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I met Rev. Jesse Jackson at an Interfaith Conference in Doha, Qatar. It was the first time I heard him speak in person, and during his plenary talk he covered the importance of interfaith dialogue. As I listened to how we human beings, in all our diversity, triumph, and affliction, are measured with one yardstick, I remembered the first sentiment Rev. Jackson stated that resonated with me: We often look at the strangers standing next to us as transient newcomers in our lives— bearing different skin and newborn, young, and weathered faces—but that stranger next to us often stands there as a distant reminder of ourselves, a reiteration of our experiences, a reflection we must welcome and embrace as our own. Such a notion may have been spouted during countless sermons in my life, however growing up in a strictly conservative evangelical household, I was taught that Christianity was the only way. I believe this is one of the ultimate pitfalls in Christianity and other major world religions: the denial of other faiths and faith believers. It draws every person of faith to believe that all other religions must be evil, and thus their followers must also be evil. It took decades of spiritual journeying and education to overcome this false belief, and led to a point in my career where interfaith dialogue became a preeminent focus. While perhaps I was led to this cause for personal edification, I began teaching the “Interfaith Dialogue” course with the intrinsic perspective of social justice as the human pillar upon which my students could act. In this way, interfaith dialogue is not relegated to classrooms and conferences, but belongs in our streets, our churches, and our homes. After meeting Rev. Jackson all those years ago, I have had opportunities to work with him on numerous issues. What comes to mind first, as it is so close to home, is our work on the South Korea, North Korea peace process, where we fought to free Kenneth Bae from North Korean prison. Overall, the issues we have collaborated on are founded in racial and gender justice, and culminated in my editing his book, Keeping Hope Alive (Orbis Books), a selection of his sermons and speeches as one of the foremost figures of civil rights in American history. While working with Rev. Jackson, I became aware of our unequivocal ties, not just to our personal history as teachers and theologians, but also to our ancestry. Truth be told, one cannot help but be reminded of one’s past in this country as an African American, especially during this tremendous time of uprisal, protests, and activism following George Floyd’s death, all insulated within the disorder of the world pandemic. It is as if every story of another black man’s death, a new case of police brutality, is yet another immersion of an iceberg’s tip. We are surrounded by such iceberg tips -- the question is whether we as a wider culture will be pushed to surface these and reveal the singular iceberg of racial injustice and create lasting, dynamic change. During this time in which I oscillated between the news, Twitter, work, and occasionally chatting with Rev. Jackson, I was constantly reminded of just how much I didn’t know; how many stories are untold, and how just as many stories are misunderstood through a majority lens. It challenged me to confront my own history and ancestry as an Asian American woman, and the strange places of marginalization and liminality that I find myself in. Such contradictions and challenges with racial identity come into relevance when examining interfaith dialogue and how we can contextualize from a stringent dogma taught in progressive faith movements to a more universal and enduring truth. What I learned alongside Rev. Jackson has deeply informed my curriculum and pedagogy. One thing I learned is that fighting any form of injustice requires collaboration with those who are similar to us and also those who are different from us. We need to work with Christians and with those of other faith traditions. I experienced this firsthand during my first meeting with Rev. Jackson in Doha, as we held offsite interfaith communications with Muslims, Jews, and Christians. Since then, I have been with him as he met with Muslim and Jewish leaders in the United States to work on eliminating islamophobia and anti-Semitism. Without dialogue, there is no diversity in thought, and thus the possibility of change moves farther and farther away from us. Without dialogue there is no confrontation, and thus, no peace. This is why I adamantly require dialogue, debate, and challenge from my students. As teachers, we must exemplify what we teach. Social justice is threaded through my teaching. When I talk about racial justice and easing the tension between groups of people of different ethnicities and religions, my exemplary work with Rev. Jackson finds its way into the classroom. There have historically been tensions between African Americans and Asian Americans, as experienced during the LA riots and Baltimore riots. The visual and symbolic representation of Asian Americans working hand-in-hand with African Americans is important in the classroom as well as outside the classroom. An Asian American woman working with Rev. Jackson exemplifies a wider ripple in collaboration across all communities, all fields, and offers students a realistic depiction of what they can anticipate and practice in their professional lives. Social justice work is ongoing and it is important to recognize the intersectionality of interfaith and racial justice, as Rev. Jackson encourages. To fight for racial justice also requires us to fight against gender injustice, sexual injustice, climate injustice, etc. Recognizing the intersectionality[1] of these issues provides students with the agency to create some kind of real-world impact; whether you are teaching Interfaith Dialogue, Liberation Theology, or homiletics, social justice issues unify with our work and therefore should be recognized in our pedagogy. To help my Interfaith Dialogue students engage deeper, I take them on a day trip to Indianapolis to visit a Hindu temple, a synagogue, and the Interchurch Center. At these three sites, we engage in dialogue with the Hindu leader at the temple, a rabbi at the synagogue, and the executive director at the Interchurch Center. These engagements and encounters are fruitful, enlightening, and pedagogically important. Some students have said that that the dialogue trip was the first time that they ever met a person of Jewish faith, or a Hindu, and that it was a profoundly enriching way, perhaps the most honest way, to engage in dialogue with them. Many students mentioned afterwards that this physical visit and dialogue was one of the most important events in their learning process. When people meet and engage in critical dialogue, it deepens their sense of social engagement and feeling for social justice from a mere lofty aspiration to a personal, grounded intention. This is what I experienced while working with Rev. Jackson. This was the type of dialogue we engaged in when I first encountered him and worked with him in Doha, and which I continue to practice on personal level, and ultimately share with my students. I have learned tremendously from working with Rev. Jackson and hope that our continued work and collaboration with make a pathway for others to collaborate and work for justice. Author’s note: Grace Ji-Sun Kim is presently working on a new book, Rev. Jackson’s Theological Biography.           [1] For more information on intersectionality, please read Intersectional Theology, Grace Ji-Sun Kim & Susan Shaw, (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2018).

