Amidst the rush and crazy of final presentations at school, we’ve been trying to eke out a decent unit on race and racism in Peace Studies class. I’ve been working this whole semester with the solid foundations of my predecessor, sort of living into and modifying a syllabus that is a hybrid of his focus and mine. So we read some James Baldwin (Fire Next Time), some Bell Hooks (Yearning), some Cornel West (Race Matters), some Thandeka (Learning to Be White), some Tim Wise (White Like Me, which the kids loved), and some Elizabeth Martinez (Des Colores Means All Of Us).
We played the Race Game and talked some about white privilege. Then, for the unit paper, I assigned them a piece of memoir: “Write memoir (autobiography) about an experience you had in which you encountered societal expectations of you and your racial identity. We have read a lot of memoir in this class so you have many good examples to guide you. 750-1000 words. Due Monday, December 7th.”
And in the course of about an hour three kids checked in with me wondering if their experience of race were valid enough for the essay. My student who is of Puerto Rican descent was thinking of writing about how people assume he’s white – and I was like “Yes, write that! Write that! (That’s really profound!)” He was sort of already off and running and just needed a little encouragement.
But two other students, who are white, talked to me about never really having had an experience where they were aware of or reminded of their race, or encountered a societal expectation of them based on their race. They weren’t sure what to do.
I had a smart teacher moment. I said: “Not having had experiences in which you are reminded of your race, or encounter societal expectations of your race, is in itself an experience of your racial identity. It’s a unique (and problematic) privilege of white people. Go think and write about that.” We mulled it over together a bit – they weren’t totally surprised by my suggestion – and then they were off and running too.
I want to create a space where all of my students can engage experiences of their racial identity as legitimate and real, where whiteness is not the absence of race or identity. We read all about how it's not, but you can intellectually understand something without emotionally understanding it. The work goes on.
