I begin my Introduction to Ethnic Studies class with the following simple questions: “What is race?” and “what is racism?” Students spend five minutes composing their definitions, during which I enjoy the awkward silence in the room that’s punctuated by the sounds of pencils or pens scratching binder paper. I can see some students squinting their eyes (which I fear signals resentment that this be their first challenge), heads turned toward the desk, one or both palms pressed against their wrinkled foreheads. As with previous semesters, most of my white students had never asked themselves these questions, and I can tell this is so by their body language and the audible silence that settles over the cramped classroom. Those silences speak volumes. There is apprehension in those silences. There is uncertainty in those silences. And why shouldn’t there be? Race is a moving goalpost. Its definition has never remained static because it’s a structure built on shaky foundations, and it can only remain stable if society reinforces it.
Some students don’t always accept this logic. Most eventually admit that race is biologically fictional and culturally real, but a small fraction of them argue that it’s white people, not people of color, who are unfairly maligned as racist actors, and as a result are the true victims of racism. The objections aren’t always so explicit, however. Occasionally they come in the form of questions, or appeals to class struggle, or subtle reversals of misfortune. These objections are challenging to confront without unfairly exposing resistant students to scrutiny from the rest of the class.
Below is a short list of anecdotes describing some challenges I’ve faced teaching Ethnic Studies to groups of mostly white students. In the stories that follow I make a number of mistakes. After covering those examples, I’ll discuss what I think I could have done differently.
- On the first week of the semester we define race, racism, colorblindness, and ethnicity as a class. The definitions aren’t straightforward and at first this feels counter-intuitive to them. I explain that racism, the belief that certain phenotypic traits reveal something about a person’s inborn and unchanging character, worth, and ability, is an effective way to illegitimately distribute social power along racial lines, and that white people benefit from that unfair distribution. A white student raises his hand to object to my definition of racism. I call on him but don’t yet know his name (I will learn it within a week). “I’m going to play devil’s advocate,” he begins. He sounds nervous: “there’s one thing I don’t understand. Why can black people be proud of their race but white people can’t?” He radiates the same energy and anger that I feel from students a few times every semester when I teach this class. I tell everybody, including those who have disapproving looks on their faces, that this is a fair question, and secretly I am thankful the student was brave enough to ask it. I pose his question to the rest of the class. Nobody speaks so I ask the student what he thinks, but before I can finish he interrupts me. His nervous tone now replaced with unwavering confidence, he continues, “for instance, I’m proud of being white.” This is an invitation to sate his curiosity, so I oblige. “But let’s interrogate this idea,” I say, “what is defined as culturally white?” He shifts in his seat, “Oh, I see what this is all about. I see what you’re doing.” Red-faced, he grips his desk and stares at the particle board. I don’t externalize the panic I feel. “That’s a serious question,” I promise, “we should define what ‘culturally white’ means before moving forward.” The silence that confronts my serious question is an occupational hazard that I have no talent for enduring, so I relent for now. “We don’t have to answer that question today. What we learn about race and racism in the weeks ahead may provide some answers.”
- A white male student writes his mid-semester diagnostic response paper on the question “how does identity shape one’s social experience?” He spends the entirety of the paper arguing that racial hierarchies are not real, yet maintains that people of color have it worse in America than white people. He garnishes his response with the claim that the academic left silences him, but offers his reader no examples. We speak after class one day and I express curiosity for his position. He has trouble offering specifics, so I invite him to elaborate whenever he wishes. He never elaborates.
- A white male student writes his weekly journal on privilege, a concept I strategically hadn’t yet covered. In it, he claims people of color, women, and women of color aren’t oppressed in America because he grew up poor with a single mother who worked a factory job to support his family. In a marginal comment I explain that while class inequality is a major problem in American culture, it’s only a special aspect of privilege, not its sole variable. A week later, he disappears.
- Two days after teaching my students about Project Implicit, Harvard University’s two decades-long effort to collect comprehensive data on the psychological dimension of race, a white male student approaches me after class to tell me he hopes I’m not offended that he “passed the test” and is not racially biased. I ask him why he thinks that would offend me, and explain that it’s not a test one can pass or fail. He says he feels it undermines my point that implicit bias is real, and thought I would interpret his challenge as disrespectful. I can tell my response surprises him: “I’m not offended. You can feel free to challenge me whenever you like. Just keep in mind that you can test one way and the overall data will still tell a different story.”
