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“Grab him!” they shouted. “And cage the big dope! Lasso his stomach with ten miles of rope! Tie the knots tight so he’ll never shake loose! Then dunk that dumb speck in the Beezle-Nut juice! Horton fought back with great vigor and vim But the Wickersham gang was too many for him. They beat him! They mauled him! They started to haul Him into his cage! But he managed to call To the Mayor: “Don’t give up! I believe in you all! A person’s a person, no matter how small! And you very small persons will not have to die If you make yourselves heard! So come on, now, and TRY!” Horton Hears a Who! by Dr. Seuss   Horton Hears a Who! is a children’s story book by the dependable philosopher Dr. Seuss. In the parable, Horton the elephant was, on May 15th, having a bath in the jungle. As Horton is splashing and enjoying the moment, he hears a small noise–a faint voice calling for help. The rest of the tale is about Horton risking his life to save the town of Who-ville from those in the jungle who would destroy it. Other characters could not, or would not, hear the Who-villians because they were small in size and their voices were faint. Who-ville is so tiny it can fit on a speck of dust. Dr. Seuss describes the smallness of Who-ville this way--“The elephant stretched his great trunk through the air, And he lifted the dust speck and carried it over, And placed it down, safe, on a very soft clover.” Unlike the other characters of the parable, Horton believed, “A person’s a person, no matter how small.” This is, unfortunately, a contested idea in the story, as well as in U.S. society. In our conversation on oppression, systemic hatred and violence, perhaps the whimsy of Dr. Seuss allows us to enter into this radical notion of inclusion, compassion, and acceptance with fresh eyes and child-like wonder. Perhaps whimsy can be used in our classrooms to teach people the worth of all humanity.  Rekindling our imaginations for the work of empathy is needed, but fraught with danger. Imagination shackled to hatred is as powerful as imagination perpetuating liberation, justice, and love. Evil itself can be imaginative. The power of imagination is recognized by those who would oppress as it is by those who would liberate. Hatred recruits imagination for propaganda and manipulation. Oppression and its many forms of torture are often creative, imaginative–yet are a machine of hopelessness. We cannot naively think that if it is imaginative it is pointing toward freedom. Dr. Seuss, the czar of whimsy and imagination is certainly a compass pointing us toward freedom. Horton Hears a Who! is the life lesson of advocacy and sacrifice. Teaching for awareness of systemic dehumanization, teaching strategies for re-imagining equitable communities are sometimes enriched with a little help from Dr. Seuss.  For those who believe in and teach toward healthy communities, healthy families, healthy individuals and, for our purposes, healthy classrooms, the social structures that are produced by racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, (etc.) are an illogical, un-reasonable, and counter-intuitive situation. Oppression truncates the imagination of the oppressor. White supremacy and patriarchy distort reality. Internalizing the lie of superiority thins the soul and weakens judgement. Imagination itself, then, is constrained by the maintenance and management of hatred. An imagination tasked with the perpetuation of hatred becomes one more blunt and dangerous tool. Dr. Seuss’s brilliant tale provides insight. Students who are reticent, unable, incapable, or simply resistant to the conversation on racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia find Dr. Seuss non-threatening and approachable. The whimsy of Dr. Seuss allows students to lower their guard–this is a good thing. Dr. Seuss reminds white students and male students of the imagination they had as children before white supremacy and patriarchy stripped them bare and robbed them.  This semester, I am partnering with the good doctor in this way. My instructions for an in-class activity are: Place your feet flat on the floor, take everything out of your hands and relax. Breathe deeply. Breath in through your nose and out through your mouth and relax.  Get out your reading assignment, Horton Hears A Who! by Dr. Seuss (it’s on the syllabus as required reading). Sit together in a small group (2 or 3 people, no more than 4) and slowly re-read the book aloud to one another. As individuals, with crayon, magic marker or colored pen and 8.5 X 11 paper consider these questions: In your family, church, community, region, or country–who are those who are treated as the small people? Who are the people who are unheard, unseen, or ignored? Who are the small people for which bias and prejudice is often heaped?  Who are the small people who struggle to be heard? Be specific–make a list.  (I supply the art materials.) Gather together with your small group, and without discussing the rationale, compile one list of all of the groups of small peoples recorded in each individual list. Bring a list with no redundancies. Record your group’s compiled list on a poster sized paper for display. Display the lists and discuss with entire class these kinds of questions: Why are these groups of people considered “small” in society? Why is bias and prejudice foisted upon these particular groups of persons? Is there a common understanding of who is “small”? Are there any groups to be added to the list? Are there any patterns of prejudice or discrimination which we can see in our lists? Accept all answers (within the bounds of sensibility). Next, I re-read aloud the above quote, and then instruct: Sit with this quote, reread it and let it soak in. Breathe deeply as you sit and think. Read our list of “small people” and breathe. Think of your interactions with or/as these oppressed brothers and sisters. Keep breathing as you sit quietly. (At least 10 minutes of silence, more if they can take it.) For which of these groups of small persons are you and your community willing or able to be a Horton? For whom will you and your community fight? For whom will you and your community take a beating? For whom will you and your community be mauled and caged? For whom will you shout encouragement and freedom? Sit in silence; take notes of your own thoughts if you so choose. (I do not ask students to report on this reflection.) Now, consider and discuss aloud: (a) What is at stake if you do not speak for the small people? (b) What is a risk if you do speak for the small people? Discuss for as long as there is energy for this inquiry. In this instance, the professor’s role is primarily listening, clarifying and, if needed, introducing vocabulary to elevate the conversation. With fresh paper, draw the kind of courage which would be necessary for you and your community should you choose to advocate or should you choose to re-invest in your advocacy of hearing and fighting for the small people. You may choose to work on individual or collaborative drawings. We will create a gallery of your drawings. The title of our gallery display is “A Person’s a Person, No Matter How Small!” Whether courage can be taught is one of my confounding meta-reflection questions. My answer today is: only if it can be imagined. The last step of this reflection is the point of the exercise; we must be able to imagine ourselves as people of courage if we are to do this risky, treacherous work of raising consciousness, creating relevant and timely strategies for eradication of oppression and learning how to heal the wounds of dehumanization and systemic hatred. 

