I really wish I had read all these books a few years ago when I was teaching at my other school. I often had kids say to me things like "I don't want some White teacher telling me what to do." Or "you just telling me to do that because I'm Black" or things like that... I used to say things like "race has nothing to do with it - I'm your teacher." But race would come up daily, even if it wasn't spoken out loud. Simply because I'm White and all of my students were Black or Hispanic. Race was there, even when we didn't talk about it.
Right now I'm reading Colormute: Race Talk Dilemmas in an American School by Mica Pollock. Fascinating. I need to finish it tonight, because I have to write a book review about it this week. It is about a high school in CA, and the author taught at this high school for a year and then becomes a researcher there, working on her doctorate. Instead of focusing on the existence of racial inequalities or race as a category, she focuses on how teachers and students talk about race. Her thesis seems to be that people experience a lot of anxiety around talking about race, but it is precisely by deleting race talk from our vocabularies that we exacerbate the problems associated with race. How does one grasp the complexity of racial inequality without using racial terms. We belong to racial categories at the same time as we don't.
4 comments:
I think race is far too complex, nuanced, dangerous and sensitive a topic to make a part of a class where is not not absolutely essential: If you want to talk about Othello you are going to have to talk about race, but if you are doing Hamlet, it is not worth the trouble to extend into a discussion on Shakespeare and the Canon being white, and the relationship of non-whites (both poets and students) to this primarily white Canon, unless you are very good at talking about race in the classroom (unless you are, say, someone who has taught a course on race and literature in the past).
You could, I suppose, train everyone to have perfectly sensitive instincts on the subject, but that is a lot of trouble to go to; there are quite a few experts who handle the subject with grace and I would send my students who are interested in discussing race to their classrooms. I would be like a brain surgeon doing heart surgery -- I would probably do OK, but, when push comes to shove, just in case something went wrong, wouldn't you rather have the specialist?
I think race is far too complex, nuanced, dangerous and sensitive a topic to make a part of a class where is not not absolutely essential: If you want to talk about Othello you are going to have to talk about race, but if you are doing Hamlet, it is not worth the trouble to extend into a discussion on Shakespeare and the Canon being white, and the relationship of non-whites (both poets and students) to this primarily white Canon, unless you are very good at talking about race in the classroom (unless you are, say, someone who has taught a course on race and literature in the past).
You could, I suppose, train everyone to have perfectly sensitive instincts on the subject, but that is a lot of trouble to go to; there are quite a few experts who handle the subject with grace and I would send my students who are interested in discussing race to their classrooms. I would be like a brain surgeon doing heart surgery -- I would probably do OK, but, when push comes to shove, just in case something went wrong, wouldn't you rather have the specialist?
Yeah, it can be really clumsy and sometimes detrimental to talk about race. We were talking in class about how sometimes you need to reach out for help from people/institutions who are really good at talking about diversity issues. I know I find it anxiety producing to talk about race and class in some (many situations). But I think it is almost our reluctance to talk about race that signifies how it could used to be spoken of more, though in thoughtful critical ways. That's not to say that the talking cure solves everything.
How would you have handled your students' comments differently if you had read this book first? Would you have initiated more of a discussion about race?
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