Milton Programming: The Defamation Experience
By LIVIA WOOD ‘19
On Wednesday, November 7, students and faculty gathered in the ACC for a program called “The Defamation Experience.” According to its website, The Defamation Experience is a “unique interactive diversity program,” containing three important sections: “the play, the deliberation, [and] the discussion.” The “play” involves an African American woman who sues a Jewish American man for defamation. The “deliberation” introduces a participatory element; it is revealed that the audience is the jury, and each audience member must give an initial vote. Members of the audience are then allowed to argue their stance and make a final decision. Finally, a facilitator from the Defamation Experience leads the audience in an honest, open discussion about the exercise.
The Defamation Experience has been brought to Milton by the Office of Multicultural Development (OMCD) and the Deans’ Office. I interviewed Heather Flewelling, the Director of OMCD, on November 2nd before the show had come to campus. Flewelling said that the two offices began looking at the event as a possibility last winter. She acknowledged that diversity programming—particularly in the past two years with speakers Rodney Glasgow and Rosetta Lee—has been lecture-based. In planning the event, she hoped that the participatory element of The Defamation Experience would allow Milton “to grapple… to talk… to act based on what [the community is] able to learn in front of each other.” Flewelling also said that often, although students and faculty want to learn, they want their education to be comfortable and entertaining. While she encourages people to “recognize that being uncomfortable isn’t necessarily bad,” she hoped the program would be entertaining.
The OMCD, according to Flewelling, hopes that The Defamation Experience will spurr Milton to participate in conversations tackling challenging and complex topics. Flewelling echoed the show’s playwright, Tod Logan, who said that he wrote the play in order to “encourage open, honest conversation that leads to greater understanding and empathy to combat today's prevailing trends." Flewelling also hoped that students and faculty took the time to look at the resources sent by the OMCD. She said that often, peoples’ source of discomfort lies “in the not knowing,” which is why she shared helpful material ahead of time. The resources, sent to the Upper School on October 30th, included an article on the arrest of two black men in Starbucks last spring, an article on the vandalizing of Boston’s Holocaust memorial, a “questions to consider” section, and definitions of the words segregation, racial profiling, anti-Semitism, and gentrification. Flewelling encouraged students and faculty to do research prior to the program in order to feel adequately prepared and to participate confidently.
Students and faculty responded to the play and following discussion differently in the ways leading up to the event; while some were excited, others were apprehensive. Flewelling noted that members of the Milton community expressed concern over the timing of the assembly after last week’s shootings in Pittsburgh and Kentucky which targeted Jewish and black people. She recognized that “some of [the community] is very raw,” but that the OMCD and Deans’ Office couldn’t have known that events like these would occur just before the planned programming. She said that “silence is not necessarily the same as safety,” and that “it’s really important that as a community, [Milton] learns how to engage with [one] another when things are emotional.”
The Defamation Experience offered students and faculty an opportunity to actively participate in a discussion about the intricate topics of “race, class, religion, gender, and the law,” according to the program’s website. The OMCD hopes that Milton will practice “engag[ing] with each other,” even “when it feels like there’s a tension point between [intellect, emotion, identity, experience, and behavior].” While every student reacted to the program differently, The Defamation Experience aimed to push boundaries while keeping its audience entertained.