Tag: race

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Teaching While White

I’ve been thinking a lot about race and racism in the classroom, about microaggressions and why anti racist activism is needed now more than ever. We’ve been having more of a conversation about it at my own university, so I decided to write up a list of the kinds of things I do and think about when it comes to teaching.

This is a working document, not final, but I think it gets at a lot of the issues that trip me and others up when creating a racially inclusive classroom.

I also want to reiterate, in no uncertain terms, that these thoughts do not reflect the thoughts or policy of the university which employs me, but only represent my own personal thoughts on the topic. (There is a reason, after all, that I have not named said university.)

Thoughts on Creating an Inclusive Classroom: Focus on Race – Helen Boyd Kramer

  1. When presenting art or music or literature that is racist, there are hugely different ways to do so. Version 1: “Here’s some racist art but we’re going to focus on the brush strokes/melodies and not talk about how racist it is” is NOT going to do the trick. “Here’s some racist art and let’s talk about why it’s racist, what makes it racist, and what it means that this kind of art is still hung in museums and galleries while black artists still struggle to be taken seriously.”
  1. Talk about how you, as a teacher and scholar, negotiate whatever kinds of art may be oppressive to you personally. Ask yourself, if you’ve never thought about it: as a woman, how do I negotiate references to rape and sexism? As a gay man, how do I address homophobia in culture? As a Jewish person, how do I negotiate anti-semitism? I don’t mean in your life, but in the ways that as a person who has studied subjects wide and deep: talk to students about how you have decided to make sense of how upsetting it can be to discover these kinds of microaggressions in the work of artists you personally love, and how it’s more upsetting precisely because you love them otherwise.
  1. I use this statement on my syllabi these days:

Safe Space/Trigger Warnings: Due to the nature of the reading material, I will issue no trigger warnings about specific readings, precisely because any or all of this material may be difficult. That said, I am more than willing to excuse you if necessary, although you will have to do a make-up assignment/readings. My intention, and the intention of most gender studies courses, is to address issues that cause oppression and violence in order to empower and create change. In order to do so, it is vital that we discuss, research, and analyze these topics but that we do so from an intellectual, not an emotional, place. That said, do make time to process, make appointments with counselors, or otherwise find support if any of these topics are deeply personal and troubling.

Finally, an educational atmosphere cannot be safe space in the truest sense, but I do ask that you follow these four rules:

