Pedagogy of fear: toward a Fanonian theory of ‘safety’ in race dialogue

Abstract

In education, it is common to put the condition of ‘safety’ around public race dialogue. The authors argue that this procedural rule maintains white comfort zones and becomes a symbolic form of violence experienced by people of color. In other words, they ask, ‘Safety for whom?’ A subtle but fundamental violence is enacted in safe discourses on race, which must be challenged through a pedagogy of disruption, itself a form of violence but a humanizing, rather than repressive, version. For this, the authors turn to Frantz Fanon's theory of violence, most clearly outlined in The Wretched of the Earth. First, the article outlines the basic assumptions of Fanon's theory of revolutionary, as opposed to repressive, violence. Second, we analyze the surrounding myths that an actual safe space exists for people of color when it concerns public race dialogue. Third, we critique the intellectualization of racism as part of the concrete violence lived by people of color in the academy, which whites continually reduce to an idea. We pedagogically reframe the racial predicament by promoting a ‘risk’ discourse about race, which does not assume safety but contradiction and tension. This does not suggest that people of color are somehow correct by virtue of their social location. In addition, it does not equate with creating a hostile situation but acknowledges that violence is already there. Finally, we consider the practical import of intellectual solidarity, where understanding racism becomes the higher good rather than whether or not one leaves the dialogue looking more or less racist than before.

Keywords:

• critical race theory
• race dialogue
• Fanon
• multiculturalism
• racism
• diversity

Notes

1. We would like to take this moment to thank the anonymous reviewers for their excellent suggestions to improve the manuscript. Much appreciation goes to REE Chief Editor, David Gillborn, for giving our perspective space in the journal and working with us from beginning to end. It is a pleasure to publish in what has become the definitive venue for critical thought on race and education.

2. We recognize that Paulo Freire took up Fanon's project on the question of violence in Pedagogy of the oppressed. Furthermore, Freire theorized the nature of liberatory dialogue in the same text. Our project differs from Freire's to the extent that racial violence, and particularly its US iteration, figures more centrally in our analysis.

3. Homi K. Bhabha (2004) asserted that the glorification of violence that is attached to The wretched of the earth is the result of Jean‐Paul Sartre's preface rather than Fanon's arguments (xxi).

4. One of the authors of this essay has seen this phenomenon play out during his own participation in a race‐based discussion where, after the designation of safety, several African American and Latino students left the group after being accused of attacking white participants, leading one African American student to declare, ‘Fuck safe space!’ as she retreated from the group. Whites looked on in amazement.

5. Fanon (2004) writes, ‘Antiracist racism and the determination to defend one's skin, which is characteristic of the colonized's response to colonial oppression, clearly represent sufficient reasons to join the struggle. But one does not sustain a war, one does not endure massive repression or witness the disappearance of one's entire family in order for hatred or racism to triumph. Racism, hatred, resentment, and “the legitimate desire for revenge” alone cannot nurture a war of liberation’ (89).

6. In Black skin, white masks, Fanon takes Sartre to task for reducing black experience to an idea rather than a brutal fact. Fanon writes, ‘Orphée Noir is a date in the intellectualization of the experience of being black. And Sartre's mistake was not only to seek the source of the source but in a certain sense to block that source’ (134).