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Bias Busters publish book for class, focus on Transgender community

September 25, 2016

Once a week, professor Joe Grimm teaches JRN 492, a class that is better known as Bias Busters. During the semester, the class assembles and publishes a book with 100 questions and answers about a specific topic.

In the past, Bias Busters has done books on veterans, Arab-Americans and African Americans, in addition to several other books, Grimm said.

The most recent book covered the subject of immigrants to the United States, and will be out before this year's election, Grimm said.

Grimm started the Bias Busters seminar class after creating a similar project of his own during his time at the Detroit Free Press. He published “100 Questions and Answers About Arab-Americans: A Journalist’s Guide.”

Once Grimm came to MSU, he was commissioned to create a 400-level class in MSU's School of Journalism.

Grimm said the university told him the class had to be different from JRN 300, but could be similar in that he could make a website like they did on the 300-level.

Grimm then designed a class in which students built a website on a specific topic and turned it into a book by the end of the semester. Thus, Bias Busters was born.

The book the Bias Busters class is producing this year is titled “100 Questions and Answers about Transgender People.”

Regarding the importance of a book about the transgender community, Terri Powys, a journalism junior in the class, said, “I personally thought that I had a lot to learn about the transgender community and just how to speak to trans people correctly.”

Powys said that the fact Bias Busters was covering the transgender community was a considerable part of why she enrolled in the class.

“On top of having a really great opportunity to be a part of something incredible, I also get to learn a lot, which is really important to me,” Powys said. 

Professional writing junior Kalib Watson said he enrolled because Grimm reached out to him and asked him to consider joining.

Watson is an openly transgender male and believes the work of Bias Busters is important because the questions they answer are questions he wants people to know the answers to.

“There’s a lot of negative connotation around the way the way that people talk about trans people, and that’s because a lot of people are uneducated and they don’t know the answers that they’re looking for,” Watson said.

Similarly, Powys said, “Most trans people are only portrayed in the media, unfortunately, after something terrible happens to them, whether it’s a hate crime or them being murdered or some type of unfortunate circumstance." 

Because of this, she believes the media needs to do a better job of portraying positive situations involving the trans community.

Both Powys and Watson said they are glad to be doing the work and to be helping the transgender community.

“I think that we, as a society, definitely have a lot of room to grow as far as knowledge and the trans community and transgender people and their process and things that they go through,” Powys said. 

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