Resources

In a previous blog, I detailed some of the ways in which white students’ practices of coloniality are manifested in the classroom through co-optation, silence, and resignation. Such praxes—often unconscious and subtle—must be unmasked, especially for those who consider themselves to be allies for justice with communities of color. Such learning is not limited to white students, however, as students of color witness how instructors address dynamics of privilege and oppression in their courses and, as a result, learn who can (or cannot) be trusted to sojourn with them through their educational experiences and beyond. But how do instructors unmask such subtle, ingrained responses (also known as embedded resistances)? Wisdom gathered from decolonial scholars and teachers within theological education, engagement with materials on decolonial pedagogy, and attempts to incorporate specific practices within my courses have led me to some core insights. I offer these not as a step-by-step “how to,” but with the hopes that they might inspire others to praxis unmasking coloniality and invite colleagues and students alike to share in this work. Give more attention and intention to the processes by which learners engage with one another in the course than to the content of the course itself. I realize that this might be blasphemous to some, so try to give equal attention and intention to both the what of course materials and the how of individuals’ relations across identity, power, and difference. A few questions to think through include: What values are you explicitly and implicitly privileging in your courses? For example, if academic rigor is a central value, what standards and signals do you incorporate to exemplify rigor and how might eurowestern colonial norms be privileged within these standards? How do students come to know and experience these values and how might white students experience them differently than students of color? How might you create a space that does not privilege the voices, perspectives, and participation of those for whom the academy was designed—namely, white (and male, heterosexual, wealthy, able-bodied) students? What commitments and modes of relating are you incorporating into the course design? What role do learners have in shaping these ways of relating, and what else is needed by you as the instructor to mitigate co-optation, silence, and resignation from white students? When you encounter particular actions or patterns by white students that are likely replicating or reinforcing colonial dynamics, consider the following: Ask neutral questions—ones that do not have opinions embedded—that invite individuals to dig deeper into their own stories, assumptions, and experiences.[1] This should be done with care and the intention to assist in students’ learning, but also with a genuine desire for the instructor to learn more about what lies underneath said actions or articulations (because our own assumptions are equally worthy of investigation). Questions can also be accompanied by, or followed up with, personal observations. It has been helpful for me to use “I” statements that reference my own observations or feelings in terms of the impact of particular noticings. In these cases, I tread a careful line as someone with positional power in the pedagogical relationship but who is also a person of color impacted by colonial dynamics. At times, I name and reflect upon my own complicity and unexamined colonial actions as a woman whose ancestry includes white colonizers and who continues to benefit from a system that privileges lighter skin. If students are able to acknowledge colonial underpinnings within their own embedded resistances, invite and/or offer alternatives to such resistances in order to decolonially reframe and re-praxis. For example, with white students who rely upon silence to avoid saying “the wrong thing,” I have asked them—along with others in the space—to imagine ways of participation beyond silence that encourage vulnerability and trust. In a virtual space, this has included the use of various art forms and nonverbal visual or auditory affirmations, as well as the usual verbal contributions to synchronous discussions. It helps if values of imperfection and leaning into tensions have been privileged in the course already to encourage actions beyond silence, as well as acknowledging that silence is necessary at times. These insights reside at the water’s edge of an ocean of practiced wisdom from educators who have been attentive to decolonial pedagogies for decades. As someone who is at the beginning of that journey, I know such learnings will only be shaped and tested with more time and experience and are subject to shifts based on context, timing, and a variety of other unique forces shaping each relational moment. Depending upon what visual representation is conjured by the imagination when one thinks of unmasking, the act itself might be quite simple, a bit uncomfortable, or downright painful (especially if one is a fan of horror films like me). Unmasking assumes that there are layers hidden beneath the mask that must be revealed in order for truth or healing to ensue. If we as teachers remain at the surface of course preparation and design by focusing on the attainment of intellectual knowledge, our students fail to encounter the depths of what they both desire and deserve as divinely breathed beings. Such failure clearly is not theirs; it is ours. White students, especially those with longings to cultivate communities of justice and equity in solidarity with their colleagues of color, deserve our reflective questions, our noticings, our own acknowledgments of complicity, and our personal discomforts with tension as co-learners. The irony of unmasking colonial practices in the classroom while teaching about decoloniality is not lost on me; but the truth of the matter is that colonial practices should be unmasked in all educational spaces and places.[2]   [1] Liz Lerman and John Bortsel, Critique Is Creative: The Critical Response Process in Theory and Action (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2022). [2] I am grateful to the following teachers and scholars who shared with generosity their wisdom, experiences, and best practices related to decolonial pedagogies: Cristian De La Rosa, Christine J. Hong, Willie James Jennings, HyeRan Kim-Cragg, and Melinda McGarrah Sharp.