  • Assume the best intentions.
  • Don’t assume you’re more right than anyone else in the room.
  • Listen to learn.
  • Criticize ideas, not people.
  1. Take trauma seriously. When introducing those rules, I usually talk about how some kinds of trauma aren’t well represented; that people assume TWs are always about sexual assault when in fact articles about lynching, transphobia, gay bashing, etc., are also triggers for students. I tend to talk more personally about how, as a NYer who lived through 9/11, I have to gird myself when it comes up even in intellectual spaces – and that it’s been a decade since that happened, and yet I will be not quite right for a few days after the topic comes up when I wasn’t expecting it. Relate. Try to. Figure out a way to understand what trauma is, how it feels to the traumatized, and remember that everyone relates to trauma differently.
  1. If you’re white, assume you’re racist. I often tell my students that flat out – that the first important step for any white ally is to acknowledge that we are all raised to be racist – if not by our family of origin, by our culture. Admit out loud to students that you are aware of some of the racism you were raised with, and that you know becoming less so is a process but a good goal. You can always use Peggy McIntosh’s “Invisible Knapsack” article if you’re not sure how to go about acknowledging skin privilege: https://www.deanza.edu/faculty/lewisjulie/White%20Priviledge%20Unpacking%20the%20Invisible%20Knapsack.pdf
  1. Accept that race doesn’t exist but that racism does. Race doesn’t exist biologically, genetically, or in any other scientific way; that race is a social construction that has helped people organize and categorize other human beings, usually in a way that oppresses, enslaves, or disempowers them. If you believe there is something innately different between you and a black person, you haven’t done your reading. Check out Coates: http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/05/what-we-mean-when-we-say-race-is-a-social-construct/275872/
  1. If you’re white, learn something about the Four Enlargements of Whiteness, and find out if any of your own ancestry wasn’t considered white at some point. The definition of Whiteness has changed over time in the US, so much so that Irish Americans and Italian Americans, Jewish Americans, were not considered white at some points in history. This helps demonstrate that whiteness is (realness, Americanness) – a social construction. Here’s Abagond on the Fourth Englargement: https://abagond.wordpress.com/2014/06/26/the-fourth-enlargement-of-american-whiteness/ or you can check out Painter’s History of White People itself: http://www.amazon.com/History-White-People-Irvin-Painter/dp/0393339742
  1. Read a LOT more by black authors. I recommend Abagond and Black Girl Dangerous (online). Make sure you’ve read at least some of the basics of black literature / critical race theory (variable list, but I’ll add mine at the end). My short list: Malcolm X’s Speeches at Harvard, Ellison’s Invisible Man, James Baldwin’s everything and anything, Nella Larsen’s Passing and/or Quicksand, something by Toni Morrison, Teaching to Transgress by bell hooks (along with many others of hers), Said’s Orientalism, Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth.
  1. Be aware of stereotype threat – what it is, how it works. See Claude Steele’s original work and some of the follow-up research on it. Short version: Stereotype Threat is a situational experience for those in marginalized groups who are invested in a field of study but are reminded that they are often representing the group. That is, male students can fail individually. When female students fail, “girls are bad at math”. Whistling Vivaldi is the book, and here’s a short interview with Steele about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=failylROnrY
  2. If a student says something racist in the classroom, or if you do, stop the discussion and take a minute to attend to it. Do not brush it off. Do not call the student out individually. I usually try to take a minute to say, “OK, did we all just hear that? I’m not sure who said it but I’m sure other white people in the room were thinking something like it, so let’s not criticize the person who did say something out loud. Instead, let’s talk about what that word/expression means and why it’s not good for any of us. After class, send an email to the class as a group and invite any students who had a hard time with what was said to an office meeting to process it a little more. Black students will often say they’re okay with white students coming to said meeting, but usually they’re not. Again, ASK. I use the line “It’s all about what you need from me, so tell me what works for you.” And DO IT. Bring it up again in the next class meeting; remind the whole class that racism is often unintentional but still very serious, and that you’re happy to spend more time discussing it privately with anyone who needs to talk more.
  1. When you’re coming to do a topic that may be difficult for some students, give counseling services a heads up, and let your students know that you have. I do this whenever we do readings on sexual assault, lynching, homophobia, transphobia. You don’t need to know if anyone sees a counselor about these issues raised in class, but they do appreciate knowing you’re aware that this material can be emotionally hard. Again, as in my “Not a Trigger Warning” statement, I remind them that while we discuss things intellectually in the classroom, there are emotional ramifications – some expected, some unexpected – that may result, and that’s normal – just not for the classroom.
  1. Don’t be scared of your black students, and don’t assume they are all the same. They come with a huge range of life experiences, world views, ways of dealing with being black in America. Never ask a black person what they think about gangs, drugs, Spike Lee, jazz, or whatever is unconsciously coded as “black” in your head. Maybe sit down and think about what things you think are “black” so that you are aware of that. Also, don’t be surprised when they love Adele or some other white performer. White people like black music, black people like white music. Tolstoy was the Tolstoy of the Zulus, after all (Coates).
  1. Simultaneously, do recognize that your student IS black. Pretending to be “post racial” or “colorblind” is wildly insulting. You are disappearing an important and significant aspect of a person by pretending you don’t “see” race or ethnicity. People are proud of where they’re from no matter where they’re from.
  1. Be okay with being ignorant. Believe me, don’t fake it. If you haven’t read anything by a person of the student’s cultural group, just SAY THAT. Most of us aren’t well versed in queer chicana art and if your student is, they’re happy to tell you what they know and love about it. Meet up with them during office hours to get recommendations. But also, read more, expose yourself to more. Remember as white people we are deprived of whole schools of art, music, literature, and history; we should feel robbed that we only know the works and world view of white people. So boring. Which goes with…
  1. Get comfortable with discomfort. It’s okay not to know things. Most people don’t. As faculty we have a tendency to know everything, or know someone who does, and to intellectualize emotional responses. But race is an uncomfortable topic for white people. Being aware of race isn’t about feeling guilty or anything like it: it’s about stepping up to make the world a little less racist, and that’s all it is. Recognizing privilege goes a long way toward that goal.
  1. Validate your students when they come to tell you something racist happened, whether it was on College Ave, in another class, or at home. Validate that they felt hurt. Telling students to toughen up, or “it could be worse” or anything like that just lets them know you’re not the one to talk to. Don’t equate your experience of oppression with theirs – “because I’m a woman I understand” but do tell them you’re sorry racism happens and that you recognize how hurtful it can be to experience.
  1. If they confront you over something you did, check with The Toe Rule – when someone tells you that you stepped on their toe, you just say sorry: you don’t explain why you did, you don’t get upset with them, you don’t ask for evidence that you did, and you don’t tell them to be nicer about it. You just apologize.
  1. Learn to appreciate the scare quote, or air quotes, to indicate words or phrases that are unacceptable or suspect to you but that authors may use otherwise. As a white person, don’t ever say the N word out loud. Just don’t. It’s not yours. My general rule of thumb is that if a word has a history of violence, and you’re not someone who would experience that violence right after hearing it, don’t use it. “Faggot” or “dyke” isn’t for straight people. The N word isn’t for white people to use. “Bitch” or “Cunt” by men. You get the idea.
  1. Don’t assume someone who doesn’t look __________ isn’t ____________. Lots of black people “look white” (whatever we mean by that) and so do multiracial students. Don’t ask African American students where their people are from because slavery means they usually don’t know. Simultaneously, asking anyone where they are from, especially where they’re “really” from, is a microaggression unless there’s a good reason for it. If anything about the way you’re asking implies “I’m white and American, but you don’t seem to be” you’re doing it wrong.
  1. Whenever you see the term “politically correct” replace it with “treating people with respect and using terminology for them and their identity that they prefer”.
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Bernie Sanders Shows Us How It’s Done