Belonging is a yearning of the soul. Our life’s quest is often about finding the place, purpose or persons to which or to whom we belong. We need to feel at home; we yearn to feel accepted, swaddled by our relationships. We want to experience being part of something bigger than our finite, individual, selves. The experience of belonging makes us keenly aware of the connectional-joy of humanness. Equally, the experience of alienation, of having no place to call home, of being deemed inferior, is a profound experience of dehumanization and is soul dampening.  Twenty-first century racism would have minoritized people believe that we are “welcome,” only then to be immersed in experiences of disrespect, disregard and hatred.  At best, this creates a psychic quandary for us. At worst, this harm is debilitating to our ability to teach and to learn.  The magnitude of the need to belong necessitates a pedagogical priority, especially in those white schools with minoritized persons on faculty, on staff and in the student body.   The seminary where I am on faculty is located in a very affluent New Jersey suburb. The town is a bedroom community for executives and corporate giants of Manhattan. Consequently, we enjoy clean streets, splendid restaurants, a preponderance of shopping, great theatre, and a world-class jazz club.  Also, consequently, is the existence of a clear two-tier caste society: those who live here and those who come to work as cashiers, waitresses, nannies, elder care worker, gardeners and secretaries. I, due to faculty housing, live in this town. Typically, the workers who come to town are African-American and Latinx.  The residents are typically white.  I am routinely treated by fellow residents, as well as by commuter workers, as if I do not belong here.  I am African-American living in this affluent county – an embodied oxymoron, at best. I pay taxes here, vote here, work here, but, from the gaze of the racist eyeball, I do not belong here…. I’ve lived here for twenty years. Recently, I was having breakfast at the local diner with our dean, Javier Viera. Dean Viera, born in Puerto Rico, is fluent in Spanish. When the waitress came to our table to take our order, she was, as she always is, pleasant, and, in retrospect, sad. I did not notice her sadness until it morphed into a smile. What made her smile was when Javier greeted her in Spanish and ordered his breakfast in Spanish. When Dean Viera spoke to her in Spanish it both surprised and delighted her.  Her face lit up like a Christmas tree.  At his speaking, she went from an almost invisible presence to a woman of dignity. This drastic shift happened when she was spoken to in a language which signaled her belonging – or more accurately, her shift happened when she received the signal that she was not alone, not alien.  The Dean could have ordered in English. I did. Instead, in that moment he chose a language which invited the waitress to know a little bit of who his people are, what his allegiances are, and the kind of man he is.  In this moment of belonging, he code-switched. A few years ago, I drove into the school parking lot and whipped into a space designated for faculty.  I literally parked in front of the sign that read “Reserved for Faculty.”  Distracted by my own thoughts, I got out of my car, opened the back door to get my briefcase and bags, then shut both car doors.  Still distracted as I walked, I headed up the path to the seminary building, intending to go straight to class.  Joe (not his name) was a facilities staff person whose job it was to place temporary signs around campus for upcoming events. Joe had worked at the school longer than I had and by that time I had been there for more than ten years. Joe, seeing me park in faculty parking, stopped hammering a signpost near the space where I parked. He shouted over to me, “You can’t park there.” In Black woman fashion, I decided I did not want to be bothered, this day, with this kind of #$%@##.  Without replying or acknowledging him in any way (ignoring is a Black woman survival strategy), I kept walking. Joe raised his volume and shouted in my direction, “That’s for faculty.  YOU can’t park there.” As I entered the building I looked over my shoulder to see that the sign-man had left his assigned task, walked over to my car and was inspecting the parking tag in my car window. I suspect Sign-man was surprised when my tag read “Faculty.”  Even when I “belong,” Sign-man, on the lowest tier of the hierarchy, believes he can police me and tell me that I do not belong.  WTH! $%##*! Though my enthusiasm at the start of any fall semester wanes, my clarity of purpose sharpens.  At the end of the orientation worship service I position myself in the hallway.  As the new students leave the chapel, I ferret-out the new African American and African students, shake their hands, read their name tags aloud.  I ask in which degree program they are enrolled and inquire about their fall course selection. While doing this, I keep an eye on the stairway. If it looks like a student who I have not spoken with is going down the stairs, I, in true old-Black-church-woman style, snap my fingers to get his/her attention, then wave them over to me. As I corral each student, I use Black church gestures and tones telling them, don’t wait for trouble, then decide to come find me; come sit in my office soon and we will get acquainted. I tell them to email me and we will have coffee or lunch - soon. I want them from their first day to know, at least a little bit, that they are not alone in this place. I tell them that the protocols and practices of respect, decency, and regard of Black church culture are, with their presence, operative and that I am a representative of our shared culture. I want them to know that this school has something of merit to offer them if they can just figure out how to extract the best and leave the rest. I want my gesture to signal to them my availability to help with this leg of their holy journey. I tell them, I, like the other old women of our church tradition, in any given moment, can reach in and down to my DD-located-coin-purse for a piece of money, a freshly pressed handkerchief, a peppermint candy or a straight edge.  For me, the importance of this gesture is like what our dean did for the waitress. Or, more importantly, an antidote for when, not if, the sign-man speaks to them on our campus. I am trying to communicate, in the midst of all the hollow rhetoric of “welcome,” that they belong in our school because our people have fought and won the right for us to be in this place. I code-switch. I code-switch in ear-shot of the public to signal to the African and African-American students, at least a little bit, that their racial/cultural identity is part of this place and that their/our expressions of religion, faith, values and community are here, at least a little bit.  It does not take Jim/Jane Crow era signs reading “Whites Only” at the water fountains and bathrooms to make people of color feel unwelcomed. Strategies of hatred and alienation are maintained in the DNA of the institution as well as by the sign-posters on payroll. By now, I have been at my desk long enough to have a modicum of authority, some institutional voice, and can exercise some mother’s-milk-given moxie.  At this stage, I possess less fear of reprisal or sabotage and more orneriness. My orneriness is one of the gifts of having survived into crone-hood; it is a gift from the ancestors, a pay-off of having earned the distinction of full professorship and being near retirement. As a person who has earned influence and power in this profession, I feel it my obligation to use this cachet to tell Black students that they belong and then to work until it happens.  This year, after my practice of greeting all the students of the African diaspora, I made my way to the foyer for the buffet lunch.  I was joined in the que by a tenure-track faculty colleague who is Korean. A new student came up to my colleague and, in greeting each other, they spoke in Korean.  After the brief exchange, my colleague introduced me to the student in English.  I was glad my colleague also understands the necessity of code-switching to assist Korean students in feeling that they belong, at least a little bit. Later that week, the same colleague and I went to dinner. We chose a sushi restaurant.  The maître d’ greeted us at the restaurant entrance, then sat us at a table.  He took my friend’s drink order in Korean and mine in English. Once the man left the table side – I playfully feinted insult and asked my friend why the maître d’ had not spoken to me in Korean. My friend tipped his head forward and, looking at me over his glasses, smiled. The truth telling of his culturally familiar gesture made me laugh out loud.   

Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said: “one can’t believe  impossible things.” “I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day.  Why,  sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”  -- Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass   The matter-of-factness of the Queen’s statement about believing impossible things is her formidable strength. My contribution to a society that must take seriously its issues of inclusion, equity, eradication of poverty, economic justice, and ecological ruin is showing my students that belief in impossible things is their prophetic obligation. I want to teach my students to be more like the Queen, and less like Alice. The current hegemonic reality would have us believe that the current state of things is all there is. And, how it is now is as it should be – and anything else is impossible. We are distracted from imagining a world of communal mindedness and cooperation. We are taught that justice is impossible, improbable, and, I dare say, imprudent. For some students, the challenge to believe impossible things is the immediacy of being taught by an African American, female professor who has, by the position she holds in the school, authority over them.  “How is it possible,” I hear them attempting to reconcile their cognitive dissonance, “that a person deemed by society to be inferior can be in this place of higher education? She must be a credit to her race; She must be an Affirmative Action hire; she must have slept with somebody to get this kind of job.”  For other students, the challenge to believe impossible things is when they see someone like themselves–same racial identity, same gender, same hair texture, and possessing the same ability to suck my teeth and roll my eyes like a champ. “How is it possible,” I hear them attempting to reconcile their confusion, “that a person like Her can be in this place of higher education? She must think she’s white. She must have left the church–she ain’t Christian. She must be sleeping with somebody to get this kind of job.”  If I can press past the immediate narrowness of some students when gazing upon my Black, female body in my own classroom, I am eager to get to deeper urgencies of believing impossible things for social change.  The politics of inferiority, the oppressions of white supremacy, white nationalism, and the current state of misogyny would have us believe, require us to believe, that the current reality is all that is possible. The status quo truncates the imagination as a way of maintaining control. Unimaginative students routinely resist learning about social transformation and the creativity necessary to disentangle and revision society without systemic oppressions. Every teacher, if you get to teach long enough, develops a shtick. The word “shtick” comes from the Yiddish language meaning “bit”–as in a “comedy bit” performed on stage. If you are not sure if you have a shtick or if you are not sure what it is–ask your students, they know. Or attend the annual end-of-the-year skits where students gleefully parody the faculty.  Keep in mind that imitation is the greatest flattery and smile during your moments. One of my many classrooms shticks goes like this: With a wry smile on my face and beginning with a dramatic pause I pose this question:  Which came first – race or racism?  Some students recognize my wry smile, become cautious--suspicious that this is a trick question. Some students hesitate to answer for fear of getting the answer wrong. A silence wafts through the classroom. I then answer my own question: Racism birthed race and not the other way ‘round.  Students’ faces signal more suspicion, disbelief, and occasionally . . . curiosity.  The silence moves deeper into disbelief and some low-grade fear (like something dangerous is about to happen). Feeling a teachable moment potentially approaching, I keep going: It took the depravity of racist hearts to construct race and not the other way ‘round. Race was created as a social/political system whose ultimate and exclusive aim is to create a permanent social under- caste of human inferiority.   (Dramatic pause, I breathe deeply so students can breathe also.) I continue: Given the spiritual evil necessary to maintain the system of patriarchy, white supremacy and white nationalism, it would make sense to assume that the victims of this social system (all women and children, people of color, the poor, LGBTQ brothers and sisters, disabled folks–for example) should be, and many are, either annihilated, embittered, or paralyzed with fear . . . . Yet, the African American men and women I know, while they have suffered tremendous hardship, oppression, and loss, exemplify a story other than defeat.  When you are a people who know how to believe impossible things, the reality of a situation does not keep you from freedom. I ask for questions and comments, linger only for a little while, and then continue with discussion questions such as: What would it take for you and your people to be able to imagine a more just society-a world without racism, sexism, classism, heterosexism, ableism? What obstacles make imagining this society difficult? What is at stake for your people if you do not imagine this world? What is the role and responsibility of church leadership in the more just society? What skills, capacities, and know-how do you need to assist your people in transitioning into a more just society, church, and world? These are not questions proffering a utopian society, nor are they questions for idle flights of fancy or busy-work. Believing in the impossible as well as teaching belief in impossible things is what it will take in order to save the racists and the victims of racism. If we are to teach our students, in the words of Bishop Desmond Tutu, to endure hardship without becoming hard and to have heartbreak without being broken, then they have to have an imagination that can conjure that which evil says is impossible.