- A white female student asks to do her final creative project on the lives of police officers. People in blue uniforms, she argues, are the underappreciated minorities who put their lives on the line every day, yet they receive the ire of an uninformed public that only witnesses those exceptional moments when men and women of color are murdered by corrupt police. I agree with her that officers must have a difficult and dangerous job, and that we likely don’t get the whole story, but I remind her that being a police officer is an occupational choice, not an ethnic or racial identity. I ask her to change her final project to fit the course. She turns in her original idea and I have to give her a low grade.
- In her response to Audre Lorde’s essay “The Uses of Anger,” a white female student who had throughout the semester endorsed most of the course material and was vocal in class suddenly dismissed Lorde’s critique of white academic women on the basis that she’s never witnessed or herself participated in marginalizing black women and other women of color. She further accused Lorde of promulgating inequalities by eroding coalitions between black and white women and artificially stoking resentment. My long-form comment (inexplicably far longer than her weekly response) summarily dismissed her argument and requested that she read Lorde’s work more closely to engage with her central thesis that black women’s claims are too often made invisible, or rejected as irrationally angry. I fear my bluntness inspired her silence for the rest of the semester.
These moments are a challenge for both me and my students, but for different reasons. My privilege as a white male instructor of Ethnic Studies with control over the direction of the course and assignment grades means my white students are likely to write or say what they think I want to read or hear, even if, secretly, they may find what I’m teaching reprehensible. But the occasional revelations above present sudden and unavoidable obstacles. No matter how confident I am in the course material and its natural social justice bent, I have to confront the reality that teaching is not a matter of spewing facts and data, or changing minds, or transforming students. They have to make those decisions on their own. Some change. Many become indignant. All are shaped by their private histories. And in the end I have no clear answers for how to confront these challenges.
But I am willing to make some tentative proposals. For the white students who have never had to confront these issues seriously, I suggest the complicated interplay of anger, frustration, confusion, and fear evidenced in these small acts of resistance signal what Robin DiAngelo calls white fragility, which is defined and countenanced by whites’ refusal to recognize how they benefit from a racist society. It is the process whereby white people respond either with fury or offense–both subtle and overt, passive aggressive and aggressive–to perceived attacks on their claims to individuality or objectivity. As Barbara Applebaum has argued, those who expose themselves as fragile often do not know they are doing so; their obvious anger is, instead, a reflex of the very privilege they tend to claim does not exist. So how do the examples above fit this definition of white fragility, and what are some protocols for confronting it?
In the first scenario, the student runs the gamut of emotions, from fear, to confidence, to outright anger, to confusion. And truthfully, I didn’t know how to respond in the moment. Reflecting on it now, I believe I did the right thing, though I suspect I could have been less comforting. I could have allowed myself to marinate in the silence of the room after I extended his question to the rest of the class. Since I view teaching as an invariably iterative process where students do half the thinking and I moderate discussion, my deferring the question to a later date when we had more tools available to confront it seemed the only logical option. It was also a risk. A deferral can easily be misinterpreted as a cowering act of subservience. A weakness. A confession that I lack the confidence to deliver the goods. A direct and concise response, on the other hand, betrays the complexity of the objection and teaches the wrong lesson that coming to quick conclusions is preferable to asking provocative questions. That is not how the world works. It’s a lesson I’d never want to teach.
But scenario one is rare enough that I caution against treating it as anything other than the exception to the rule. Most instances of white fragility resemble the other four scenarios in their private secrecy. If the second student objected to George M. Fredrickson’s definition of a racial hierarchy, I only knew about it because of his paper. And anyway, discussing it in person yielded no fruit. Yet I left the classroom blaming myself for going too easy on him. I wondered if it wouldn’t have been a better decision to push on his preconceptions, to show him that hierarchies are part of the human condition, and that the project is to critique the power that emerges out of those hierarchies. How, then, does one draw such objections out of students in the moment? What is a viable strategy for giving them permission to confront those thinly-veiled prejudices? What is at stake for these denials?