(For the record, I’m only going to comment here about how Sanders responded to the shutdown of his speech in Seattle. I’m not interested in talking about activist tactics (but I think they were right), but more in how white allies respond to criticism.)

Honestly, I’m so impressed to see any politician respond exactly how he should have to being protested and shut down: he conceded the stage, listened, and responded with a remarkable statement about what is needed in order to do something about the systemic, structural, economic, carcerel racism in this country. But of course Sanders is more than a politician; he’s an old school radical who’s been arrested for his views and actions in the past.

I’m sure it was incredibly frustrating but you know? Black activists are furious for a reason, and it’s embarrassing to me that more of us aren’t with the disregard we have for the bodies and lives of people who have created so, so much beauty and music and labor and theory. Honestly. Love black people as much as you love black culture is exactly right.

More tomorrow on misplaced outrage and purity politics.

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Race is Not Gender: About Rachel Dolezal

As much as I joked yesterday that America just found out, via Spokane, that race is a social construction, I meant it to be only that: a joke. It has lead to a lot of people actually talking about what race IS and specifically what blackness is, and to me, that’s a long overdue conversation where maybe some white people will learn a little more about paper bag tests and colorism, “passing” as a means to survival, marrying up to have lighter children than their parents, etc. There are amazing histories and books full of information and deep knowledge about what it means to be black.

But that this whole idea that she is “transracial” is just upsetting to me. First, I always discourage comparisons between race and gender because they never, ever hold up. Gender is constructed by very different discourses of being, through different bodies and histories. Race – especially race in america – is constructed through specific historical contexts (slavery, for starters). Even the movements toward liberation are different. Look at how differently the term “passing” is used, for instance — which is one of the main reasons I hate using the term when it comes to gender.

Here are a few reasons this bothers me: (1) we’re having a conversation about race, finally, at long last. It seems at best disrespectful to make it about anything else when we are so, so overdue in talking about race in the US.

(2) It’s pretty clear that Dolezal doesn’t identify as black.

Ezra believes the only reason his sister would change her identity was due to the racism she claimed to have encountered at Howard University, where she graduated with her master’s degree in fine art in 2002.

Rachel, he added, would often complain that she was treated poorly as one of only a few white students on a mostly black campus.

“She used to tell us that teachers treated her differently than other people and a lot of them acted like they didn’t want her there,” Ezra said. “Because of her work in African-American art, they thought she was a black student during her application, but they ended up with a white person.”

