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With close
to a half of the month of the May complete, it seems apparent
that there is not a great upsurge of discussion of the May
reading. To be precise, there has been none -- all of the
discussion has centered on that handcuffing incident in Florida.
So it may be an appropriate time to ask why. There are, of
course, all of the pressures of time and work that keep us
from this task, but they are also present at other times,
and discussion still breaks out. We need to consider the possibility
that it is the article itself that is the cause of the silence.
Let
me confess my bias. I had a negative reaction to the article
when I read it about two weeks ago. But I told myself that
rather than prejudice the entire discussion, I should wait
to see how the discussion went and if others found virtue
in the article, before I voiced my criticisms. At this point,
rather than having no conversation at all, I have decided
to see if my criticisms of the article could lead to some
discussion.
This article
falls into a genre of white people writing about race which
I call the Pharisee genre, after the story in the Christian
gospels of the Pharisee who stood in the back of the temple
and prayed, "I thank you God that I am not a sinner like
other men." In this genre, the author provides an expose
of the ways in which other white people perpetuate racism,
and a condemnation of the failings of other white people to
confront racism. However, the author occupies some sort of
privileged, pristine space, where s/he can see all that is
wrong and racially unjust that other white people miss, and
avoid doing it her/himself. Consequently, the author sits
in judgment on the racial flaws of these other white people.
As a genre,
this sort of discourse has two primary negative effects. First,
it makes impossible for the safe place that needs to be established
if a honest and searching discussion of race is take place.
If the discourse divides along lines of the judges and judged,
the fear it necessarily invokes is that one will find oneself
among the judged, and there are few verdicts which white people
of good will fear more than being judged a racist. Second,
it engenders feelings of guilt, particularly when what it
purports to judge are actions that people may take without
conscious awareness of their effect. The reaction is "oh
my god, could I be doing racist things, even though I do my
best not to be a racist?" And guilt is a disabling emotion,
when what we desperately need in the US today on matters of
race is empowering emotions, that move us toward positive
action.
All of
this means that the Pharisee genre of "talking about"
race actually serves more as a discussion stopper than a discussion
starter.
What needs
to happen to have a honest and searching discussion about
race?
A good
point to begin might be to consider what our purpose in having
the discussion is. If the point is to ultimately empower people
to take positive action to undo some part of the negative,
and increasingly institutional, effects of racism, then the
discourse should not be organized around separating the judge
from the judged, the pure and the chaste from the sinner and
the fallen, the anointed from the unwashed. We are all sinners,
because racism is one of the original sins of American history,
part of the woof and weave of the fabric of American culture
and society of which we are part. When we are acculturated
into American culture and society, we acquire a way of seeing
the world through the lens of race, even when we struggle
against racism: it is inescapable, because one must even think
through and use the categories to undo them. This is true
of Americans of all races: we are acculturated into these
racial categories in different ways, but we are most certainly
all acculturated into them. No one is pure; no one is outside
of this system of power.
Just think
about it: what is more irrational, without the slightest reasonable
basis, than ordering and classifying human beings, according
them virtues and vices, on the basis of surface physical appearance.
Recall that powerful educational experience we still talk
about decades later, of the teacher in the Midwest that divided
a class of white children on the basis of eye color, and developed
an entire system of privileges and rights that went to students
of the preferred eye color: was not one of the profound messages
of that exercise the incredible arbitrariness and irrationality
of such a system of classification? Yet because of a history
and social structure which used just such a system of classification
to make one set of human being free and masters of their own
destiny and the other subject to the first, because there
is a social and political reality to the categories "African-American,"
"Latino," "Asian-American," and "white"
which emanates from that history, because there is a system
of inequality today which is still based on those categories,
we can not escape these categories: the original sin of racism
is with all of us. The only difference is how we approach
that sin: whether we struggle with it or acquiesce to it,
whether we reflect on it and work against it or passively
accept it and perhaps even promote it.
Once we
understand that we are all sinners, we can turn to the wannabe
Pharisees, and either they can work with us sinners or get
out of the way, but that we are not impressed with their sitting
in judgment on the rest of humankind.
What would
a different type of discussion of race look like?
Let me
tell a story which both models such a discussion, and provides
a parable for it.
For ten
of the years I taught, my students at Clara Barton HS participated
in the We The People competition, a national civics competition
on the Constitution and Bill of Rights. For all ten of those
years, we won the NYC Championship; in four of those years,
we won the NY State Championship; and twice we placed fourth
in the nation. The classes I brought to the competition were
all students of color (in 14 years of teaching, I never had
a single white student in my classes), and predominantly immigrant,
poor and female. And we regularly bested classes from elite
schools in NYC, NY State, and the nation.
The second
year I took a class to the state competition, a number of
incidents took place. It was not until we got back from the
state competition that my students told me what had happened.
Our school was housed in the same hotel as the school from
Long Island, which was every bit as white, native born and
upper class as we were of color, immigrant and poor. The night
before the competition, male students from the LI school had
approached African-American male students from our school
and made comments such as, "I hear you come from Clara
Barton. Isn't that a school of black pussies?" (Our school
has once been a school for nursing, and had a mostly female
student body.) A couple of the LI students had been following
female students from our school around the hotel, and had
tried to push their way into one of the girls' rooms. There
clearly had been a conscious attempt to intimidate and harass
our students, probably -- if we attribute the least malevolent
of motives, to 'psych' them out for the next day's competition.
I was
outraged, and wrote a letter of protest to the coordinator
of the state competition. I received a call from the teacher
of the LI school, who said he couldn't believe that his students
would do anything like this, and asked me for a description
of the offending parties. My students supplied a rather detailed
description, which I passed on. The teacher of the LI school
said that he had spoken to the students involved, and that
they denied that they had done what they were accused of doing.