In Luke 1:20, an angel named Gabriel informs the priest Zechariah that he will remain mute during his wife Elizabeth’s pregnancy. Zechariah’s mistake was to doubt Gabriel’s announcement that they would have a child despite decades of infertility. Perhaps Gabriel made a mistake by reacting harshly to a question any reasonable human would have asked, but I have come to understand the priest’s silence as a prescription more than a punishment. I imagine a muted Zechariah growing spiritually and relationally as he listened more to Elizabeth, to their relative Mary, and to the Spirit who would guide and empower their son. I found myself identifying with Zechariah while participating as a learner in Dr. Mitzi J. Smith’s excellent course on African American Interpretation and the Gospel of Luke.[i] When we discussed my role prior to the course, Mitzi made it clear that I must not speak or write in ways that undermined her authority as the instructor. At her request I did not post any messages in the preliminary discussion forums in Moodle. One exception that Mitzi approved was a message explaining my relative silence and encouraging openness to womanist hermeneutics.[ii] When we transitioned to intensive sessions in Zoom, Mitzi sometimes asked my opinion, and she included me in breakout discussion groups. Even so, I remained one of the quietest learners in the class. Although I identified with Zechariah’s temporary silence, his privilege offers a more enduring analogy. My privilege has included a history of talking in class. My parents valued education highly and had resources to help me succeed, including my mother’s training and experience in early childhood education. With their encouragement, I became a precocious talker, quick to get teachers’ attention and give answers they wanted. Not all of my classmates were so advantaged. In How to Be an Antiracist, Ibram X. Kendi describes the anger he felt at biased teaching in third grade. A white teacher regularly ignored raised non-white hands while engaging with favored white children.[iii] The flip side of similar biases enhanced my education in many respects, but there were drawbacks. I missed out on what others would have said if I had not taken so much “air time,” and my relationships were often better with adults than with peers. I was oblivious to the injustice. The skills and habits I learned as a child helped me compete for attention, grades, honors, and scholarships all the way through a PhD program. An MDiv program that emphasized collaboration taught me to dial back competition and seek the good of a whole class, but I still talked a lot. I continue to do so as a seminary professor. Extensive research has documented the impact of implicit bias on students’ achievement at all levels of education.[iv] There seem to be fewer studies focused on the impact of implicit bias on students’ perceptions of minoritized and women professors,[v] but I am learning from Mitzi and other colleagues that it is a serious problem. For many (but not all) students, my race and gender lend me added authority, whereas the same students may discount the authority of professors who are not white or male. For Mitzi these biases are headwinds that impede her teaching. Patriarchal biblical texts and interpretations have long supported to the silencing of women, and Luke-Acts has contributed to that injustice because most female characters model traditional silent roles. Mary’s prophetic hymn in Luke 1:67-79 is an important exception, but the overall impression remains. In relation to that tradition, Mitzi’s strong leadership and my relative silence constituted a small dose of justice. Most prescriptions come with warning labels, and so should silence. When privileged people remain comfortably silent in the face of oppression, we perpetuate injustice by refusing to add our voices and energies to movements for change. Silence can also be a symptom of passive-aggressive relationships, where resentments fester without being addressed in a timely way. Like fasting, silence is only healthy when it is temporary. It is best when chosen, not imposed, and when rooted in trust, not fear. In academic settings, silent students might be hiding a failure to prepare, or they might be afraid that voicing their thoughts will lead to negative judgments. My own motives for silence were mixed. I was willing to comply with Mitzi’s wishes and eager to hear what others had to say during each of the challenging and engaging sessions. I was also anxious not to fit the stereotype of a well-intentioned but clueless white guy. I abhor racism and sexism, but I also recognize that I am not entirely free from them. I did not want to say “the wrong thing.” Dr. Marcia Riggs has wisely suggested that intentional, interpersonal work on race and gender would have been valuable earlier in our collaboration.[vi] The course was not an appropriate space in which to do that work, but I hope to do more in the future. I also hope that my experience of “stereotype threat” will deepen my empathy and strengthen my planning for students who may be silent due to fear.[vii] Discernment of when to speak and when to remain silent is an essential skill for theological educators and for everyone who seeks justice. Zechariah’s silence prepares him to prophesy like Mary, and I hope to benefit from the same prescription. Notes [i] For more information about the course and the related Wabash Center grant project, search for previous posts by Drs. Mitzi J. Smith and Daniel W. Ulrich, beginning with “Learning Womanist Hermeneutics during Covid-19” at https://www.wabashcenter.wabash.edu/2020/07/learning-womanist-hermeneutics-during-covid-19/. [ii] Thanks to Mary Hess for suggesting this step. [iii] Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist (New York: One World, 2019), 44-55. [iv] See, for example, the studies summarized in Rachel E. Godsil et al., The Science of Equality, Volume 1: Addressing Implicit Bias, Racial Anxiety, and Stereotype Threat in Education and Health Care (Perception Institute, 2014), accessed August 28, 2020, http://perception.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Science-of-Equality.pdf. [v] On the impact of race, see Bettye P. Smith, “Student Ratings of Teaching Effectiveness: An Analysis of End-of-Course Faculty Evaluations,” College Student Journal 41, no. 4 (December 1, 2007): 788–800. On age and gender see Alison F. Doubleday and Lisa M. J. Lee, “Dissecting the Voice: Health Professions Students’ Perceptions of Instructor Age and Gender in an Online Environment and the Impact on Evaluations for Faculty,” Anatomical Sciences Education 9 (2016): 537–44. [vi] Marcia Y. Riggs, “To Teach Collaboratively or Not?” [vii] “Stereotype threat” is fear of acting in ways that confirm a stereotype of a group to which one belongs. For research demonstrating its negative impact on learning, including in discussions of race, see Godsil, The Science of Equality, 31-33.