There are two subjects about which I am passionate as a teacher and scholar: leadership formation and decolonial praxis. These areas may seem to be at odds with one another, at least in white western worldviews; but disrupting colonial frameworks and ways of being and doing leadership in ministry and theological education is a necessary endeavor for those of us who continue to long for worlds beyond death-dealing hegemony and homogeneity. As an early career Latina teacher and scholar, I feel this longing in my bones. Perhaps more importantly, I experience these longings from students both in my courses and in the wider institution. But what do you do when the very students who express such deep desires for change—even explicitly longing for a dismantling of western/white/colonial structures, processes, and epistemologies—function in ways that are wholly aligned with “possession, control, and mastery” as the ultimate display of white, self-sufficient masculinity, as Willie James Jennings articulates?[1] In other words, how does one teach decolonial praxis in a course about decolonial praxis, particularly with well-meaning and well-intentioned white students who praxis coloniality? The first time that I taught a course on ministry leadership and decolonial praxis, I was not prepared for the embedded resistances that I encountered from students, particularly socially and/or politically progressive white students, that sometimes contradicted the very praxes we were reflecting upon that same week. Of course, such actions were so subtle and automatic that the students themselves were unable to recognize them; but that’s how colonialism works its deadly charms—in the corners and cracks of the unconscious. As educators, our most important task is to unmask that which lies just underneath the surface of what students articulate in word, speech, and affect, as a learning for the whole, and with kindness, respect, and compassion. As bell hooks said, “We practice interrogating habits of being as well as ideas. Through this process we build community.”[2] After that first course, and like any good scholar, I researched what others had written about decolonial pedagogies in the classroom and white racial identity formation and resistances. I also engaged in wisdom-seeking conversations with trusted educators and scholars on their own practices for mitigating colonial praxes in their classrooms. Through this process, what began to appear were patterns of behavior for what I and others had experienced. In gaining clarity about the nature and origins of some of these movements on the part of white students, I was better able to respond in the moment and incorporate pedagogies and practices to mitigate these in my courses. Here are just a few of the subtle embedded resistances that were unmasked.[3] Co-optation. Whether it be in online or in-person discussions, many white students—unintentionally and without awareness—often take up time, space, and/or voice in class conversations and take over ideas, characteristics, and practices of nonwhite others, collapsing them into their own worldviews and subsuming them for their own purposes. For example, I noticed that a few white students in my class resonated with particular attributes or characteristics associated with some postcolonial and decolonial communities and leadership. Identifying that their own communities and/or leadership exemplified some of these attributes, they signified their ministries to be “decolonial” (yet remained situated contextually as majority white, middle-upper class congregations not necessarily allied with those most harmed by colonization and colonialism nor engaged in any kind of stated decolonial praxis). These attempts at possession and control also come in the form of collapsing decolonization into movements for gender, LGBTQ, or socioeconomic equity without acknowledging the racialized foundations and socio-historical trajectories of colonialism. Ultimately, students’ desires to not be seen as carriers of colonialism resulted in them perpetuating the very colonial characteristics they were attempting to deny. Silence. Several of the scholars with whom I spoke shared their experiences of white students maintaining silence in class in order to give space to students of color to speak or share or, more often than not, out of a fear of doing or saying “the wrong thing.” Unfortunately, this itself highlights the privilege one has to practice opacity as an exercise of power, leaving others to perform vulnerability for the benefit of white students’ learning. In my experience, white students—and even white colleagues—who say little to nothing in intercultural or interracial spaces often end up perpetuating the “white gaze” on students and colleagues of color as if they are being monitored or put upon to present in particular ways. Resignation. When the depths of our collective entanglements with colonialism are realized more fully, one of the most frequent responses from white students is to “burn it all down,” a form of resignation to the irreparability of religious and secular systems alike. It’s as if starting over completely, dismantling current structures, or working outside of institutional church spaces to create something new will rid us of our colonial ways of being and doing. Such a totalizing response arises from the privilege of being able to transcend or separate oneself from those very structures with little consequence or loss of power. Students of color in my courses have tended to not articulate such statements because the legacies and forces of colonization impact them more intensely and intimately than their white counterparts (though, of course, intersections exist). These students have not had the option or power to “burn it all down” and have learned to navigate within such systems for survival, with many finding spaces of joy and flourishing in spite of colonialism’s strongholds. Simply burning something down doesn’t make it disappear; it simply takes on another form. Unmasking such praxes in the classroom takes discernment, patience, and care on the part of the instructor. In the next blog post, I will share some of my pedagogical learnings around unmasking.   [1] Willie James Jennings, After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2020). [2] bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (New York: Routledge, 1994), 43. [3] While postcolonialism and decoloniality are intersectional in nature—meaning that they also seek to dismantle imposing eurowestern constructions of gender, sexuality, class, caste, etc.—the construction of racial hierarchies and white supremacy in the subjugation of non-white “others” assumes, historically and presently, a foundational place in the colonial project. Furthermore, because I noticed this phenomenon taking place with white students (regardless of their gender, sexual identity, or class), the praxes named here necessitate a specific focus on race as a socially constructed phenomenon.