Grad student lectures on apartheid experience

Black-rimmed glasses sit on her nose, graded papers sit on the podium in front of her and students sit wide-eyed before her, staring with wonder at her wild, new hair-do. As graduate student Viola Milton, 31, prepares to teach her class about communications, she is pleased. This is exactly the stunned reaction she wanted.\n"She had her hair rolled in knobs all over her head. It distracted me the entire day in class. She's the kind of person who does that to see how you'll react," said freshman Nathan Mundy, a student in Milton's C122 Interpersonal Communications class last semester.\nBut her hairstyle is not the only way Milton tries to communicate. In order to better relate cultural communication, Milton often talks about her past and what it was like to grow up in a South African township.\nLife in South Africa was similar to the history of the South in the United States -- segregation was all over. Until apartheid was abolished in 1991, race determined boundaries. Milton recalled a time when even toilets were separated. She was forced to use a hole in the ground when she was about three. \n"I used to be terrified to go in there … what happens when you fall in the hole?" said Milton, laughing at her childhood fears. \nFear was more real and prevalent for her grandparents, though. Her great-grandmother was of Scottish and black-African descent. Because of her mixed race, she experienced pressure from both sides -- the whites discriminated against her for her black family, while the blacks in the market were confused because she was white. \nHer grandfather lived in the infamous District Six in Cape Town where, in 1966, "60,000 people ... were forcibly removed, their homes and businesses bulldozed to the ground," simply because they were not white, said Susan Taylor, writer for East Cape News, "one in six people in (South Africa) is HIV-positive." \nMilton said these numbers are probably even higher. She said AIDS has the "fastest growing infection rate in the world." \nBecause of her background in communications (she received bachelor's and master's degrees in the field), Milton is interested in how the epidemic is portrayed in the media. \n"I'd like to see reporters do something other than point fingers and assign blame," Milton said.\nMilton said one problem the media uses to assign blame deals with the Virgin Myth Theory. This myth suggests that if you have sex with a virgin, you can be cured of AIDS. Although the media makes it seem like a "black" problem, the idea itself probably originated in previous centuries in England with STDs like gonorrhea and syphilis, Milton said. \nSeeing the world from Milton's point of view and hearing her story helps students better understand their classes and their friends.\n"I'm not visibly marked in a way that causes me to be singled out," Trice said. "I've learned (through Viola) not to take my own situation for granted"