My course began with an iconic book by bell hooks and ended, after several other readings, with a beloved text by Parker Palmer. On the last day of class, a white woman student came up to me to tell me how much she enjoyed the course (she had earned an A in the course), and to give me feedback, saying, “Next time, start with the white guy and not bell hooks; it will be easier for us white people to stay in the conversation.” So much teaching is complicit with dominant race ideologies and patriarchy, yet we yearn for different ways to teach. White normative approaches to disciplinary-subject matter, reading lists which strain to add even one non-white author, grading standards which insist upon majority culture assessment categories are only a few of the ways that the ideals which normalize whiteness permeate our daily living and teaching. Disrupting these patterns of evil and shifting these detrimental values takes mixing things up, muddling stuff, creating newness and difference. Increasing our knowledge of new resources and redefining our criteria of what might constitute acceptable academic resource for our classrooms, might be a way forward. Look for narratives which resist and repudiate the story of whiteness. Stories that champion and reinforce whiteness and patriarchy, stories that allow for a token few minoritized people to triumph, but refuse to portray a change in the oppression for all or stories which never question the absence of powerless people in significant roles permeate our airwaves and imaginations. We are persons immersed in the narrative which supports and promotes white supremacy, white nationalism, and patriarchy. We have to find ways to resist. A critical challenge for all teachers who want to teach as a disruption to whiteness and patriarchy is that, regardless of personal social location, each of us must expand our knowledge of freedom narratives. We, all of us, given the ethos of the United States in the 21st century, must with great intent, seek out and immerse ourselves in the counter-narratives to the lie of whiteness. We must internalize a narrative of freedom, love, creativity, and forgiveness. We must believe in the sacredness and worth of all human beings and teach this story in unflinching and believable ways. As a spiritual discipline, take time to fill your consciousness and imagination with freedom narratives as a way to fortify yourself for teaching against the status quo. We must re-teach ourselves in order to teach toward freedom.   Read stories that depict and portray people of color as intelligent, generative, and caring human beings – as normal. This is why the movie Black Panther was so popular and so refreshing. It did not start and end with chattel slavery. It made use of fresh portrayals of people of the African diaspora which told a story of community, kinship and the complexity of freedom.  Avoid the motifs of the individual superhero like the ways Martin Luther King’s or Harriet Tubman’s legacies have been distorted. Look past the stories of inferiority and degradation often told in the daily news cycle. Find stories where the women are not one-dimensional wooden beings and the people of color are not gratuitously violent, oversexualized, or stupid. Teach yourself to identify the narratives of freedom and bring them into your classroom. In immersing yourself in freedom narratives, look for a multiplicity of mediums: film clips, music, screenplays, artwork, photography (all means of storytelling), and then consider making use of the best ones in your classes. Narratives that are sophisticated about race/gender politics are seeping into the U.S. culture. Look for new stories like “Dear White People” on Netflix. Binge watching both seasons of “Dear White People” took focus and stamina. I managed to do it in 48 hours – taking occasional breaks to walk my dog, get a snack and sleep. The well-written Netflix series is based upon an acclaimed film of the same name. The plot is set in a 21st-century fictitious college called Winchester University. The story depicts the lives of African American college students at this Ivy League, predominantly white university. The Black students are bright, articulate, culturally and politically conscious, and conscientious. In other words, the black folks are woke. The title “Dear White People” is a clue that the white folks of the community are not woke. The lead character and protagonist has a campus radio show. She often, to inform white peers, professors, and university administrators formats her radio soliloquies in the form of a letter which begins, “Dear White People.” Then in great poetic rant, she informs and reprimands the offending, or simply ignorant, white people about their white supremacy, privilege, and the ways their behaviors and the racist, sexist systems which privilege them, to which they seem to be oblivious, continually affect her and her friends. The poignant stories disclose and interrogate cultural bias, social injustice, misguided activism, and the zeal that comes with college-aged persons. The stories are also about the relationships of young people and the ways they struggle to negotiate their social, cultural, and intellectual growth. Creator and executive producer Justin Simien is a storyteller who understands the ever-present irony, bitter humor and too often anger for persons attempting to live life while being a target of white supremacy and patriarchy. “Dear White People” is an expanding of freedom narratives. This is the kind of material you want to explore for possible classroom use. Material which unapologetically tells the story from the perspective of the oppressed and the ways we navigate the dehumanizing terrain.  Consider radical ideas as you find new resources. What if you taught your introductory course with no white or male authors? Develop a course which is soundly disciplinary, but has no majority culture readings. This might mean using all articles and no textbooks, per se, but why not? Teaching to transform might not mean including a few voices of the marginalized --- it might mean excluding the voices of the oppressor so we can learn the perspectives, voices, and stories of the oppressed. And/or consider introducing each text to be read by providing, or having your students research, the social locations of each author. If an author is white and male, identify the person in this way. Resist only identifying the gender and race of authors who are female and people of color because it signals they are “exceptions” to the routinely read normal readings authored by white men.  Creating educational spaces for which the voices of the oppressed and marginalized is taken seriously, respected, even prioritized is a paradigm-shifting act – an act of freedom in which you can participate by the stories you bring into your classroom.

