Reese Article

Imagine walking into the first day of Intro to American Government and having your professor, who is not even close to looking Asian, start a conversation with you in your native Cantonese.

Dr. Renford Reese, professor of political science and founder of the Colorful Flags program, does just that.

“I try to speak their language,” Reese said. “I can speak conversationally 20 different languages.”

This ability and interest in using language to relate to people by promoting mutual respect of ethnicity is the central premise of Reese's Colorful Flags program.

The program is directed towards schools and civil agencies to break down some of the barriers between different cultures through learning helpful phrases in other languages.

Reese hands out “Colorful Flags” cards in all of his classes and has his students spend time teaching each other about different cultures. He feels that this activity, like his program, “empowers them [those who can share about their culture], and it teaches us about their culture.”

“I have multiple roles here at Cal Poly,” Reese said. “My job is to teach. That's my first concern, that's my commitment to the students here, and I take my teaching very seriously. We say that we value diversity, but we have all these people who live beside us, work beside us, study beside us and we can't even say hello to them in their first language-and that seems to be fundamental,” Reese said.

Reese has always been interested in bridging the gap between ethnic groups. As a child, he grew up in the small, rural, segregated town of McDonough, Georgia. His father was one of the first black journalists to write for a major newspaper in the South, and his mother was his high school principal. Both of his parents were socially active and took part in the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

After seeing the uneven playing field for ethnic minorities, Reese made a commitment to dealing with public policy issues.

Reese went on to Vanderbilt University, where he earned a bachelor's degree in political science and master's degree in public policy. He then went to work in Seattle before continuing his education by earning a doctorate from USC. While there, Reese was selected to be a presidential fellow.

Reese chose to develop Colorful Flags as a community-based program because he was dissatisfied with race relations in society.

Since 1994, Colorful Flags has serviced 80,00o0 K-12 students in 17 school districts in California. The concept is part of the Los Angeles Human Relations Commission's 1996 Landmark Report on dealing with anti-immigrant sentiment and was featured on the cover of the 1997 edition of Multicultural Review. The program is also in use by the Los Angeles Police Department South Bureaus and the Pomona Police Department.

When a school district sends teachers to a Colorful Flags conference, they receive cassette and videotapes, and an orientation to the program and its background. The teachers that participate in the conference go back and act as liaisons between the program and their schools. Reese then gives assemblies to the students.

“We get their school libraries two video tapes; the teachers get a program guide, these cards and an audio tape,” Reese said. “The process is we let them identify what their five most spoken languages are. They report to us. We go to make these tapes.”

In Pomona, the five most spoken languages are Spanish; Vietnamese; Cantonese; Khmer, which is spoken in Kampuchea; and Tagalog, spoken in the Philippines.

“If you move over about five miles into Diamond Bar, then Korean becomes more prevalent,” Reese said. “Walnut has Spanish, Mandarin, Korean, Cantonese and Japanese, so it just depends on what region you're in.”

“The single most important incident that prompted me to come up with my concept was what happened to Latasha Harland in March of 1991,” Reese said. “She was an African-American teenager who was shot and killed by a Korean merchant. They fought over orange juice, and the teenager was shot in the back of the head and killed. So I asked myself after this tragedy, `Can situations like this be diffused before they escalate into violence? What if she would have walked in, said, “An yong ha sae yo?,” which is “hello, how are you doing?” in Korean, purchased something and walked out and said good-bue, “Annyonghee kaiseyyo” as she left? Would the same scenario have taken place?'” Reese doesn't think so. He's developed Colorful Flags to prevent such situations from happening again.

“This is a program that penetrates the bubble of mistrust, which is what our world needs,” Reese said. “We have to proactively engage the bubble of mistrust.”

Reese has been working on plays and films to communicate importance of mutual respect between cultures.

Reese's “Bus Stop Soliloquy” was performed during Black History Month last February. The play tells the story of a young African-American man and a young Korean man that have been sitting at the same bus stop for over a year and, yet, have never spoken. The play portrays their internal thoughts and stereotypes. This year “Bus Stop Soliloquy” has been turned into a film directed by Oscar-winning filmmaker and Hugh O. LaBounty fellowship endowee Saul Landau. The effort, produced by Martina Newberry, was marketed to PBS and BET.

Reese has just finished a second script, “Black Jack Chameleon.” It will be workshopped this year at Kaleidoscope, the theatre department's production during intercultural week.

This summer, Reese also began working on a book, “Crossing Cultures: Penetrating the Bubble of Mistrust.”

A board game version of the program has also been developed and is awaiting a manufacturer.

“The program moved to Cal Poly Pomona in the summer of 1997, and we've gotten fantastic support from the president {and} Dean Barbara Way,” Reese said.

“I dropped my car off at the auto mechanic in South Central Los Angeles to an elderly Korean gentlemen,” Reese said. “I came to him about four hours later, and I asked him if he had serviced my transmission. He said `Yes.' I asked him if he had serviced my muffler. He said,'Yes.' Then I looked him in his eyes, and I put my hand out, and then I said `Comop sin me dah,' than you in Korean. Well, first his mouth dropped open. Then his eyes started to water, because he had never heard an American, let alone an African-American, attempt to speak his language. He didn't care about my syntax, my grammar, my mechanics. The only thing he cared about was that I was using the most intimate vehicle that he know –his language- to show him that I care something about him and his culture.”