(3) Why are white people so quick to defend what she’s done when they don’t know her? White privilege, again. When those in your own gang are behaving badly, it shouldn’t take someone from some other group to point that out. When I work with men on issues of violence against women, my most frequent refrain is that the good guys have GOT to stop defending the bad guy in their midst. Their best work is to call out the bad guys, to use their own male privilege to confront the people whose actions are oppressing others. White people have to call this woman out for exploiting and mocking the experiences and identities of black people. Continue reading “Race is Not Gender: About Rachel Dolezal”

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Anti Cop?

One of the issues that always comes up when police brutality becomes visible – as it has been consistently for this past year – and especially when that police brutality is expressed racially – is that somehow being for justice and against racism makes a person anti-cop.

I grew up white working class so I grew up with men (and maybe some women) who became cops. They were good guys, brave guys, often guys who weren’t scared of a whole lot. They have my unending respect for being willing to step up and try to do some good in the world. Some of my crossdressing friends are police officers or are in other law enforcement. I went to HS with a federal agent whose job scares the fuck out of me, but I’m glad he’s the kind of smart, brave man who can do it.

I’ve worked with the Appleton PD on quite a few occasions. A few of them I count as friends but certainly as colleagues in community building. We throw everything, as a culture, that we don’t want to deal with at them – racism, poverty, domestic violence, addiction, theft, and – as was pointed out to me recently – all of the mental health issues our system isn’t acknowledging, much less dealing with. They are given precious few resources to “solve” a whole swath of problems, and if we listened to compassionate police more about what is needed, we’d hear a lot about educational opportunity, community participation, access to mental health services, even social justice. They know it. They see it.

But I really really dislike having it assumed that as someone whose heart breaks over the broken spine of a young, poor, disenfranchised man of color in Baltimore that somehow I don’t care about cops. I’ve personally had both good experiences — I am, after all, white, currently middle class & newly middle aged — and not so good ones (because I am also queer, female, and have been, many times in my life, a protestor). That is, I am assumed to be on the side of law & order because of some of my identity, and assumed to be suspect because of other parts of myself.

Freddie Gray had pretty much of nothing about him that told the cops he might be on the side of law & order. We create these binaries of identity, assume kinds of legitimacy or don’t, but the issue is that we tend to put an awful lot of muscle and guns and power on the side of those who have more power.

To me the issue isn’t the cops the same way the issue isn’t the media. Both are reflections of our current systems of order and power – who, in a nutshell, is assumed to be okay, who is assumed to be a good citizen, who might be given a second chance, and who gets the benefit of the doubt.

The thing is, poor people live in public. Their lives are, as a result, seen more easily, examined more closely, judged more often. Mental health issues go untreated – even undiagnosed. Addiction likewise.

And so we send in the cops to clean up the messes we’ve created, created not because we’re bad people, not because we’re Republican or Democrats, but that we’ve created in letting these systems that assume some people are okay and some people aren’t, often based on their gender or orientation or race or immigration status.

But no, the fault is not often with the police except for when they – as their own community – protect and defend practices that prey on the least of us. And the least of us, in the US, are still black and poor with less access to good educations, who are often living in families rife with addiction, mental health, disability, and untreated and undiagnosed medical conditions. And maybe it’s because sometimes it’s obvious to me that the only thing separating me and them, my family’s ancestors from theirs, is the color of my skin.

Stay safe, Baltimore: and by that I mean not just the protestors but the police too.

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Today I Want: Thoughts on Baltimore

Today I want for more of us to see what I see in black men. There is something so humble and simultaneously proud, the kind of humble that living in a system that tells you to keep your head down and your mouth shut, the kind of humble poor people have, and yet, too, I see the pride, the fire of dignity that has to be kept nearly invisible from most, a fire like the pilot light of a gas stove, full of power to destroy but full of power too, to lead and to defend.

Today I wish I could remove the gauze on the eyes of so many white people I know, who see thugs where there are only scamps, who see anger where there is only frustration and sadness. There is something to spending your 20s in Harlem as a young, stupid, white woman; the way older black men just laughed quietly when I was getting hit on and didn’t know it; the young teenagers eager to prove themselves by asking a terrified white girl whose dick she was there to suck; the young boys with those big eyes and big ears and big brains who have a snowball’s chance in hell of using any of those to live in the world and make it more awesome. We’ve all lost, for so many years, so much of this human potential because white people can’t get past being afraid.