The third student invoked a familiar refrain that confuses systemic injustice with particular experience. If poor white people exist, the argument goes, then clearly white people aren’t privileged. Had he remained in attendance, he would have learned that “white trash” covers a specific subset of poor white people who, sociologist Monica McDermott observes, are called trash because they’ve perceptibly fallen short of the arbitrary ideals of whiteness. The natural byproduct of this stereotype is that black people–seen only as part of their group–have already been discarded like their white trash counterparts. But teaching such a set of social scientific facts and cultural analyses is unlikely itself to spark a dialogue. Rather than graffiti his short paper with blunt criticisms, I should have been kinder in writing and later pulled him aside to ask him how the class made him feel.
The scenario with the student who participated in Project Implicit commits a similar fallacy. Project Implicit is not a standardized test. Getting results of “moderately biased” or “heavily biased” carries no social consequences. One result is a data point among a sea of data points. It’s that sea, and the instructive distributions within that sea, that matters. Were it not, then it would make little sense for the project to span two decades. Not only did I not feel offended by his choice to telegraph the results, I interpreted that choice as a respectful need to seem anti-racist. That desire to perform anti-racism through an unwillingness to see, well-meaning though it is, is a problematic deferral to colorblindness. While we had already covered colorblind racism as a class, that doesn’t ensure understanding, and I should have seen that. As legal scholar Michelle Alexander writes in The New Jim Crow, colorblindness is the standard American social model adopted in retaliation against the gains of the Civil Rights Movement that refers to the refusal to discuss the systemic racism that surrounds us like a fog. Colorblindness is so intrinsic to American culture that, for some, talking about race is the same as confronting a core belief. It’s partly an individual problem, but really it’s so ingrained in American politics and culture that even noticing it for some can feel like adopting the perspective of a two-dimensional organism thrust suddenly into three-dimensional space. Had I recognized that in the moment, I may have instead connected project implicit with colorblindness, thereby abstracting it as an intellectual–rather than personal–problem and reaching beyond my guarded response that amounted to “your understanding of Project Implicit is flawed.”
The fifth student had perfect attendance and turned in all her assignments. She did the reading. She earned her A. But she lived her whole life up to that point among a family of white police officers. Any reference to the reams of sociological and psychological evidence supporting the narrative that officers shoot people of color at higher rates than white people she interpreted as a blanket condemnation of her family. And despite my assurances that the evidence isn’t a condemnation, she wouldn’t budge. So I did the only thing I could and let her feel uncomfortable. What I should have done was express my curiosity about her family, rather than merely bombard her with evidence that she no doubt read as a concerted attack on those she loved. After all, when students raise these objections openly, they’re signaling an openness to debate, to having their core beliefs challenged.
The final student likewise earned her glowing marks. But she was unique in that her objections arose only toward the end of the semester during the week when I introduced another variable–intersectionality–to our analytic toolbox. In her view intersectionality was a red herring, neither adequately representing women of color nor confronting real inequalities between groups of women. Thinking about my response to her in retrospect, I could have expended less energy on challenging her reading of the material then and there and instead allowed class discussion to complicate her preconceptions. On the contrary, I, a white man with presumptuous authority, tried to head her off at the pass, thereby potentially placing her on the defensive and silencing her. When I teach this course and others like it in the future, intersectionality must become a central pillar of my pedagogy. The discomfort my white students feel must extend throughout the semester so I can communicate the complexities behind how institutions use identity to distribute power unevenly. Intersectionality cannot become an end-of-semester concept shoehorned into the class during week twelve.
Ultimately, I have to let all of the students feel some discomfort. Discomfort is a natural byproduct of discussing race and gender in a colorblind society, so some white students have developed ways to avoid talking about it. In fact, most of these white students included assurances in their writing that they reject racism and would never perpetuate it knowingly. Yet these assurances ironically lay claim to a version of individuality that’s been confiscated from people of color. Implicit in each of these assurances is an unspoken request that I consider their emotions and experiences first and foremost. But wouldn’t doing so be tantamount to ignoring the grievances of those genuinely affected by racism? Applebaum suggests centering white emotions and offering comfort “allows for the suffering endured by the marginalized to continue without outrage and without a second thought” (869). So I’ve decided to center vulnerability as a virtue in my pedagogical practice. Doing so gives students permission to live in ambiguity. It directs them away from the desire to protect themselves from uncomfortable social realities. It encourages them to accept that there are no simple answers in an ineffable world.