The first time that I taught a graduate-level class where anti-oppression work was a primary component of the learning, I made a major blunder. I structured the class with materials and exercises assuming that students understood that racism, sexism, and other forms of structural injustice based on identity categories and embodiment actually exist and had material, social, and intrapsychic impacts on the people who were most affected by them. At the time we were working on such concepts as how privilege functions in a variety of identity categories, understanding microaggressions, solidarity and co-conspirators, and other vocabulary and practices that would hopefully help students to work towards justice in their circles of influence in religious leadership. So the educational goals were about recognizing and intervening in situations where inequity and injustice are practiced in institutions, policies, and interpersonal interactions. We were a few weeks into the term before a brave student articulated what it turned out several other students were also thinking: namely, that racism and sexism had ended, and we were now in a post-racial age. So why were we spending so much time on what only a few bad people engaged in… on individual character flaws related to racism/homophobia/etc.? They personally were not racist (sexist, classist, or ableist). They were good people committed to social justice! But a significant number of the students in my classroom were convinced that meritocracy allowed hard work and good character to overcome any remaining barriers that might exist. Other students were familiar with how structural inequality worked in relation to their own targeted identity categories, but were less familiar with how this worked intersectionally or with other embodied experiences. Now, my hope is that in the more than a decade that has passed since this particular situation occurred, public protests and the increased access to perspectives beyond the mainstream have increased general awareness of ongoing racism and other forms of structural injustice. Certainly those with eyes to see and ears to hear should have had many examples in the day-to-day news of the last decade, where terms like misogynist and white fragility have begun to appear on major outlets such as National Public Radio, The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, and so on. Unfortunately, cultural polarization, the segregation of listening and reading practices, and the ways that online logarithms build echo chambers of like thinking means that some of our students have not been exposed to these kinds of conversations. Other networks and media outlets work to debunk the ideas of social inequality and define social justice not as a theological commitment but as a solely political term related to left-wing politics. Because of this, I still find that many students, particularly those raised in fairly homogenous white middle-class Christian communities and neighborhoods, have little nuanced awareness of the depth of structural inequality that is built into histories of policy, institutional legacies, economic pathways, educational access, and representation in media and leadership positions, and how these many arenas work together to ensure that this inequality replicates itself across generations. As a teacher in that moment, I quickly learned that simply asserting that structural inequality is a reality was not effective in challenging the common sense understandings of meritocracy and equality that students had heard all of their lives in their families, schools, churches, and other formative communities. Over the years, the many instructors of this first year class have developed a number of strategies to show, not tell, that structural inequality is very real and to help make connections across experiences where it manifests itself. Unfortunately, there is no quick solution to unlearning these “common sense” understandings, and learning the full interlocking force of inequality through a variety of contributing factors takes practice and careful attention over time for all of us, particularly when our identities do not force us to navigate those structures with attention. Here are some teaching resources that have been helpful in opening these conversations: Peggy McIntosh’s introductory piece “White Privilege: Unpacking The Invisible Knapsack,” provides useful directness in its listicle format of naming everyday indications of white privilege, although it tends to focus on individual experiences, albeit as they are embedded in social realities.  This brief video about wealth inequality in the United States has initiated helpful conversations about our perceptions versus the realities of economic equity. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM&feature=youtu.be The video series Race: The Power of an Illusion by California Newsreel is particularly helpful in tracing complex relationships between FHA policy, redlining, urban development policy, and generational wealth difference, as well as exploring the history of defining race in Supreme Court decisions related to immigration and property ownership. https://www.racepowerofanillusion.org/ Creating together a giant whiteboard-sized chart documenting historical events, legal changes/Supreme Court decisions, and strategies in the movement for full equality for LGBTQ+ persons. Looking decade by decade from the 1940s to the 2020s at interpersonal, institutional/communal, ideological/representational, and legal/policy changes over time (generally drawing on a range of websites that document the history of LGBTQ+ rights in the US), students begin to discern the depth of inequality built into these various levels of life for persons who are not heteronormative or living within gender binaries.

Throughout my twenty-five plus years of teaching I have most often declined opportunities to “team teach” (the terminology used in my institution) in the historically and predominantly white seminary I have spent the longest part of my teaching career. Why? Two primary reasons. First, I was the only full-time African American professor for a very long time. I had students questioning my qualifications because I was Black and female, so why would I place myself in a position to be judged worthy or not by students because my content and method differed radically from that of my white colleague? Second, I did not want to be patronized by a white colleague either defending my “right” to teach or “correcting” my position as That Womanist liberation ethicist. Some readers are perhaps wondering why I didn’t give my students and colleagues the benefit of the doubt? Well, I have spent most of my educational life as a student and teacher in historically white institutions. I have repeatedly been on the receiving end of well-meaning but white racially-biased surveillance and censoring by white students, professors, and faculty colleagues. Yes, I think that genuine mutual respect has developed now between me and my current colleagues. Still, implicit bias and racist socialization runs deep in ways with which my white colleagues are not yet ready to grapple. Thus, when Professor Mitzi Smith and Professor Dan Ulrich invited me to join them as a consultant (along with Dr. Mary Hess) for their project, “The Challenges of Effective Pedagogy of a Trans-Contextual Online Collaboration for an African American/Womanist Hermeneutics Course during COVID-19,” I was intrigued. The words “trans-contextual online collaboration” drew me to say yes. Given my reluctance to team teach in my context, I was impressed by my new colleague’s (Dr. Smith) willingness to teach with a white male colleague from another seminary while living into the learning curve for many of us in adapting to online teaching in response to the pandemic. Several questions came immediately to the forefront for me: Are Drs. Smith and Ulrich doing any pre-course race-gender-class work with each other? Or are they simply going to work through the inevitable race-gender-class tensions as they arise while the course is taught? How is “trans-contextual” to be understood? Is it an exchange across geographical borders and institutional boundaries and/or crossing dynamics of power between the two professors, between the professors and the students, between the different institutional norms for teaching and learning? This pedagogical decision of the course was ambitious: having an African American Womanist biblical scholar and teacher “out front,” while a white male biblical scholar was “a learning/teaching professor.” As a consultant, I worked hard to contribute helpful insights about the tensions that the two professors shared with us. Asking clarifying questions was my first way of engaging this. As both professors’ blogs revealed, they did honestly grapple with each other. My further questions were about whether students understood the roles and did not attempt to “force” a more familiar pattern of engaging the white male professor. After our last consultation, I remain convinced that it is necessary for professors to do race-gender-class work prior to and throughout trans-contextual or team teaching. In other words, teaching empathetically and justly with a colleague across race, gender, and class lines requires intentional dialogue to make explicit the race-gender-class assumptions of the teachers involved. This work must be as much a part of course preparation as learning the subject matter of the course from the perspectives and methodologies of each other. Most importantly, teaching collaboratively or team teaching adds a level of preparation and ongoing dialogue; reflecting with an African American woman and a white woman as consultants was a definite step in the right direction. COVID-19 necessitated teaching this course about homelessness online, and this created a barrier to direct engagement with persons who are homeless and with practitioners who work in solidarity with these persons. Professor Smith used pedagogical methods and reading assignments that created space for developing empathetic sensibilities for persons who are experiencing homelessness, rather than considering homelessness as solely a social justice issue. Likewise, she taught Womanist and African American biblical hermeneutical skills for teaching and preaching that can impact the lives of homeless persons through ministerial practice and can influence public policy. Lesson: Improvisation catalyzes online pedagogies, pandemic or not. To teach collaboratively, or not? I just might give it a chance, under the right conditions.