Maybe it’s having grown up working class and white, raised by a grandma who was in a janitor’s union, but there is something about black men — who never get to be men and yet who are despite everything.

Stay safe, Baltimore.

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#blacklivesmatter

Oh, #alllivesmatter people, please, just listen for a minute.

For those of us in communities that are targeted for violence – from both people who hate us and often the police who are supposed to serve and protect us – we’re aware that our lives are supposed to matter. We know our own lives matter.

But for LGBTQ people, that is not often the case.

For trans people, it is rarely the case.

For Hispanic people, it is rarely the case.

For black people, it is almost never the case.

The reason #alllivesmatter is an insulting response to a racial problem is because it whitewashes the problem. Being more humane doesn’t work; racial prejudices and homophobia go so deep historically, personally, unconsciously, that unless we pay special attention to the kinds of hatred that fuels the killings of trans women and black men, trans women of color in particular, young black men in particular, our systems don’t get any better.

Look, the hippies tried loving everyone and that was a long time ago, and if the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner teach us anything, it’s that people refusing to call our national race problem a race problem is part of it.

Please. Of course #alllivesmatter. But as Orwell once wrote, the problem is that some lives matter a hell of a lot more than others, which is why we need to highlight that #blacklivesmatter and #translivesmatter and #queerlivesmatter.

Step away from your white privilege. We are part of a system that kills black men and imprisons them and throws them away. “Universalizing” is exactly what disappears black lives in the first place.

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Elliot Rodger

Elliot Rodger was still a virgin at 22, and he was angry that he was because too often, men’s value is in their ability to “get women”. There are a lot of good articles out already – Slate’s & The Belle Jar‘s & Jess Zimmerman’s in Medium’s Archipelago are standouts – all of which have pointed out that Rodger was not a madman because he didn’t need to be. He only had to be a man, full of entitlement and male privilege – entitled to women’s bodies and to sex. His connections to various groups who persist in thinking that “game” is what convinces women to have sex with men, and that women are only attracted to jerks – never to a “perfect gentleman” as Rodger thought he was – has been well documented, despite those groups and online communities having scrubbed any and all of his posts. I assume they don’t want to be held responsible for failing to recognize someone who wasn’t just blowing off steam but planning to kill.

And what always strikes me about these kinds of complaints is the thing that I had to explain to my wife as she was transitioning: there are men who can yell that they want to do you across a crowded street and it’s a compliment, even if totally inappropriate, and there are others who can shake your hand politely who fill you with caution if not fear.

When I have made this observation (here on my blog and elsewhere), invariably someone who is male – or who used to be – says something about how the real difference is whether or not the man is attractive or handsome or whether the come-on is welcome.

That is not the case.

As Jess Zimmerman points out in parentheses:

“If women‘s mysterious disinterest drives you to consider murdering them, consider that you may be terrifying. Women are smart enough to notice that you’re the kind of guy who’s driven to blood rage by simple rejection.”

And I would add, not only do women pick up on someone who hates them enough to threaten or commit violence; they can, too, pick up on a more subtle and less violent misogyny as well. And that is what I feel is the difference between the men I’ve just mentioned: using “gentlemanly” manners to cover a deeply felt hostility or hatred toward women will not work.

And as someone who has hung out with kinky folks – for whom fulfilling a woman’s fantasy of rape, degradation, or humiliation is not uncommon – I know there are men who respect and adore women enough that even these difficult fantasies do not change their respect for the women they top.

By no means am I saying that only when men respect women enough do they “get” to exert power over them; that is the illusion, not the fact. The fact is that what comes first – what gains a man privilege into a woman’s trust – is their respect and understanding that only once their misogyny is something they have become aware of, worked on, realized and acknowledged does it go away.

It strikes me that this is not unlike racism, or transphobia, or ableism or any of the other kinds of blind hatreds are culture teaches us. And we are all taught them; women in a patriarchy can also be misogynists who do not trust or like or respect other women the same way that even gay men can hate themselves and other gay men because we are all raised in the stink of homophobia.