Deconstructing Race is a book written by a teacher to other teachers. It combines empirical data with critical race theory and pedagogical research with three objectives: at the theoretical level, the book offers teachers an overview of applied critical race theory; at the pedagogical level, Mahiri offers a wide sample of ethnographic data (mostly interviews) and literary analysis (Chapter 2) that both inform and illustrate the theoretical framework; third, and perhaps most importantly, Deconstructing Race offers an alternative framework “beyond the Color-Bind.” Aptly drawing on Derrida’s work, Mahiri diagnoses that “rapidly changing micro-cultural identities and practices of individuals cannot be contained in the static racial categories assigned by white supremacy” (7). The author advances the notion of “micro-cultures” to account for the myriad ways in which subjects assume different cultural positions, practices, choices, and perspectives. The hyphen in the expression seeks to underline the experience of multicultural individuals who always live in-between. The theoretical apparatus (Chapters 1, 2, 3, and 9) sandwiches a set of five chapters in which the author exemplifies the inadequacy of racial categories by presenting several interviews grouped according to the five official categories of race (briefly presented in chapter 3). The wealth of interviews and testimonies cannot be summarized here, but they all point to how institutionalized racial categorizations completely miss the mark as descriptors of identity. The ethnographical data amply demonstrates in turn that identitarian “boxes” cannot be decided in advance and theoretical notions need to be sharpened to reflect what Mahiri calls the phenomenon of hyperdiversity. For educators in the fields of theology, religious studies, or multicultural ministry, the main appeal of this contribution may reside precisely in the richness of its ethnographical survey and, more specifically, in the testimonies of subjects classified within a certain race. Their experiences push racial categories to come undone in favor of other “ancestral, ethnic, and national origin identifications” (78). Furthermore, this new construction of identities, Mahiri explores, is performed through digital media where subjects negotiate real-world and virtual identities – subverting the former by performing new identifications in the latter. From this standpoint, Deconstructing Race offers a glimpse of what resistance looks like in the age of digital media. Whereas the ethnographic account is definitely the book’s main strength, its theoretical framework calls for further elaboration. Mahiri takes a descriptive approach to ethnographic analysis with the subsequent advantage of presenting the experiences of the interviewed subjects in their rich complexity. However, self-descriptions are not sufficiently analyzed. For instance, to what extent is the emphatic insistence on the notion of “identity” (regardless of the axes that define it) not itself a philosophical project in need of deconstruction? How might a more robust analysis of contemporary capitalism – a concept mentioned a couple of times in passing but that names the cause, one might argue, of mass population movements that inform the identities presented – inform alternative racial imaginaries?

It has now been over a full year since the 2016 presidential election. Yet, I still remember vividly the dark and raw thoughts I had the morning of November 9, 2016. When I woke up and learned of the election results, I was horrified that so many people had made a conscious decision to elect a person who embodied and condoned the evils of racism, misogyny, and xenophobia, to be the world’s most powerful leader. Most of the discussions I had that day with my family, friends, and colleagues centered around our inability to understand the political stances and ideologies that were reflected in so much (but not the majority!) of the popular vote. In that grim day after the election, I remember thinking that educators, like myself, must have completely missed the mark. As a professor of theology, I was particularly troubled. The election had touched one of my core beliefs deeply—that is, the purpose of theological education is to form persons to think and act responsibly in the church and society. I remember thinking that my field had failed, and that we needed to rethink everything we had been doing in the classroom up to then. As I read the analyses that were pouring in that day, one particular headline caught my eye: “Trump won because college-educated Americans are out of touch. Higher education is isolated, insular and liberal. Average voters aren't.” The article was written by Charles Camosy, a professor at Fordham University, who was proposing that the election reflected a divide in our country between those who have a college degree and those who do not. “The reality is that six in 10 Americans do not have a college degree, and they elected Donald Trump,” he declared. I had been thinking more about age-old racism and the divide between whites and non-whites as the reason for the election results. But, Professor Camosy presented a different analysis, one that has been troubling me and my role as a theological educator ever since I read it that day. He said: “College-educated people didn’t just fail to see this coming — they have struggled to display even a rudimentary understanding of the worldviews of those who voted for Trump.” What really stopped me in my tracks was his remark about how college-educated persons, “have especially paltry knowledge about the foundational role that different philosophical or theological claims play in public thought compared with what is common to college campuses . . . . [M]any professors and college students don’t even realize that their views on political issues rely on a particular philosophical or theological stance.”[1] This statement made me pause, because it resonated deeply with my own experience, and, therefore, called me to task. I began thinking: Are the ideologies expressed in my assigned readings and classroom assignments monolithic? In my efforts to form persons to think and act responsibly, have I promoted an insular way of thinking? As educators, we have a great opportunity (and perhaps even a responsibility) to present certain sets of values persuasively. I even state some of these values explicitly in my course syllabi. For example, I want my students to know that I value the theological voices of those on the margins, both in history and contemporary society. I am edified when students come to adopt this value of mine as their own. In addition, if certain values, like racism, ignorance, and bigotry, are displayed in my classroom, I clearly denounce them and explain why. But, in my effort to rethink everything I have been doing in the classroom, Professor Camosy’s article has led me to consider a different approach: that I should be giving some attention to racism, ignorance, and bigotry, before simply denouncing it. In the classroom, this would entail assigning readings from the alt-right, for example. The goal would be to better understand the political and theological stances that undergird these values, which are often underrepresented in higher education, so that we and our students would understand them better. If I want my students to think and act in the world responsibly, shouldn’t they be able to understand the values they will be encountering and engaging outside of the classroom? In the required texts and readings assignments on my course syllabi, I strive to include diverse authors. I understand “diversity” in this sense to mean the inclusion of writings by people traditionally marginalized because of their race/ethnicity, gender, class, etc. But, lately I have been thinking that I might do better to reconsider my definition of “diversity.” Perhaps it should include those marginalized by educational levels, age groups, geographic regions, values, and political standpoints? To be honest, what has held me back thus far in assigning texts from certain political standpoints, such as those that are entangled with white supremacy, is my own aversion to them. I also do not want to be misunderstood as promoting the values espoused by such writings--or worse yet, risk students being convinced by their rhetoric. So, I’m curious: What do you educators, who might be reading this, think is at risk in extending this definition of “diversity” or not extending it? On the most practical level, have any of you begun to include diverse political standpoints in your reading assignments? If so, how do you present the material to your students? Do you follow any rules or guidelines? Perhaps most importantly: Is your working definition of “diversity” effective, do you think, in preparing students to intellectually and socially engage with the world outside of the classroom more effectively?  [1] Carles Camosy, “Trump won because college-educated Americans are out of touch,” Washington Post, November 9, 2016. https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/11/09/trump-won-because-college-educated-americans-are-out-of-touch/?utm_term=.3634cedb1e19 (accessed December 13, 2017).