Since last fall, the theology department at my institution, St. Ambrose University, has been offering a new course called “Just Theology.” On the first day of class each semester, I like to poll the students to ask them what they think the title “Just Theology” means. Most of the students’ answers reveal that they assumed they had signed up for a basic theology class, one that covered religious principles only—without any math, science, or art mixed in. In actuality, the class is designed to introduce students to the study of Christian scripture and theology through the lens of justice. I’ve learned more from this first day activity than that my students are bad at puns. Many are surprised to learn that theology has anything to do with just action in the world. In an effort to analyze this trend more deeply and to see if the course is successful in teaching about the relationship between justice and theology, my department chair, Lisa Powell, developed a survey to distribute to our students on both the first and last day of class. The survey asks students to respond to five statements: (1) “Acting for justice is central to the Christian life”; (2) “Racial justice is an important part of the Christian message”; (3) “Christian teaching can have a liberating message for women”; (4) “Care for the earth is an important part of Christian teaching”; and (5) “The Bible shows God’s particular concern for the poor.” Students indicate their belief about each statement from the following options: “strongly disagree”; “disagree”; “agree”; “strongly agree”; and “I don’t know.” It surprises me each semester to learn that only about half of the students at the beginning of the semester select “agree” or “strongly agree” to each statement. In fact, around 25-30% select “strongly disagree.” I am always happy to see that nearly all the students select “agree” or “strongly agree” by the end of the semester. The surveys are helpful in gauging what my students’ preconceptions about religion and theology are, especially at the beginning of the semester, so I can identify the starting point for our conversations. This semester’s data was particularly noteworthy. To take just one example: only about 10% of my class indicated that they agreed or strongly agreed with the statement “Racial justice is an important part of the Christian message.” I asked the class, “Who has ever heard a sermon or homily that endorsed racial justice?” About 10% raised their hands. This was disturbing, particularly on the heels of a summer in which racial injustice and police brutality received heightened attention in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder. I asked the students how many had attended a Black Lives Matter protest this summer: about 25% of them raised their hands. But when I asked how many did this from a religious or faith conviction, none raised their hands. About the same 25% of students raised their hands when I asked if they had watched Representative John Lewis’s funeral on television. Again, when I asked if anyone could give me an example of how his religious/faith convictions related to his social justice work, no one raised their hands. Of course, John Lewis’s life and funeral provides a heroic and exceptionally clear example of the relationship between God and just action in the world. But the students seemed to miss the connection. Instead, they told me that they understood his civic engagement (and civic disobedience) as stemming from his affiliation with the Democratic party. As a counterpoint and illustration of black liberation theology, I read the students this quote from President Obama’s eulogy: “Like John the Baptist preparing the way, like those Old Testament prophets speaking truth to kings, John Lewis did not hesitate—he kept on getting on board buses and sitting at lunch counters, got his mug shot taken again and again, marched again and again on a mission to change America.” [i] One student responded to the quote by mentioning that it was President Obama who delivered the eulogy. They seemed to be arguing that political party affiliations and values were more probable indicators of one’s work for social justice in the world than one’s theological commitments. This summer as I prepared for my classes, I knew this semester would be a complicated one for students in nearly every aspect. I revised syllabi and lesson plans to account for and to integrate the COVID - 19 pandemic and increased exposure to ongoing racial injustice, but I neglected to consider how deeply the pre-election, polarized political landscape would impact students’ assumptions about theology and justice. One student honestly explained to me that they responded “strongly disagree” on the survey because when they scroll through social media, they only see Christianity associated with injustice, and usually with the political “right.” Donald Trump’s photo op with the Bible in front of St. John’s Church offers a poignant example of such. After just one week of this fall semester, I’ve learned that I need to be more cognizant than ever before, about so many things—including students’ presuppositions about religion and politics, and theology and justice. Notes [i] “President Barack Obama’s Eulogy for John Lewis: Full Transcript.” New York Times, July 30 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/30/us/obama-eulogy-john-lewis-full-transcript.html.  

One of the reckonings I have had to make five months into a global pandemic is that the grounds upon which our classrooms stand continue to feel unstable, confusing, and ever shifting. Educators across the country are once again welcoming into learning spaces amalgamations of stories, experiences, memories—and trauma. Teachers and learners are resuming virtual classes with bodies that have experienced too much, too fast, and are likely to be overwhelmed even before the beginning of a new academic year. So how might the design of our classes and pedagogies grapple with and take into account the profound and collective shifts, disempowerment, and emotional and physical challenges that COVID-19 has imposed on us? How might we design experiences of presence and regard using a practice I call “a pedagogy of affection”? In an effort to answer these questions, I have been taking a closer look at classroom interactions between March and May of 2020. Looking back at my notes, I notice an important pattern: a more open naming of how our heightened instability aroused feelings of helplessness, anxiety, worry, withdrawal, grief, preoccupation. Students also asked for (and were granted) extensions on assignments, opportunities to process their response to the pandemic via check-ins, campus ministry, zoom happy hours, chapel services, and so on. Our conversations expanded beyond so-called disciplinary boundaries to include questions like “How is your breathing today?” and “What kind of insecurity are you dealing with in this moment? Did you have enough to eat? Did you have a restful sleep?” and even “How is your undivided unit of bodyspiritplacetime?” as Patrisia Gonzalez put it. Some of us may have asked our students how their bodies were metabolizing fear and anxiety, housing and food insecurities, whether they had a computer to work from, a stable enough shelter. We may have encouraged them to occupy institutional spaces to speak and write about how they were envisioning us showing up for them in the most meaningful and regard-filled ways. One of my student-teachers, Jacob Perez, asked in one of our institutional meetings whether we would be willing to stretch our “understanding of pedagogy beyond what happens when a zoom link goes live.” Having co-created together a special reading course on “Queering and Decolonizing Pedagogies,” Perez invited reflection on the power of implicit pedagogies, affirming that they “occur in the contexts and contours of how we come to the classroom.”