ANTI-RACIST ACTIVISM: TEACHING RHETORIC AND WRITING
In a society in which white supremacy has structured every aspect of our world, there can be no claim to neutrality.—Jensen, 2005, p. 17
Too often, discussions of how to address racism, particularly in a learning environment, are cluttered and derailed with claims to politeness and professionalism. It is not professional, we claim, to make students uncomfortable. It is too personal, we say, to bring up issues that are based on our identities. And, being personal and political, it has no place in the work environment.
However, we happen to be in Midwestern America, where the values of professionalism are not objective but rather linked to capitalism, service, and whiteness. We work in the academy, which is similarly structured by white supremacist assumptions, and we primarily teach writing, which values the language practices of the white and upperclass. So the question becomes, then, "Can we take the question of professionalism at face value? Furthermore, is this a yes or no question? Can we simply say, no, it is not professional to address race, when the concept of professionalism is built upon and complicit with a system that is already designed to ignore (or perpetuate) racial injustice?"
The Heart of Whiteness, written by Robert Jensen (2005), by and primarily for white people, addresses the systemic nature of white supremacy in this way:
We're all in the race game, so to speak, either consciously or unconsciously. We can overtly support white-supremacist racial projects. We can reject white supremacy and support projects aimed at a democratic distribution of power and a just distribution of resources. Or we can claim not to be interested in race, in which case we will almost certainly end up tacitly supporting white supremacy by virtue of our unwillingness to confront it. (p. 17)
In that moment when race arises, whatever position we take or fail to take, whatever strategy we choose to employ - be it conciliatory and passive, direct and confrontational, or somewhere along that spectrum, direct and confrontational - we are teaching something. Our failure to act does not mean that we are able to take ourselves out of the moment and choose to teach nothing.
Instead of retreating to a concept that can only pretend to be neutrality, we can rather reframe the question, consider what we believe our responsibilities to be, and mediate the distance between them in such a way that we do not ask our students to be so professional that they are not allowed to be human. Perhaps the notion of professionalism in this instance is a distraction.
The choice to take action is actually radically more complex than whether or not something adheres to an unquestioned standard of professionalism/politeness/appropriateness. For us at the writing center, action involves taking into account the systemic institutional racism before we step into the situation where race becomes a topic. Action involves the identities of the individuals in that situation and where their power falls or is denied according to those identities.
Zhang, Phil, St. Amand, Jessie, Quaynor, J, Haltiwanger, Talisha, Chambers, Evan, Canino, Geneva, & Ozias, Moira. (2013, August 7). "Going there": Peer writing consultants' perspectives on the new racism and peer writing pedagogies. Across the Disciplines, 10(3). Retrieved from http://wac.colostate.edu/atd/race/oziasetal/index.htm
Copyright on the materials on this site are held by the authors and editors who have contributed content to it (© 1997-2017).