But the thing about Elliott Rodger is this: so many men who want to date or have sex with or marry women figure it out. They realize they love their moms or their sisters or their daughters and realize the women they are dating or sleeping with or marrying deserve the same respect as the women they know and love. Gay men, on the other hand, especially those who live in a very intense masculine homosocial environments, can express a misogyny that is raw and unchecked. That is, they haven’t had to do the work necessary to realize that women are awesome. Those gay men, I might add, are very, very rare, and getting rarer by the day. The only time their misogyny is still apparent is in the disrespectful, violent attitudes they occasionally express toward trans women, which many, many people have witnessed in these recent uproars about RuPaul and Trannyshack.

What I’m saying, ultimately, is that people – not just women – are wise enough to pick up on someone who hates you for who you are. The white kid who loves rap but who hates black people will never feel welcome by blacks socially. Gay men and lesbians often know when someone who is truly a homophobe is in their midst.

And women, like all of these other groups, know deeply when a man hates them for being women. They may not know it enough to articulate it, but they know it enough to keep their distance.

No amount of chivalry or good manners or “game” will perfume over the stink of that kind of misogyny. In this time when we hear a lot of talk about how accepted gay people are, or how “post racial” we are, or when we hear a gay man talk about how much he really loves trans people but doesn’t want his language policed, we might do well to remember what Elliot Rodger accidentally taught us: that it’s only in owning and dismantling these kinds of systemic, taught, culture-wide hatreds that we free ourselves of them.

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What He Did

I love this Daily Kos diary which explains what Dr. King actually did. It’s not about the quotes. It’s about standing up to systemic violence.

My father told me with a sort of cold fury, “Dr. King ended the terror of living in the south.”

Please let this sink in and and take my word and the word of my late father on this. If you are a white person who has always lived in the U.S. and never under a brutal dictatorship, you probably don’t know what my father was talking about.

But this is what the great Dr. Martin Luther King accomplished. Not that he marched, nor that he gave speeches.

He ended the terror of living as a black person, especially in the south.

I’m guessing that most of you, especially those having come fresh from seeing “The Help,” may not understand what this was all about. But living in the south (and in parts of the mid west and in many ghettos of the north) was living under terrorism.

It wasn’t that black people had to use a separate drinking fountain or couldn’t sit at lunch counters, or had to sit in the back of the bus.

You really must disabuse yourself of this idea. Lunch counters and buses were crucial symbolic planes of struggle that the civil rights movement decided to use to dramatize the issue, but the main suffering in the south did not come from our inability to drink from the same fountain, ride in the front of the bus or eat lunch at Woolworth’s.

It was that white people, mostly white men, occasionally went berserk, and grabbed random black people, usually men, and lynched them. You all know about lynching. But you may forget or not know that white people also randomly beat black people, and the black people could not fight back, for fear of even worse punishment.

This constant low level dread of atavistic violence is what kept the system running. It made life miserable, stressful and terrifying for black people . . .

This is the climate of fear that Dr. King ended.

(I think sometimes that in a very different way, this is what LGBT people have been doing for the past 20 years or so.)

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The 15%

There’s a project called “We Are the 15 Percent” that collects portraits of interiracial marriages and families, and I came upon this one and decided they were too cute not to post.

The project came about because of the ridiculous, hateful backlash that came about as a result of that sweet Cheerios commercial a while back. From the Tumblr:

In May, Cheerios posted this new commercial on youtube. It sparked a firestorm of backlash, and (naturally) the comments on the video have been deactivated.

When my wife and I watched the video, it felt great to (finally) see a representation of our own family. Especially considering what happened at a Wal-Mart in Virginia a few weeks ago.

We created this site to publicly reflect the changing face of the American family. According to the 2008 census, 15% of new marriages are interracial. And yet, it still feels rare to see something like the Cheerios ad represented in mainstream culture.

It’s especially nice to see a queer married couple in the mix.

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Renisha McBride

So what the fuck is going on in this country? A woman’s car dies so she stops in a suburb (of Detroit) and knocks on a door for help and is shot in the back of the head when she turned to leave.

Her body is found nearby, except nope, it wasn’t, it was found on the front steps of this house.

I’m assuming I don’t have to tell you the suburb was white & the woman was black.

Horrifying, sickening, frustrating, and saddening. I’m tired of these stories, tired of people resolving everything with guns and violence.

& Ugh, her poor family.