[ii] In finding ways to navigate the spring of 2020, we began to ask how we could hold space for breath and feeling and truth telling; how we could mutually co-create spaces of presence, regard, and care, responding to the many urgencies named above. Some of us began to write love-lectures, began starting classes with breathing and stretching exercises or a more robust check-in where we could talk about anger, vulnerabilities, dissociations, isolation, the ongoing inability to concentrate, police brutality, anti-Blackness, grief. Some of us reconsidered dead-lines, exams, grades. Zebulon Hurst, for example, poeticized his longings through a publication co-authored with Perez, as well as this poetic piece, even before the uprisings began:“i wonder when my Black life will matter beyond a sign in the window/ i wonder when i will go home / i wonder where is home / i wonder if my aunties are safe i mean / i know they aren’t but / i wonder if anyone beyond the bonds of my genetic material cares about that. / i wonder if you love me the way you say you do.” This pandemic, the ensuing uprisings, the incapacity of governments to decently respond to the population’s most pressing needs interrupted our lives in unimaginable ways. We haven’t really recovered or adequately processed much of what happened in the first semester of 2020. And with that, a question haunts me: How are we to begin a new academic year integrating the overlay of stories and traumas that circulate in our bodies, histories, and memories? How are we to think about pedagogies of affection and presence with integrity instead of reinforcing pedagogies of cruelty and trauma response in minoritized students in higher education? A set of pedagogical choices that are trauma-informed may prove helpful in designing our fall courses as the global pandemic has barely subsided, our communities continue to be in danger, and as we brace ourselves for this year’s election cycle. A trauma-informed approach would not only affirm that suffering, pain, and distress is present among us but would also seek to actively mitigate or foresee potential challenges. In Pedagogy of the Heart, Paulo Freire reflected on his experience of trauma: a forced exile after the violent Brazilian coup d’état, which took place in 1964. His warning that trauma is not simply something to be lived through—but rather, is something to be felt, to be acknowledged, and to be suffered—is fundamental for our times.[iv] He also warned about the dangers of creating disjointed communities during times of crises where members interact with one another through a “functional” system and a set of transactional interactions. For Freire, the only way forward is one that implicates us in each other’s well-being, with presence, integrity, solidarity, emotional roots, and communion. In order to develop such bonds of affection, presence, and regard, we would have to apprehend the “tragedy of ruptures” while acknowledging our collective crises, all while maintaining a lively political-pedagogical response-ability and epistemological curiosity. With Freire’s pedagogical charge in mind, a fellow co-conspirator and faculty colleague at the Pacific School of Religion—Dr. Aizaiah Yong—and I designed a course on spiritual formation that is mindful of such pedagogies of the heart via embodied, spiritual, and artistic practices. One goal of the course is to co-construct with students a “covenant of presence and regard” through synchronous and asynchronous exercises such as contemplative practices, writing prompts, artmaking, and a “Spiritual Care Package.” The required “readings,” aside from a curated multivocal range of scholars, are experimental and will include poetry, podcasts, documentaries, and the visual arts, delineating an anatomy of learning that leans more into instability and unlearning than inflexibility and certitude, as Clelia Rodríguez puts it.[v] Our hope is that these pedagogical choices will continue to affirm an educational journey that not only resists “the worst muck of racialized, ableist heterocapital” settler-colonialism, as Alexis Pauline Gumbs names it, but that is aware of our heartaches, our indignation, our agonies, and our political rage, with all our capacity to be at once “problematic and prophetic.”[vi] As the academic year of 2020-21 draws near, I hope we can continue to commit to pedagogies of affection, presence, and regard that gather the dismembered pieces of our bodies, stories, cultures, and existences so we can continue to imagine and create with a tremendous capacity to intimate this world differently. Notes [i] Patrisia Gonzales, Red Medicine: Traditional Indigenous Rites of Birthing and Healing (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2012), xix [ii] Jacob Perez (he/his) is a Master of Theological Studies student at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley and a Co-Chair of the Latinx Religions and Spiritualties Unit for the American Academy of Religion Western Region. Jacob also serves on the Board of Directors for the AARWR as the Student Representative of Northern California. He can be reached at jperez@ses.psr.edu. [iii] Zebulon B. Hurst (he/them) is a Master of Divinity student at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California. His work weaves together queer intimacies, pleasurepain, somatics, and poetics. Their continued research explores manifestations of fissure, domination, and self-sublimation. Hurst authored a chapter in the 2017 volume edited by Anthony J. Nocella, II, and Erik Jeurgensmeyer, Fighting Academic Repression and Neoliberal Education: Resistance, Reclaiming, Organizing, and Black Lives Matter in Education (New York: Peter Lang). He can be reached at zhurst@ses.psr.edu. [iv] Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Heart (New York: Continuum, 1997), 67. [v] Clelia Rodríguez, Decolonizing Academia: Poverty, Oppression, and Pain (Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing, 2018), 1-2. [vi] Alexis Pauline Gumbs in Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2020), 2.