The structure of the competition is that each school remains
in their own room, and the judges circulate to see teams from
each school, so that students see very little of students
from other schools. These individuals had made such an impression
on my students that they could provide very detailed descriptions
of them. I did not ask for anyone to be punished, but I certainly
thought that an apology was in order, both from the students
in question and the school. None was forthcoming.
Both my
students and I were left with a very bitter taste in our mouths.
For my own part, the competition experience was one of intense
bonding with my students. We would spend holidays, weekends,
before school and after school working on preparations for
the competition, for I knew that we needed to work triply
hard to overcome all of the social and cultural advantages
students from elite backgrounds had. By the time the competition
ended, these students were my children, and I would defend
them as fiercely as any father, and hurt for them as deeply
as any mother. My students knew that, and I think that they
initially withheld the information of what happened from me
because they thought it would hurt my feelings to hear that
white students had done this. Their hurt was equally intense,
because this competition gave them a sense that they could
accomplish great things with hard work, and this sort of experience
suggested that there would be folks just waiting to snatch
those great things from them when they appeared within reach.
One student was on a television program years later, and she
recalled this incident in her recounting of her school experience.
The reality
was that my students were quite sheltered: they lived in neighborhoods
with a great deal of violence (this was the height of the
crack epidemic in NYC), and so their parents were very protective,
largely allowing them to only go back and forth to school,
and requiring that they spend much of the rest of their time
in their apartments. The only white people most of them had
interacted with were their teachers and cops. This was the
first occasion that many had much interaction with white peers
-- there certainly were none in our school.
Over time,
and after a number of other incidents, I began to reflect
on what was happening, and how I was handling it as a teacher.
It gradually dawned on me that what I had tried to do was
probably the first instinct of every parent for children they
loved, but especially of parents of color in a racist society
-- to protect them from the cruelty of the world, and to fight
on their behalf when they were wronged. But it also became
clear to me that all that I had managed to leave my students
with was a sense of being wronged, of having been on the receiving
end of an injustice. And that was not good enough. Even if
I had been successful in obtaining an apology, and even if
I had protected them from similar incidents, what good would
what that do when I was no longer there? Most of these students
went on to colleges and universities where they were a small
numerical minority -- what was I doing to prepare them for
that experience, with all of its culture shock, and to give
them the tools to manage it? Those years, the school psychologist
had her office next to my office as UFT leader, and she, an
African-American women, and I would often talk about these
things. It was she who pointed out to me that what I was going
through the same sort of struggles and the same sort of learning
experiences that parents of African-American children go through,
as they struggle to raise their children in a racist society.
A new
approach gradually took shape when I would prepare my students
for participation in the competition. I would raise from the
start the negative experiences that had taken place in the
past, and we would talk about strategies that the students
could use to handle such encounters. We discussed it specifically
as attempts to throw them 'off their game' in the competition,
and the need to not let them succeed in doing that. When you
think about it, you can see that this was a model and a metaphor
for how to think about and handle negative encounters with
white peers in college and throughout their life. To know
it is coming, and to be ready to deal with it. It was an approach
that empowered them to deal with the problem, so that my presence
and my intervention would be unnecessary.
Toward
the end of my run in the competition, one of my classes had
made it to the final round of the national competition, which
was held on Capitol Hill in the hearing room of the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee. There were my students, all dressed
up in their Sunday best, discussing the great constitutional
issues of the day. One team in the class had to discuss the
Second Amendment, and gave a particularly moving presentation
on how the conditions that the founders had in mind no longer
held true today, and that in their neighborhoods, guns were
not a check on government tyranny, but an ever-present danger
to the well-being and safety of themselves and their community.
Since two students had been shot and murdered inside a neighboring
high school a short year before, and since there were shootings
on the street outside the school on an all too regular basis,
their statements were quite powerful. However, one of the
judges was clearly a NRA type Second Amendment absolutists,
and he was completely blind and impervious to what they said.
He questioned them about the need to check government tyranny,
and would not accept their answer that individual guns were
no match for government firepower today, or that there were
non-violent means, such as civil disobedience, to resist government
tyranny. I still have a picture of him in my mind, sitting
in the seat where the senators sat when they heard testimony
(I have always thought in my mind it had to be the chair of
Jesse Helms, although I have only poetic justice as my evidence
for that supposition), and bellowing at my students, "When
will you people rebel?"
We had
an interesting discussion after that experience. I began by
saying that if the children of this judge had to figure out
the ways of the street, and what was the safest way to get
from home to school and back the way they did, you had better
believe he would have been singing a different tune. The problem,
I said, was that voices like theirs were usually not heard
in rooms like this, and that the whole purpose of doing this
competition was to make sure that when these sorts of discussion
were held in the future, their voice would be there, and their
experience would be represented. We do all of this work not
to win this competition, but to change society. We talked
about disappointment, and how you overcome them.
I won't
pretend that the fact that we came in fourth and not first
in the national competition didn't smart, especially in the
context of a judge who clearly was prepared to hear points
of view which only confirmed his own. But as time wore on,
what my students remembered and took away was not an injustice
done to them, but a sense of empowerment that they could face
down such injustices.
I like
this story for a lot of reasons, and I retell it often. It
shows how I learned and grew as a teacher, and how even the
best of my intentions and the most vigorous of my efforts
to do the right thing were not enough, until I understood
that teaching was about empowering my students, even in the
face of something they should not have had to face. It shows
why it is important to talk about race, and what kind of talk
one can and should have. It shows how the struggle against
racism is not something that we conduct because we are morally
superior to other folk, but something that we do together,
out of our love for each other. We make a difference when
we figure out ways to engage our communities, our entire classes,
in this endeavor.
Leo Casey
New York City
5/12/05
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