least in the communities where I grew up.

We're not in the mainstream, but they were so few and far between

that it was almost unremarked on that you would have an Arab merchant in your town,

just like you might have a Jewish merchant in your town. Nobody, you know, made a particular

notice of it. Now, there were communities where there were many more Arab Americans where I think

the Arab presence was noticed. But in, you know, the community for my mother grew up. There were

a few families in the community where we live. You know, there were very few families that in

Speaker 1: Nebraska,

yeah, in Nebraska, and where was your mother's family from originally?

In Nebraska, you mean are in Lebanon? Yeah. So okay.

Speaker 2: So in the,

in the 19th century, a lot of peddlers a lot of young people from Lebanon came to this country,

mostly Christian, some Muslim. And they adopted I guess you would say, the,

the vocation of peddling. And the way it worked was you would pedal from farm to

farm or town to town with a pack on your back, you can see these packs. In fact, there's one

in Texas, there's a museum of many cultures or something like that in San Antonio, I think.

And they have a Lebanese peddlers pack in there. After you got enough money together, you would buy

a store, and you would have a general store. That was kind of the route that a number of

Arab Americans took. And that's the route my mother's family took. So it was also the

era of where the dominant narrative was melting pot, you fit into America. So you didn't display

you're in this case, Arab is, you know, we, and as it turned out, my thought, it seems like the one

thing that continues after so many cultural things are wiped out is food. And my aunt was

a great Lebanese cook, my mother didn't do it as much because my father didn't like the food.

Speaker 1: So your father was not Arabic? He was not

Speaker 2; No. So this

was my upbringing. It wasn't a huge emphasis. And it wasn't anything

that made me encounter diversity, because there were so few Arabs in our town.

Speaker 1:

So in point of fact, it was going to, as you mentioned earlier, going to the diverse High

School, that was more of a profound impact on their own history. Right. Okay. Yeah. So it's

been wonderful talking with you, Mary. And I'm wondering if there is anything else that

you would like to talk about or mentioned that I neglected to ask you, you feel is important.

Speaker 2: I think, in terms of my concern about

an intention to diversity, there was one other event that I still look back on, and that is,

during the Free Press nine months strike. I was at fairly loose ends. And one of the things I did was

to take a series of seminars that basically laid out the theory of what we would now call white

supremacy, white racism. And it, you know, gave it a theoretical framework. It was something I was,

you know, kind of experiencing but didn't have the theoretical background to really give a name to

and that I think, helped inform my ventures into looking more into diversity.

Speaker 1: Okay, well, thank you so much. Yeah.

Speaker 2: Thank you.

AEJMC Trailblazers of Diversity Interview with Mary Ann Weston

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