Hospitality does not begin faraway, but near. We learn what hospitality is by reaching out to persons near to us—persons we pass by every day, persons who share our highways and hallways, our sidewalks and side streets. This past fall, forty-eight leaders from around our community gathered to tell “near stories” to one another about their experience of race and racism, privilege and power in their lives. These community leaders included local judges, superintendents and principals of schools, CEOs of health systems, business owners, college administrators, and, notably, police officers—the very leaders shaping the response to the unholy trinity of Covid-19, systemic racism, and misinformation. This group of busy, highly educated leaders committed to twelve hours of honest dialogue about the history and ongoing impact of racism in our country and our community. The dialogue followed what is known as a “caring circle” model—a model that requires participants, first and foremost, to listen actively to one another without judgment. That is, it asks us to “hear each other to speech,” as the racial justice activist Nelle Morton exhorted. The difficult realities of our shared life together in the United States—things like our biases, the past and present ways in which we have discriminated against persons based on the identities we decided were most important, the ongoing effects of racial violence and trauma—are not always easy to hear into speech among friends, much less among powerful community leaders. But the dialogues didn’t start with these difficult topics. The conversations begin with questions designed to reset the frame of the relationships in the caring circle. Participants were no longer their job titles or their positions of formal authority, they were human beings subject in myriad ways to the fundamental need to belong. The circle began: Tell me an experience of when you belonged? Tell me an experience of when you felt excluded? Participants start by relearning in a highly structured, formal way how to practice hospitality to one another, and this allows them to hear each other to speech about what we know to be some of our most profound, shared needs as human beings: the need to be recognized as whole persons with complex, unique stories that have something to contribute to the “we are” part of “I am because we are.” At the same time, circles emphasize the need to recognize in others something of the “I am”—something that connects who I am deeply to who you are you, to what it means to be human. That is, they start with near stories that illumine in their very particularity something of the universal ties that bind us together. Though some might quibble with the phrase, they are religious stories in the sense that they aim to “re-bind” (re-ligare) us together—to reaffirm our shared commitment to hospitality in the face of hostility and reinforce the threads that bind us together in the face of the threats that tear us apart. I would like to believe that these dialogues and the relationships they established prepared our community to respond with greater integrity and humility to the systemic and institutional racism at the heart of the racial uprisings this summer. Like so many things in this moment, the justification for my belief may only be confirmed with the advantage of hindsight. But as I turn my attention more fully to this fall’s syllabi, I am even more convinced that my tendency to fill weeks with content needs to be mitigated by the foregrounding of process and the centering of relationships in the classroom. It is not that content is unimportant. The “deep dive dialogues” among community leaders included content—presentations about systemic racism, health inequities, and implicit bias locally, for example—but this content was embedded in multiple processes of relationship building throughout our time together. In this way, the intimacy of hearing each other to speech in our small groups became the starting point for listening to what the presentations had to teach. What I have been describing is likely familiar to many who have attended (perhaps even led) workshops and trainings related to racial justice. But all too often the pedagogical insight does not quite make the leap from the workshop to the classroom. Even among well intentioned faculty whose courses are most amenable to flipping the classroom and devoting several weeks to relationship building and near stories, content always threatens to colonize the curriculum; the participatory language of covenant gives way to convenience, transposed into the more expedient and expected legalese of a learning contract. When teaching courses animated by issues of social justice (are there any that aren’t?), we knowingly enter into a charged space—even before we take roll on the first day of classes. As we enter a Fall semester in which pandemics, politics, and protests will be carried daily into our classrooms—by both persons and pedagogies masked and unmasked—this is the question I find myself returning to in the design of my syllabi: how do we help set the conditions for what Parker Palmer describes as a necessary paradox, namely, a charged but hospitable classroom, one in which the practice of hearing each other to speech is as much a process as an outcome? If our religious studies and theology classrooms are to be places of preparation for creative engagement in this imperfect world, to borrow from Faith Ngunjiri’s understanding of servant leadership, then we do well to make ample space in our courses for modeling discursive practices that counter hate speech with hospitality, callousness with compassion, and the pathology of violence with the promise of peace. For me, one way to do this with integrity will be to commit to the caring circle model as a pedagogical anchor for the course and not merely an ice-breaker in the first week of class.

Like many of you, perhaps, I’ve been involved in a lot of race-related conversations at my institution lately. These conversations are usually among folks who I might, if pressed, call “allies,” “accomplices,” or even “co-conspirators”—well-intentioned, social justice advocates who are wanting to make real change at our institution, particularly in the ways we support the learning, sense of belonging, mental health, retention, and success of our underserved student populations. Yet I’ve noticed a trend in these various conversations, which, frankly, I find troubling. The trend is this: the problem (and thus, implicitly, any solution) always seems to be located elsewhere, outside the meeting space, in the ones who are not “woke”—that is, students, colleagues, and administrators ‘over there.’ This move, and it is a one I recognize and have made myself many times before, only serves to distance ourselves from the need for critical self-reflection, for taking responsibility, for offering apologies, for tough internal change. Exploring, even confronting, ourselves is a crucial step in doing any kind of social justice work, including what we might want to be doing with students in our classes. How can we effectively lead conversations about, for instance, antisemitism or Islamophobia when we ourselves haven’t done the necessary inner work of racial justice? Professor of Law Rhonda Magee offers an “ecological model of social change,” which, yes, aspires toward interconnectedness and collective transformation, but which, first, depends on the work we do within and on ourselves. For Magee, the focus is on mindfulness, awareness, self-compassion, and resilience. What are our physical sensations? What are our emotional responses? What are our fears? What are our immediate judgments? For me, such increased awareness leads me to ask some tough questions: How am I complicit? How is my department? How is our discipline? A few years ago, I read Irving’s Waking Up White and, I’m embarrassed to admit, realized for the first time in my life that I was, in fact, white. This set me on a course to better understand “white privilege”—how being white has affected me, what paths it has smoothed over for me, what barriers it has removed for me—invisibly, seamlessly, without me even noticing or trying. I’ve read Oluo’s So You Want to Talk about Race, DiAngelo’s White Fragility, and Kendi’s How to Be an Anti-Racist, and I’ve been unsettled, even disturbed, at some of the things I’ve discovered about myself. I won’t record them here, as I imagine they would be upsetting for some readers, but I assure you that this aspect of my social identity invariably affects how I show up as a friend, as a neighbor, as a colleague, as a team leader, as a teacher. When we talk about implicit bias, it’s not just “them,” it’s me. When we talk about microaggressions, it’s not just “them,” it’s me. When we talk about the problems, it’s not just “them,” it’s me. Ongoing self-exploration, “fierce moral audits” as a friend of mine likes to say, is necessary as we work with and alongside our students. There are wonderful tools and resources available online, such as this Anti-Racist Educator Questionnaire and Rubric. Folks of color (like those at yourblackfriendsarebusy) have been generous in curating, writing, talking, protesting, singing, illustrating, imagining. For me, these efforts are not to (continue to) center whiteness or to get kudos and congratulations for doing what is essentially the bare minimum; it is to better ourselves before attempting to better anyone else. In a recent blog post, Sarah Farmer wrote beautifully of her experiences with students: Justice-seeking conversations challenge students at the core. Students aren’t just grappling with social justice concepts theoretically; they wrestle with their very identities. I invite that wrestling in the class. I want the class to be a space where they can explore, discover, challenge, reconstruct, and dream of a better world and their participation in that world together. But each of these actions require courage. I imagine my classroom as a stage, one where students are invited to “try on” these new courageous ways of doing and being socially just. Her words work just as well if you replace “students” with “us” or “we.” This work is challenging for us. We are wrestling with our very identities. We are (or should be) exploring, discovering, challenging, reconstructing, and dreaming. Social justice requires courage—not just of them, but of us too.

