Domesticating Difference: Performing Memories of School Desegregation

Abstract

The early steps of mandated school desegregation, during the freedom of choice period (1965–1969), began with black teachers going into all-white schools and white teachers going into all-black schools. This essay takes up the memory performances of one of the first white teachers in the all-black Marian Anderson High School in rural Camden County, North Carolina. Specifically the essay explores how these performances as they reinvent the past open possibilities for interrupting historic performances of whiteness. At the same time, such performances also risk the reinstantiation of white authority in the present, particularly through the use of humor and the domestication of difference.

Keywords:

• Performance
• Memory
• School
• Desegregation
• Domestication
• Whiteness

This essay was derived from the author's dissertation, “Desegregation, Dialogue, and Difference: Remembering Camden County, North Carolina” (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill 2005 (Della Pollock, Director). An earlier version of this paper was awarded the 2005 Norman Denzin Qualitative Research Award.

This essay was derived from the author's dissertation, “Desegregation, Dialogue, and Difference: Remembering Camden County, North Carolina” (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill 2005 (Della Pollock, Director). An earlier version of this paper was awarded the 2005 Norman Denzin Qualitative Research Award.

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank Della Pollock, Michael Bowman, Bruce Henderson, D. Soyini Madison, George Noblit, Christina Foust, Alan Ternes, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Julia Wood, J. Robert Cox, Bland Simpson, and an anonymous reviewer for their generous readings of this work. Dedicated in memory of Clinton N. Textor.

Notes

This essay was derived from the author's dissertation, “Desegregation, Dialogue, and Difference: Remembering Camden County, North Carolina” (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill 2005 (Della Pollock, Director). An earlier version of this paper was awarded the 2005 Norman Denzin Qualitative Research Award.

1. By car, Camden is an hour west of the popular tourist destination of the Outer Banks beaches and one hour south of growing Norfolk, Virginia.

2. My research is part of a larger oral history project, “Roads Not Taken: Desegregation in the Post-Brown South.” This project, funded by the Spencer Foundation, looks at the process of desegregation in three areas of North Carolina with the aim of illuminating how people altered race relations by filling the gaps between national law and local community tradition. The interviews in this study were conducted between February 2003 and June 2004. I have used a pseudonym for Mr. Adler and have received his written consent to quote our interviews.In terms of transcription, I realize there is any number of models for coding rhythm, style, etc. I have tried to communicate through the transcription some sense of the performance and speech values of each individual without using a more elaborate transcriptions system. I have chosen the most minimal approach to emphasize these three aspects. Standard text represents regular speech for that individual. Underlined text represents an emphasis on the word or words. Bold distinguishes the speech as particularly strong. To represent flowing speech I indent five spaces after the first line. For every break in speech I return to the margin. My approach to transcription and it's politics is informed by Conquergood; Deavere Smith; Madison; Fine; Frisch; Pollock (Telling); and Tedlock.

3. hooks contends decolonization is “a political process is always a struggle to define ourselves in and beyond the act of resistance to domination, we are always in the process of both remembering the past even as we create new ways to imagine and make the future” (5). In relation to decolonizing my own thinking and acting, I discuss later in the essay the influence of my own subjectivity in greater depth, particularly issues of whiteness.To provide some initial context for my relationship with Mr. Adler, I am about the age of his children. I believe our age difference enabled this former teacher to view me as a student (this being even more the case because I am not from Camden and they couldn't assume that we shared any insider knowledge). I did get the sense that as a (sometimes) unaccompanied white woman, a woman driving between Camden and Chapel Hill alone, Mr. Leary and others felt the need to watch over me. I am fairly sure that if I were a man they wouldn't have these same concerns. I am also not sure, and can't know, whether they would have been so open with a male. Whether it is the southern (white) woman archetype that shaped in part their response to me, or the fact that I am generally unassuming and deferential in conversations, I do not know. I do know that when I spoke with a man or a woman who was substantially older than me, I generally received maternalistic or paternalistic treatment (with the potential for both negative and positive consequences). However, given my generally privileged position as a white person in this community and as an outsider, I gladly compromised some of my authority (in the positive and negative sense of the word) to be in relation with others and to know others better. I explore the more vexing issue of whiteness in this interview later in this essay.

4. This idea comes from a talk given by Dr. Michael Bowman at the University of North Carolina on September 24, 2004.

5. Here I echo Chandra Talpade Mohanty's work on the “politics of location” (34).

6. See also Langellier and Peterson, Chapter 1.

7. Tom Jones was the name of the protagonist in the story. But for a time Mr. Alder confuses him with Peter T. Burgess before realizing his mistake.

8. Given that it was as an all-black high school, it is not surprising the cafeteria manager was black. What I found remarkable about this was the performative and rhetorical effect of the sudden shift from a heated inter-racial basketball game to the traditional interactions of a white teacher and a black cafeteria worker in an everyday exchange.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kate Willink

Kate Willink is an Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Waterloo