Casual Racism and Stuttering Failures: An ethics for classroom engagement

Abstract

“Casual Racism and Stuttering Failures” addresses the affective consequences of pedagogical experiences in which an instructor is surprised by the eruption of racist discourse in the classroom.  In the context of an outwardly politically progressive graduate program, I found myself riding on the presumption that students and I thought alike about race and ethnicity, in our classroom discourse and in the theatre.  Instead, on two different occasions, I found myself unprepared for addressing overtly racist comments in class.  This essay meditates on what the experience of such failures means to feminist and progressive teachers.

Notes

¹ The programme description is available at http://www.finearts.utexas.edu/tad/degree_programs/graduate/performance_as_public_practice/phd_performance_as_public_practice/index.cfm, accessed 31 July 2011.

² A white male MA PPP student, in fact, wrote me a very long letter after he received his degree to confess that he'd never felt so ostracized or disrespected for who he was in his entire life as he had in our programme. He expressed his astonishment at the gender hegemony of the PPP programme (where 95 per cent of the students were female) and shock at his de facto outsiderness as a white man with no prior facility with theory and with a staunchly humanist rather than feminist commitment. Unbeknown to me, some of the PPP students disparaged him out of hand, because they couldn't get past his white male privilege and his liberalism. Had I known about this excessive political correctness, I might have intervened. On the other hand, I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing when someone with a great deal of social power is forced to experience marginality that's most likely just temporary. This student's perspective, however, could have prompted a useful conversation about the hegemony of the programme's ideology, which the PPP faculty very much took for granted during my years at UT.

³ I've changed all the students' names in this essay.

⁴ In my correspondence with ‘Mi-Hee’ while writing this essay, neither of us could recall if David said, ‘She's almost white’ or ‘Oh, well, she's white-ish.’ Either way, his meaning is the same.

⁵ I think we discount how difficult it is to negotiate the stereotype of the ‘man-hating lesbian feminist’ to which some of us continue to fall prey. I probably give too little thought to the alwayspresent emotional costs of unconsciously working against the prevailing man-hating lesbian stereotype as I teach.

⁶ The freshman introductory course for majors at UT is called ‘Languages of the Stage’. The syllabus was written by two of my former colleagues, Stacy Wolf, a white woman, and Deborah Paredez, a Latina, to include a variety of plays by people of colour, gays and lesbians, and other minoritarian authors. When the white woman taught the class, students accepted the syllabus without question. When our African American female colleague taught the class, she got poor evaluations, on which students complained that the course was only about people of colour. I've no doubt that my African American former colleague expects racism, even though she was frustrated and upset at her students' responses.

⁷ I'd like to thank ‘Mi-Hee’ for her engagement with me on this essay, which I dedicate to her in the spirit of solidarity and with great admiration for her wisdom and resilience. I'd also like to thank Margaret Werry, Roísín O'Gorman and Stacy Wolf for their productive, insightful comments on drafts of this essay, and to acknowledge the students in TD389T, Fall 2004, at the University of Texas at Austin, whose struggle to process our collective experience inspired these thoughts.