Like most construction projects in the neighborhood where I live, education rarely takes place on an empty lot. A building is already present. It can be demolished and replaced, repaired, or enlarged; but a successful builder will not ignore it. Learners and teachers alike need to consider how new information relates to learners’ prior understandings. Learners ordinarily integrate new ideas and experiences within existing knowledge structures, but sometimes new information causes enough cognitive dissonance to motivate either a replacement of old understandings or a rejection of the new. Regular readers of this blog may remember that I am participating as a learner in a course on womanist hermeneutics taught by Dr. Mitzi Smith of Columbia Theological Seminary.[i] Dr. Smith knows from hard experience that teaching womanist hermeneutics typically requires much deconstructive as well as constructive work. Her most recent post, “Decentering Biblical Interpretation is Anti-Racism Work,” testifies to the taxing nature of that challenge, especially for an African American woman teaching in a majority white context. As a learner, I have the freedom and responsibility to decide whether and how I will change my understanding of hermeneutics. This work, too, can be emotionally and intellectually taxing. It can involve modifying or discarding beliefs that have been central to my identity and sense of purpose. Or it can require negotiating tensions while moving toward synthesis and integration. With the intensive portion of the course about to begin, I would like to survey some of my prior commitments in order to test their compatibility with womanist hermeneutics. Along the way, I will mention some pedagogical implications of those commitments. I interpret the Bible as a Christian immersed in the Anabaptist and Pietist streams of the Radical Reformation. “Seeking the mind of Christ together” is an essential goal in this tradition, and Bible study is one means to pursue that goal. For me, seeking the mind of Christ is analogous to other interpersonal relationships in which I attempt to learn how someone feels and thinks. Along with other disciples, I ask the living Jesus, “What do you think of this text, and how do you want us to respond to it now?” I ask similar questions when the interpretive process begins with a contemporary situation instead of a biblical text. For example, “What do you think of unjust policing, or of the disproportionate impact of Covid-19 on people of color? How do you want us to respond?” Christ-centered hermeneutics allows for prioritization and critique of biblical texts. It is not a matter of doing whatever we want with scripture, but of prayerfully discerning what Jesus wants. When asked about a text, Jesus may answer, “You have heard that it was said . . . , but I say to you” (Matt 5:21-48); or “Go and learn what this means:  ‘I desire mercy and not sacrifice’” (Matt 9:13; 12:27). Justice, mercy, and love are essential values in Jesus’ reading of scripture. Jesus is especially inclined to reject scriptural reasoning that reinforces unjust privilege and marginalization. Dr. Smith has offered a similar thought about African-American hermeneutics: “Critical engagement with the Scriptures could involve a resistance to and/or a rejection of some biblical texts and yet leave ‘my Jesus’ intact.”[ii] To imagine Jesus faithfully is often counter-cultural work. Although incarnated in a male body, Jesus does not conform to societal expectations of gender. Jesus has never been white. Thus, I am especially drawn to the image that Dr. Smith put at the top of her Moodle page:  Jesus, who is black, covers his eyes in dismay at the injustice around and within us. Although students may or may not share my Christ-centered approach, it affects how I teach them. I assume that another Teacher is present in the classroom (or wherever the students are). Jesus may speak through anyone, most often through people who have been marginalized. My academic training is a resource for students, but it gives me no claim to superior authority. Instead, my primary task is to lead students in the formation of an intersubjective and intercontextual community of inquiry where they can learn from one another, from me, and from a range of other interpreters. In such communities we can all hope to stand corrected as Jesus uses conversation partners to raise insights, questions, or objections that we might have otherwise ignored. The communal emphasis of Anabaptism warns against a complacent, individualistic approach in which any interpretation is deemed valid regardless of its impact on peoples’ lives or its relationship to the text. We need loving communities to correct unloving interpretations while teaching and modeling better ones. I am aware, of course, that communal interpretation is not a panacea. Entire communities might be wrong, and majority votes at church conferences might or might not bring people closer to the mind of Christ. Systemic injustices (racism, sexism, etc.) are endemic to many communities, including many denominations, congregations, and seminaries. These injustices distort both the processes and the outcomes of our discussions. In such circumstances, Jesus often speaks through prophetesses, iconoclasts, and activists to call for repentance by the majority.[iii]  My claim that some interpretations merit rejection does not mean that there is only one right interpretation. Jesus is free to inspire the multiple understandings that different interpreters need at different times. When communal conversations uncover more of a text’s “meaning potential,”[iv] interpreters are better able to discern which possible meanings are just and faithful for their contexts. As a professor I accept responsibility for designing and leading courses in ways that maximize the potential and avoid the pitfalls of communal interpretation. I strive to avoid any hint of systemic injustices in my courses, but I am not perfect in that regard. Sometimes I have allowed a few students to dominate discussions instead of ensuring that all voices are heard. Sometimes the best I can do is repent, apologize, and work to improve in the future. This survey has revealed some common ground between my Christ-centered, communal approach to hermeneutics and what I am learning from Dr. Smith. I, too, decenter the Bible to some extent, and I understand Christ to have an ethical agenda like hers. [i] Earlier blogs have introduced this learning opportunity. See Daniel W. Ulrich, “Learning Womanist Hermeneutics during Covid-19” at https://www.wabashcenter.wabash.edu/2020/07/learning-womanist-hermeneutics-during-covid-19/, and Mitzi J. Smith, “Change and the Baggage I Bring to This Collaboration” at https://www.wabashcenter.wabash.edu/2020/07/change-and-the-baggage-i-bring-to-this-collaboration/. [ii] Mitzi J. Smith, Insights from African American Interpretation (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2017), 66. [iii] See Mitzi J. Smith, “‘This Little Light of Mine’: The Womanist Biblical Scholar as Prophetess, Iconoclast, and Activist,” in I Found God in Me: A Womanist Biblical Hermeneutics Reader, ed. Mitzi J. Smith (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2015), 109-127. [iv] Brian K. Blount, “The Souls of Biblical Folks and the Potential for Meaning,” Journal of Biblical Literature 138 (Spring 2019): 6–21, esp. 14.

