Sensitivity in Pontiac

"An open keg of gunpowder with people smoking around it." That is how the host of a discussion show on a Pontiac, Mich., radio station describes his city. The explosive potential lies in the makeup of the factory town's population of 80,000. Of the total 30,000 are blacks, 4,000 Spanish Americans, 13,500 whites from the South, and the rest local whites. Tension in Pontiac, and in its schools, has been consistently high ever since two men were killed and fire bombs thrown in a spillover of the 1967 riot in nearby Detroit. Last year, at the urging of concerned blacks and whites, the city's school board agreed to appropriate $25,000 for the first system-wide school "sensitivity" training program in the nation. The purpose: to give whites and minority groups in the schools a better understanding of each other, in the hope of reducing distrust and antagonism.

Shortly before school reopened this month, 1,100 teachers, 80 administrators and 300 parents and students gathered in Pontiac's Northern High School auditorium to participate in a "human-re lations institute." For many, the three-day course was a shocking experience. At the opening gathering, Joseph Paige, 38, a bearded black who holds a doctorate in science and who ran the program, set the tone of what was to follow by denouncing "spineless administrators," scornfully calling them "castrated" and "niggers."

After splitting into groups of 25, the black and white participants were instructed by their group leaders (who had been given intensive advance training) to make contact with each other, first by gesture, then by touch. During one of the exercises, in which emotions had to be expressed without speech, pats soon gave way to hugs between men and women and between blacks and whites. Some of the women could not hide their discomfort at their first physical contact with blacks. After one handshake, a black man said to a white woman, "Look--see--none of it rubbed off." One older white man obstinately moved off to a corner and refused to participate, saying, "I wasn't brought up this way."

Tears and Threats. Ghetto language --alien to the genteel mores of the white middle-class teachers--filled the air. Provocative statements worked out in advance were brutally introduced by group leaders in discussion sessions to bring out basic attitudes. One example: "Almost without exception, black teachers are inferior to white teachers." The 70 leaders cajoled and insulted the participants in an effort to push them into understanding, or at least into receptivity. One woman burst into tears under the pressure. Another at first wilted under an explosive attack and then threatened to resign from her teaching job. A few older teachers walked out.

Pontiac's program was developed by school-system officials and citizen volunteers together with Paige, who runs the United States Urbanics Corp., a sensitivity-training firm. The program's announced aim was to increase teachers' and administrators' awareness of the needs, feelings and aspirations of pupils and their parents--particularly black and Spanish-American pupils and parents. There will be five more follow-up sessions, each three hours long, during the school year, to keep this awareness at a high level.

Appraisals of the program's success are as varied as the emotions it stirred up. Says James Hawkins, principal of an elementary school: "It did some good if it did nothing more than develop some awareness." Sonya Friedman, a clinical psychologist who served as a group leader, notes that some younger teachers "showed signs of coming around," but that older ones had difficulty changing their ways. She also complains that the give and take was all one way: blacks lashing out at whites, and whites taking it. "There was no cry the whites could make that the blacks could hear," she says.

School Superintendent Dana Whitmer believes it is too early to appraise the results. "It will depend on whether there are improvements in education," he insists. But last week an early return came in. Some 250 white teachers joined 170 black colleagues in a one-day walkout to enforce their demand for the appointment of a black assistant superintendent. All of the strikers lost a day's pay and risked losing their jobs. It was the first time the whites and blacks of Pontiac's schools had made common cause over such an issue.

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