Like Teresa Delgado  I’ve composed and deleted several versions of this post. My first draft, started several weeks ago, reflected on how we talk about race, violence, and nationalism post-Charlottesville. I wanted to add my voice to the many inspiring people who have found ways to incorporate discussions of xenophobia, violence, and white privilege into their courses. In that post, I attempted to address the types of questions and frameworks that our students naturally employ in the aftermath of tragedies. Specifically, I was interested in the ways our students personalize these experiences by asking each other “What would you do?” We all hope to be the people who do something in the face of hate. If I hadn’t fallen behind in the wake of a hectic fall semester that would be the blog post you would be reading. This week, however, I’ve been tasked with a different question. Not what would you do, but rather, what will we do? I write not from the perspective of post- but the perspective of pre-. The League of the South (along with several other white supremacist organizations) are planning a rally next weekend in both Shelbyville and Murfreesboro, Tennessee. According to a spokesperson for the organization, the group is not rallying around the preservation of statues this time because the state’s Heritage Act already makes it quite difficult to remove confederate monuments. Instead, their stated topic of contention is refugee resettlement (an issue which happens to be close to home for me; I volunteer as a translator for a local refugee family). Right now there are several groups mobilizing in opposition to these rallies. Both local organizations and ones from out of town are coordinating resistance activities and counter-protests. Across social media and at various public forums, citizens of Murfreesboro are divided as to what the appropriate response should be. Some people are firmly resolved, others are uncertain, and many are afraid. Coincidentally, in my introductory Religion and Society class, my students are in the middle of a unit examining religious codes and systems of ethics. Last week, we looked at Craig Martin’s A Critical Introduction to the Study of Religion that explores how ethical decisions are filtered through Bourdieu’s notion of habitus. That seemed like as a good a place as any to think about the different possible actions that one might take against a white supremacist rally. So here’s what I did, pre- an event like Murfreesboro/Shelbyville 2017. I began by reflecting on the fact that we’ve had more conversations than usual about current and political events this semester. From Puerto Rico to Las Vegas; from nuclear threats from North Korea to a church shooting in the town next door; and from the epidemic of sexual violence against women epitomized by Harvey Weinstein to the movement inspired by Colin Kaepernick to expose systemic racism. Over the past two months there has been no shortage of current events for our students to assess or debate from the position of “What would you do?” I went on to say that I wanted to have a different type of conversation. Rather than describing or offering their own opinions, I would be asking them to do a higher level of analysis. Description, I told them, is an important part of what we do in religious studies, but that’s not all we do. I called on the students who are also enrolled in my Jesus class to explain how in that class we’ve undertaken a discursive analysis wherein we’re not interested in what the texts say (and certainly not in whether they are right or wrong), but instead are interested in what they do (and what the doing does). I printed off conversation threads from four different public Facebook events/pages that are making plans in opposition to the white supremacists’ rally. The different options presented by these pages are: Do nothing (ignore them, don’t invite conflict) Hold a family-friendly rally in a different location (a protest of sorts without direct confrontation) Have a counter-protest and call on citizens to stand against white nationalism, Nazis, and the KKK (a protest with direct confrontation but the avoidance of physical violence) Take part in an Antifa-style protest (direct confrontation with anticipated violence)[1] As we worked our way through the four sites, I asked the class to read the language closely for evidence of how each group describes themselves, the white supremacist group, and other planned protests. We discussed how they legitimated their perspectives and where they placed their authority (in the case of the first three, each claimed to have the best interests of Murfreesboro at heart and worked to establish their local identity via connections to different community groups and networks). From there we sketched out a basic conception of how all four read the moral position “white supremacy is wrong” through different lenses provided by their habitus and with very different consequences. The activity seemed to work well. I wanted to have a conversation that did something different than simply reiterating the students’ own viewpoints. While those types of conversations can be helpful because they provide an opportunity for students to practice speaking about contentious issues, this particular discussion is more urgent. Often I find classroom discussions devolve into each student waiting their turn to state their case and figure out who is “on their side.” My hope was that by working together to analyze the discourses and social locations of the different groups rather than evaluating each other, the boundaries that sometimes emerge in these conversations would dissolve. I also hoped that they might come to better understand their own perspectives and how they are shaped by social factors. Finally, and most prominently, I hoped they would be able to more fully understand these events as embedded in cultural systems, rather than independent, chaotic occurrences. By way of a conclusion, I offered myself as a case study and asked them (based on their assessment of my own identity, values, and habitus) to offer evidence for and against my participation in each of the four counter activities. I told them that I was uncertain about which of the options I wanted to participate in and that I would take their advice to heart when deciding what to do. They made passionate cases for and against each position with a level of perceptiveness and concern that exceeded my expectations. Previously, when I’ve thought about how I teach current events in the classroom it has focused on reflection as reaction. I’ve invited students to consider the facts of what “actually happened” and to delve into the nuance of context. In those cases, I have taken on the role of a guide, helping them articulate and expand their understanding. Here we don’t completely understand because we don’t yet know what will happen. There’s an ambiguity in addressing something that is uncertain and has yet to occur, especially amid the elevated risks that accompany a situation like this. In this case, I made them play the role of the guide, instructing me on how to understand and articulate my own perspective. As I write in a moment that feels like a calm before the storm, this ambiguity and liminality feels important – which is why I wanted to write this post before the event itself occurred. As faculty we’re good at having answers. Assessment and evaluation are second nature. But both with my students and on the Wabash Teaching Religion and Politics blog, I see value in capturing the uncertainty, inviting my students and you into the process of considering the question what will, as opposed to what would, you do. [1]For obvious reasons, I was unable to find anything on public social media forums making specific plans related to Antifa or similar groups so we read an article describing their perspective and activities.