In a webinar on “white allies” moderated by Dr. Lynne Westfield, her guests Drs. Melanie Harris and Jennifer Garvey discussed their collective anti-racism work. Dr. Harris stated that she feels called to work with white colleagues around anti-racism, but that white colleagues must do some preparatory anti-racism work before engaging black people in conversation or enlisting their help. I do not sense a call to anti-racism work with or for white people, but I find myself in the thick of it every time I teach a class open to all students and more so in a seminary where white students are the majority. When white students arrive in my courses, they find that black and brown scholars and our scholarship are centered, thereby decentering whiteness. A question that some white colleagues and students ask after reading my womanist work for the first time, which is the case with this “African American Biblical Interpretation and the Gospel of Luke” course I am currently teaching, is “how do we know when we have gone too far?” (implication, you have gone too far?). Or they assert that “we must find the original meaning of the Bible before we can apply the truth” to contemporary contexts. I have never expressly articulated my work as a womanist biblical scholar as anti-racism work prior to this collaboration between a white male professor, Dr. Dan Ulrich (as learning professor in the course) and the dominantly white Bethany Theological Seminary/Earlham School of Religion where he teaches. This collaboration is my most labor-intensive anti-racism work in the classroom to date. Teaching biblical studies as an African American female has never been without the challenges of sexism, racism, and classism. I am sure that this isolation required of me during this pandemic has lowered my threshold for racism, but I maintain my composure. Whether it is intentional or not, decentering whiteness while teaching as a black woman is emotionally, spiritually, intellectually, and physically taxing. White people in general are oblivious to the impact of anti-racism work on black scholars as teachers and colleagues. In one breath, many white people position themselves as both progressives and gatekeepers of Eurocentric approaches to interpretation. When the participants (white and black) in this course were polled about how many books they had read by African American biblical scholars prior to this course, many named black theologians like James Cone or Delores Williams. One white male participant wanted to use his knowledge of Martin Luther King Jr. to demonstrate how radical my work is. King is only palatable to most white people and many nonwhite people post-mortem; in his later years King was regarded as radical. To racism, black bodies are easily interchangeable. As the instructor, I can muster the bandwidth to challenge racist assumptions and ideas or I can preserve my energy for other things. Dr. Harris asks herself “what is the garment I must place on my mind, my body, on my spirit to work with white students today?” Yes, so true.  Our consultants to this collaboration, Drs. Marcia Riggs and Mary Hess, asked me how I plan to create empathy among my students for people experiencing homelessness. My response was through stories, guest speakers (one of whom experienced homelessness and is now the founder/director of Love Beyond Walls in Atlanta), and Matthew Desmond’s book, Eviction. In a Consciousness-Raising document I constructed, one of the questions is “have you ever experienced trauma?” and “… or homelessness?” Quite a few said they had not. In Eviction, Desmond shares the stories of poor white people (living in a trailer park in the North side of Milwaukee) and poor black people (living in an apartment building on the South side of Milwaukee). Through their stories, readers witness the violent intersectional impact of systemic poverty, racism, and sexism. The question that also arises is how does one create empathy for the plight of black people? The deaths of too many black and brown women and men have been videotaped and circulated on social media; they were suffocated or shot to death by police officers ‘before our eyes.’ George Floyd was not the first; the killers of Breonna Tylor have yet to be arrested. It is unclear whether most white people marching with BLM and SayHerName protests empathize with black people, it is popular now to do so, and/or the pandemic allows for and compels their participation. In this course, how do I create empathy for black people and encourage a need and desire for becoming anti-racist when white people believe they can have their Eurocentric exegesis cake and be progressive or progressing toward unmitigated anti-racism that both empathizes with black peoples and their lived realities with systemic racism and acknowledges (and exposes) sacralized rituals that perform whiteness? John Warren argues that “education relies on maintenance of imagined purity, that education effectively treats and reproduces the cultural logic that bodies of color represent a disturbance in a culture of power, a contaminant against the performative nature of whiteness as a pure and perfect ideal . . . education is a social process and that social process often works in violent ways to erase and inscribe violence on the bodies it encounters.”[1] Whiteness and its performance must be named, made visible to be displaced. One cannot empathize with black people and marginalize the black people’s stories, epistemologies, wisdom, and historical and contemporary experiences. Feminism centers women’s experiences and voices; this alone is troubling to exegesis born in the womb of eurocentrism, androcentrism, and racism. In a recent womanist reading of the story of the so-called “woman caught in adultery,” a white male biblical scholar asked why I must rescue all women. Yesterday, I made the comment “Yoho Must Go” on the YouTube video of Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s response to Rep. Yoho. Someone responded to my comment by calling me a “FemiNazi.” I laughed out loud, but sexism, racism, classism, and homo/trans/queer phobia are no laughing matters; oppression is traumatic, debilitating, and death-dealing. The majority students in this course have been indoctrinated to believe that exegesis is the scientific method that yields the truth and/or truths about the Bible; it is the sine qua non to biblical truth. In another student poll, I placed in the Moodle course for the week of July 20, majority students responded with certainty that exegesis is the opposite of eisegesis, as reading out of the text versus reading into the text. How does one encourage empathy for centering black women and our communities, our epistemologies, and our approaches to biblical interpretation that challenge what students believe is objective science (or subjective but superior)? There were no scientists at the table during the Enlightenment when European white biblical scholars invented exegesis as the antithesis of eisegesis. We all read into texts; we bring our biases, our training, the impact of our culture and ecclesial affiliations, to the task of reading. Most students believe exegesis is a skill; a few responded that it as a gift. Exegesis is a skill that is taught and with much practice is learned. But it, of course, is not a science with a guaranteed outcome/truth provided one uses a set formula, as evinced, at least, by the hostile arguments among biblical scholars over in/correct exegetical truths. Let’s be honest; few students leave theological schools with the ability to write a good exegesis paper, but our institutions persist in their efforts to inculcate the notion that exegesis is the best and/or only legitimate approach to biblical interpretation and to claim to be doing anything but exegesis is unacceptable; only the uneducated or miseducated perform eisegesis. Seminary graduates interpret biblical texts variously on Facebook, for example, and label them ‘exegetical’ and themselves ‘exegetes’; often they are doing anything but exegesis. Labeling their efforts at interpretation as exegesis legitimizes them and their readings. Religion often dismisses common sense questions as not spiritual, but I am committed to challenge students with probing questions, such as “what is at stake?” “who loses?” and “what is the impact?” I hope to encourage or compel them to re/consider their assumptions and assertions. But it is also necessary to directly refute or challenge racist beliefs, assumptions, and assertions. [1] John T. Warren, “Bodily Excess and the Desire for Absence: Whiteness and the Making of (Raced) Educational Subjectivities,” Performance Theories in Education: Power Pedagogy, and the Politics of Identity, eds. Bryant K. Alexander et al., (NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2005), 86.