Cultivating Racial Literacy in White, Segregated Settings: Emotions as Site of Ethical Engagement and Inquiry

Abstract

Drawing on writing from a first-year composition class, this article explores how White students approach racial literacy in a segregated, rural college setting in the United States. I argue for the importance of understanding how emotions inform and propel students’ responses to what I believe needs to be understood as the ethical challenge of racial literacy. White students who defended a color-blind stance of ethical judgment seemed to accept the emotional schooling, the accompanying beliefs, and innocent identities linked to their home communities. In contrast, other White students, adopting a stance of ethical awareness, engaged critically with their emotions so that emotions functioned as a site of ethical inquiry. Rather than defending a stable innocent identity, they began to interrogate an implicated, unstable, racialized identity within the context of their relationships with other Whites. In contrast to research that understands White students’ emotions primarily as a manifestation of resistance, my approach uses critical emotion studies to consider how emotions might function as a site of engagement and possibility. I conclude that we should develop a critical vocabulary for analyzing emotions in our classrooms and that we need to develop new strategies for addressing the embodied nature of emotion and belief.

Notes

Notes

1 According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Snyder county’s population in 2008 was estimated to be 97.7% White, while across the United States the White population was estimated to be 79.8%. Significantly, demographic trends suggest that by 2050 non-Hispanic Whites will be a minority in the United States.

2 Indeed, neuroscience researchers have found “that reason cannot operate without emotion; the frontal lobes, the site of consciousness, are virtually helpless when they cannot receive input from emotional bodily states” (Crowley, 2006, p. 82).

3 In so doing, we might also recall Spelman’s argument that emotions are “revelatory of important parts of our lives as moral agents” (quoted in Quandhal, 2003, p. 18).

4 This quotation, like all quotations from student work, is used by permission of the student. Pseudonyms are used here and throughout.

5 This is one reason I describe the campus as segregated rather than as predominantly White or racially isolated. The campus demographics, discursive norms, and social patterns are neither accidental nor inevitable. With that said, my goal is not to single out my campus as unusual; indeed, many overwhelmingly White campuses should be described similarly. See Massey and Denton’s (1993, pp. 1–3) discussion of the evolving use of the term segregated.

6 Interestingly, a nearby college, also located in a small, rural town, graduated its first African American student in the mid-19th century.

7 For example, consider Eula Biss’s (2009) Notes From No-Man’s Land, a collection of personal essays that explores a White woman’s struggles to navigate racial borderlands. Biss situates emotions historically and in the context of structural racism and White privilege.