Every semester I stand in front of my classes at my predominantly white state university and argue, “whiteness came into being through more than five hundred years of dominant cultural narratives undergirded by [white] Christianity, laws, and sciences which have proclaimed the innate inferiority of those outside dominant white culture.” Historically my students have had three different responses to the argument: revelation, no surprise, and disdain. For the first group of students, the idea that white Christianity has anything to do with race and racism in the United States is new and revelatory. It helps them better understand how systemic violence came in to being and continues to function. For the second group of students, the idea that white Christianity is in part responsible for the state of race relations comes as no surprise and connects to their understanding of reality. Many of these students have a long view of history and many face the direct consequences of the systemic violence created by white supremacy, hetero-normativity, patriarchy, and ableism all of which have been justified by white Christianity. The third group of students respond with disbelief, anger, and disdain. This third group of students is more visible now than in previous years. As I look around the room there are clearly more eye rolls and head shakes, whispers, and general displays of dis-ease. The arguments about the politics of white Christianity are a direct affront to this group’s worldview and in some cases, the ideas are exactly what their families, community leaders, and political pundits warned them about. What has become more evident in the last year is an increased level of anxiety in classroom spaces when talking about systemic violence and oppression. Part of the anxiety is about trauma and trust, while another part of the anxiety is about anger. The trauma was created by the presence of a presidential candidate on campus. It was an event that left students and faculty feeling wounded and vulnerable. Students stood on the opposite sides of the street with a police line between them. The experience has left people questioning who they can trust. It also exposed a lot of anger, much of which is fueled by hate. We are living in a time when overt verbal and physical attacks against black and brown bodies, against women’s bodies, against queer and trans bodies, and against non-Christian bodies are more overtly public, calculated, and politically normalized. The pushback against anything that has been labeled progressive is palpable and real. I now find myself thinking about how I will deal with disrupters who take over class conversations. I find a ready group of colleagues who want to discuss and strategize about classroom engagements and the campus climate. It is easy to get distracted by fear of what could happen and in all likelihood will happen. For some colleagues and students classrooms no longer feel safe. The classroom has become a very heavy space. And yet, I go back to the words of bell hooks, “[E]ngaged pedagogy recognize[s] each classroom as different, that strategies must constantly be changed, invented, reconceptualized to address each new teaching experience.” What does an engaged pedagogy look like in the face of our current social-political climate? How does an engaged pedagogy help foster radical democracy, social responsibility, resistance, and critical citizenship? I have started to reconceptualize how I teach about the politics of white Christianity, or any other contentious topic, in an anxious classroom. First, I work very hard at creating the classroom as a community. While this is not new to my teaching, I am very careful to build relationships among the students and myself with a series of exercises at the beginning of the semester before launching into divisive issues. Next, I have reconceptualized how I create a context for students to understand their place in history by using Elise Boulding’s “200-year present.” According to Boulding, “[The 200-year present] is a continuously moving moment, always reaching out 100 years in either direction from the day we are in.” This idea allows students to engage the ebbs and flows of history and place themselves in it. The 200-year present also allows students to see how systemic violence and oppression have developed over time. Finally, I continue to call out and name domination systems. However, I spend more time considering how conversations serve to nurture radical democracy and critical citizenship rather than further entrench students in dogmatic positions. It is an anxious time and the fears of the worst are made real almost daily. There is much at stake. There is much to gain. Teaching is a constant process of reimagining how we reach students and bring in to being engaged citizens. [1] Dean J. Johnson, “Weaving Narratives: The Construction of Whiteness” in We Have Not Been Moved: Resisting Racism and Militarism in 21st Century America, eds. Elizabeth “Betita” Martínez, Mandy Carter & Matt Meyer (PM Press 2012), 131. [1] bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Educationas the Practice of Freedom (Routledge, 1994), 10-11. [1] Elise Boulding, Building a Global Civic Culture: Education for an Interdependent World (Syracuse University Press 1990), 4.

