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Saturday, May 27, 2006

Oso Raro’s Lord of the Flies Moment


From Slaves of Academe’s Oso Raro:
For the last few weeks I have ... been participating in a faculty seminar on teaching, specifically concerning the question of difference in the classroom… [An] incident in the seminar upset me greatly, and seemed to detail a number of problems not only with thinking through difference in our teaching but also difference among the professoriate.

…[T]he apex (or perhaps nadir) of our seminar sessions was a heated discussion of a recent racial controversy on campus. Many of the students involved in this controversy were actually enrolled in various classes of mine, and a number of them approached me: What should we do? How should we respond? How should we deal with our feelings of anger? (Although this wasn’t usually stated so eloquently, for more often my students wanted to literally go find the offending party and whup their ass: “We’re trying to find out where [offending party] lives.”)



As a faculty of colour, this is obviously not my first time in proximity to a campus racial controversy, nor the strong emotions that tend to accompany them, and I urged my students to craft, along with their feelings of anger and rage, an intellectual response to this conundrum. The reasons as to why I would respond thusly are manifold, and both personal and professional. One clearly is that physical violence has no place in a learning environment… Another is that emotional and rash reactions of this sort, as well as the pure emotive hair-pulling performed in invariably endless meetings, conforms to the vicious stereotypes of people of colour as incapable of intellectual and reasoned response….

[The idea] was to connect my students with their budding intellectual training at Cold City U: if white supremacy is a discursive system that manifests itself in both material and metaphysical ways and is moreover invisible as a system, how do we differentiate the level of risk in confronting it, as well as the level and intensity of response. In other words, how do we craft an intellectual response to the problem of white supremacy as ideology as well as through material action (literal resistance, struggle, protest, self-protection)?

The fact that this incident encapsulates many of the principles of the teaching seminar itself, principally how do we handle and accommodate different stakeholders in the classroom, would purportedly make this a perfect “teachable moment.” However, that was not they way it played out. Several white faculty were disturbed by my intellectual response to the campus controversy, and quickly moved to critique it (which of course was not the point of sharing it in the first place; I was not asking for their opinion). One of my immediate colleagues offered a professional critique that was well worded, immediately followed by an older white woman from another division who said, “Yeah, if I was your student and you said that to me [the need to develop an intellectual response], I would want to punch you in the face!”




… [S]everal other white faculty voiced their agreement with this woman’s statement at the moment (“Yeah!", “Exactly!”), in essence, saying that they believed in fact the correct response of students of colour to this campus controversy was violence, unbridled emotion, reaction, hysteria. Intellectualism was not, for these good white people, the appropriate response to this controversy. However, if the university is not the place for an intellectual response, then indeed where is that place?

…I am a trained humanist with a doctorate, but I am not a psychotherapist. I see my role as guiding my students towards fundamentally intellectual patterns of thought and critique. I, for one, am not ashamed to call myself an intellectual, a thinker, someone who uses their brain, who by choice and training privileges, to a large extent, reason over emotion… At the end of our class time together, my students leave the room and walk back into the gloom of a deeply irrational and emotive society that loathes thinking and intellectualism and intellectuals. … Our students arguably are up to their eyeballs in anti-intellectual sentiment. They certainly don’t need, in my opinion, that standpoint reified in the context of the classroom. Here, they might be able to achieve a state they cannot easily achieve elsewhere. If we don’t believe in the life of the mind, however defined, why are we here then at the university? To change society radically? A decidedly poor choice of venue, in my book, considering how rabidly conservative the Shop is.

… If this incident in the teaching seminar was meant to chastise me for my method, it in fact reasserted the belief that what we need is more intellectualism, more thinking, more methodology, in approaching these complicated situations of the new academy filled with race, difference, tension. A simple retreat into the emotive is simply not enough, for we need to find a way to broach this divide between emotion and intellectualism in ways that honour the ability of students of colour to think critically and empathetically, within and beyond themselves, and have the confidence that they can do it.



Bitch PhD comments:

I think that your critic was redirecting attention away from the incident *and* from your thinking about it/advice to the students, onto herself. Specifically, onto *her* emotive reaction to the incident. I don't think it's a question of discussions about institutional racism finding redirection to people of color; I think it's discussions about institutional racism finding redirection back to reassuring white people about their own self-image. In this case (as so often with liberal whites), her self-image as one who sympathizes with--feels for--the "plight" of the students of color. Because, of course, for a lot of white liberals, the problem with racism is how it makes them feel.