For the last two years, I have taught a required class on evangelism for ordination at the United Methodist Church at Asbury Theological Seminary on the Orlando Campus during the summer and January terms. The course is structured as an intensive class delivered over five days. Over these two years, I have never had an African American student in class. For example, in the J-Term of 2015, there were 11 white students: 9 males and 2 females. In the summer of 2015, there were 22 students: 12 males (2 Kenyans) and 10 females. In the J-term of 2016, there were 23 students: 19 males (2 Filipinos) and 4 females (1 Chinese).  In the summer of 2016, there were 26 students: 12 males and 14 females (1 Chinese-American female). Given this, I have been surprised by the fact that the student demographics at the Orlando Campus is 24% Latino/a and 28% African American. Maybe it is due to the southern UMC as it is known for its lack of pastoral diversity. The last module of the class is devoted to racial reconciliation and mission. Students read “Evangelization and Politics: A Black Perspective” by James Cone. As you could expect, this is the module when silence becomes unbearable as students wrestle with evangelicalism and white privilege. It is also the moment when all the students have “a black friend” or when “my roommate in college was black.” The superficiality of our conversations has been frustrating and such frustration grew to the point that I considered changing the last module to something else. It was at this point that I sought the help of a respected colleague. His suggestion was for me to change gears and examine my own experience of discrimination and history as a brown Puerto Rican in the context of North American imperialism and colonization. Using the new approach, I replaced Cone’s article with primary sources of Protestant missionaries to Puerto Rico in the early 1900s, a sociological article on “the Puerto Rican Problem,” and excerpts from Gloria Anzaldua’s La Frontera. By contextualizing the history of race relations between white North Americans, Puerto Ricans, and other Latinas, I was able to deconstruct the disregarding ethos of racism that is embedded in a systemic structure of oppression in the United States. In light of evangelicalism’s insistence of individual responsibility, confronting racism as a systemic issue brought its own complexities to our conversations. Students were more engaged in discussing issues of race and oppression in the historical context of mission and colonialism. However, the closer we got to contemporary issues, especially immigration, the tone of the conversation changed and the discomfort around ethnocentrism and negative views on immigration was palpable. A good example was when a white male student in the summer of 2016 recited the talking points of the Republican Party to the class. He referred to the negative impact on immigration on crime, employment, and US culture in general based on language and customs. To everyone’s surprise, because she never spoke before in class, only the female Chinese-American student confronted the speaker by telling her family’s story of immigration.  Her mother came to the US with a temporary work permit, but after it expired she stayed. As years passed, she married an American man and became a citizen more than a decade after her visa expired. She confronted the white male student and the whole class with her story and showed the ethnocentrism and stereotypes embedded in US society against immigrants. I learned that even though I am in complete solidarity with African Americans in their quest for justice and respect, students saw me as a Puerto Rican who does not embody the African American experience. On the other hand, when I embody my experience and the history of racism against Latino/a people in the US, the perception and reaction in the classroom change.  At the end, we are contextual beings and sometimes the best way to teach others about race is not through theories, but through our own experience with racism.    What triggers public opposition to immigration? Is immigration a racial issue? What triggers racial resentment against undocumented immigrants? What is the value of the implementation of autobiography in the classroom? How should professors move from autobiographical data to theoretical articulations in the classroom? How can professors help students take responsibility for their assumptions of the other in a safe manner? Is this desirable, or it would a shock approach to student assumptions be better?    

Countless hate crimes since Election Day already show the widespread effect of the President-Elect’s unpredictable nature and his death-inducing ideologies: racism, islamophobia, heteropatriarchy, xenophobia, anti-Semitism. What do we as higher educators do when our global context is unstable, the future is uncertain, and the local context is even dangerous for our students? The first matter is safety. We need to make sure that our students are safe. If they are not, we need to point them to resources for protection and help. As teachers in a divided nation, we cannot add to the authoritative calls for unity, which serve only to silence the cries of the oppressed further. Advising victims to be in union with their oppressors is dangerous. What we can do is signal to our students—especially those who are immigrants, people of color, LGBT, Muslim, Jewish—that our classroom is a safe zone. Wearing a safety-pin may offer them a palpable sign, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. A much deeper and more credible sign is committed to work to fixing these systemic injustices, both inside and outside of the classroom. For example, as a white professor, I could claim that I’m not racist, or I could actively engage in anti-racist work. The difference is critical for our students given the current political climate, wherein silence signals complicity. As higher educators, writing and teaching are the areas in which we can give ourselves the most effectively because this is where we are trained and have expertise. Yet perhaps like many of you, I have felt the need lately to re-evaluate everything I’ve ever done. The current context of global oppression demands this. It is urgent that we remove any curriculum and practice that reinforces systems of domination. It is also time, if we have not already done so, to heed bell hooks’ call to “take the risks that engaged pedagogy requires” and make our very “teaching practices a site of resistance.”[1] Practically speaking, in terms of content and curriculum, it should be a given that we include in our reading lists those groups often underrepresented intellectually. What we “progressive” professors are often unaware of, however, is how we use such readings. As Stephen Ray warns, we cannot keep placing the “texts of historically marginalized communities” at the “margins of conversation” (e.g., using Hildegard of Bingen as a “counterfoil” to Anselm's atonement theory or James Cones as a critique of the white American theological tradition). Such usage results in our students experiencing “these thinkers as primarily kibitzers and only vaguely as primary contributors to the tradition.”[2] Given that white nationalists are rising to cabinet level authority in our current political context, it is imperative that we stop centering the work of European male thinkers. This also relates to how we manage the space/time given to marginalized students within our classroom. hooks suggests “an inversion of hierarchal structures,” wherein the professor uses her/his authority to decenter the voices of the privileged.[3] One pedagogical strategy, for instance, would be to begin each class of an entire semester with a reading from the Quran. This not only resists islamophobia but also signifies to the class the privileging of Muslim students’ voices. As hooks reminds us, we professors too often critique domination from an intellectual perspective, emphasizing “an understanding of the politics of difference, of race, class gender, even though classroom dynamics remain conventional, business as usual.”[4] As election exit polls have shown, our white students have a long way to come in understanding intersectionality; maybe this is why. Furthermore, in this post-election aftermath, teachers of religion and theology need to be asking ourselves an obvious and basic question: Do our students have the ability to recognize that their political stances rely on particular theological or philosophical assumptions? In more general terms, no matter which topic we teach, we need to consider the degree to which our pedagogies reinforce the dualistic separation of the public and private spheres and the mind/body split.[5] Do we craft assignments that require students to make connections between their life experiences and course material? As teachers, do we model these connections for our students? I invite discussion in the comment boxes below. What pedagogical strategies of resistance have you used effectively? Please be specific.   [1] bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (New York: Routledge, 1994), 21. [2] Stephen Ray, “E-Racing While Black,” in Being Black, Teaching Black: Politics and Pedagogy in Religious Studies, ed. Nancy Lynne Westfield (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2008), 52. [3] hooks, 188. [4] Ibid., 180. [5] Ibid., 16.