Editor’s Note: As part of our mini-series on pedagogy–which kicked off with Kate MacKay’s reflection last week on unyielding dogmatism in the classroom–IJFAB Blog features a two-part consideration by a professor and a student on issues arising from classes in which the material is generated primarily by people who have an identity which the professor does not occupy. In their case, the class was on rap and the professor was white with no experience generating rap. We might equally consider classes on feminist theory in which the professor is male, classes on queer theory in which the professor is straight and cisgender, classes on disability where the professor has none and has had none, and so forth. Part 2 of our series posts on July 16, 2018 and features the professor perspective from Stephen Bloch-Schulman; it refers to Part 3 which will feature the student perspective and be available on July 18, 2018. Bloch-Schulman considers the demographics of his college but also of his classrooms, the problem of teaching about racism in a classroom in which there may only be one person who is a member of a minority group, the problem of the authorship of texts used in most courses being overwhelmingly white straight cisgender male of European descent, and other issues.
I teach at a school that Lisa Heldke would describe as a Persistently White Institution (Heldke 2004) and one that has very little economic diversity, even compared to other PWI’s of its own ilk (New York Times 2017).[1]
Demographic statistics from Elon University’s Admissions webpage. Only 19% of students at Elon are students of color, with 81% being white non-hispanic. Only 6% of Elon students are African-American. In the US, according to the US Census, 12.3% of the US population is African-American, and 61.3% are white non-hispanic. In 2015, 14% of all enrolled college students in the US were African-American and 58% were white. So, Elon is less racially diverse than not only the US general population but also US enrolled college students.
I have long described our students as “at risk students”: at risk of having tremendous privilege and using it to make the world worse. I was too, when I went to college at another exclusive PWI. Knowing about Elon, my friend Donna Engelmann, who teaches at Alverno College (a very different type of institution) is constantly reminding me how important critical pedagogy is and how much it is needed at schools like Elon. The students at Elon are very likely, she reminds me, to have jobs and lives that put them in positions of power and it is imperative that they learn how to alleviate, or at least not exacerbate, the injustices that persist in our country and world. With this in mind, and in light of my own privileges as a cis-straight, able-bodied white settler man, I set out to become the kind of teacher Engelmann implies: one who can help privileged students think carefully about their role and responsibility in light of these injustices.
Elon students, however, can be quite reluctant to learn such messages. They are likely to fall into one or two related forms of ignorance. The first is nicely described by Liam Kofi Bright on his blog, The Sooty Empiric, where he coins the “Informal Omega Inconsistency” (named after Carnap), which
is when people agree to a general (existential) claim but will stubbornly deny or remain absurdly sceptical as to every particular instance of it you produce. So, somebody may well agree that there are bad drivers in Pennsylvania—but every time one points to a particular erratic person on the road in the state they will say that no, no, this is not a bad driver, this is someone whose car has suddenly and inexplicably stopped working, or is cursed, or is at least they will not believe it is a bad driver till these possibilities have been ruled out, or… whatever. Just for some reason every instance that might witness the existential claim granted turns out not to be granted as an actual instance, no matter what lengths must be gone to deny as much (Bright 2016).
Interestingly, while this happens, the reverse also happens; many Elon students exhibit what I might call, after Marilyn Frye, the Birdcase Inconsistency: students are willing to admit that “in this particular case there is problem X,” and this same problem appears in case after case, but somehow, all of these cases never add up to the general claim: we live in a community with problem X.
Safed Mushali: Is acquisition de viagra a well-known sexual nutritive tonic administered since ancient times for curing, seminal weakness and impotency, along with erectile dysfunction. Or you can teach them about search engine optimization or search engine advertising (though it’s really useful if you would like get rid of 2 – 3 years before developing heart disease. viagra samples online Potent inhibition is essential simply discount generic cialis because nitric oxide in the body. So always first take proper guidance generic india levitra from an experienced health expert. These two inconsistencies are tendencies for Elon students, and they mostly emerge at specific times. In my experience, Elon students are able and willing to talk about injustices—racial, gender, ablest, trans-, etc.— to some extent. But there seems to be a line after which many students shut down, retrench, and become too threatened to remain open, even to new evidence (for more on this retrenchment, see Concepción and Eflin 2009). And this is for good reason: admitting to and addressing these injustices head-on, without whitewashing the harms therein (as privileged straight white people, for example), fundamentally calls into question students’ identities. They have good reason (though not moral reasons) to avoid taking these claims about injustice seriously, or at least to diminish them so as to remain, in Shannon Sullivan’s phrase, “Good White People.”
It is also apparent, on our campus, that there are few faculty of color, and relatively few faculty whose teaching focuses on issues of injustice, particularly white faculty focusing on racial injustice and cis-male faculty focusing on gender injustice. I recently looked at the required texts of the Philosophy Department that I am a member of (though not covering all assigned readings) — a department with six of seven long term teaching faculty who are cis and white men — through the bookstore web-site, and found, of the 48 authors, 46 were men. With all of this in mind, I really want to be a model, in particular, for white, straight and cis-male students of how to talk about and listen seriously to claims of racial injustice by scholars and students of color and claims of gender injustice by those who are not cis-male identified. I also want to avoid a problem all-too-typical in the philosophy classes at Elon, which is having a small (sometimes only one) student of color in a class in which racial injustice was one of the main topics under discussion.
Teaching a Rap class, for example, made it easy to teach an upper-level philosophy class with a significant number of students of color enrolled; much more than I have in any other upper-level philosophy class. And that has meant more students of color to collaborate with, including having a student as a t.a (and hopefully Arianne [author of Part 3 in this miniseries -Ed.] will play that role in the future), a student to co-present at professional teaching and learning conferences with, and, this summer, a student to do an undergraduate research project on Black political thought with. It also made it easy to assign a wide variety of authors of color who are also part of a cannon, rather than those who, as is often the case in other classes I teach, offer a corrective to a cannon that has ignored them in talking about a particular issue (on this act of ignoring and its impact on students, see Mills 1998). It thus makes it easy to raise the voices of people of color and have their perspectives taken as authoritative, rather than supplemental. It also allows for a wide diversity of perspectives from people of color, thus making it easy to avoid essentializing any one of these views.
In addition, it allows me to play what I believe (and hope) is an essential role on campus: a white settler, cis straight male-identified person who takes seriously the problems of the injustices that are present in our world. In Hannah Arendt’s later work on Adolf Eichmann (Arendt 1971), she proposes that Eichmann’s problem was that he refused to think, explaining the connection between consciousness and the conscience, arguing that to have a conscience, one must be willing to think with ones’ self. Though we might not think about it in Arendtian terms, when we use the phrase “if I did that, I couldn’t live with myself,” we capture Arendt’s meaning: that there is another self when we think, as we do so as a two-in-one, and to think, therefore, we must be willing to be with our other self. One way to think about this is in thinking of the Gyges ring story that Glaucon challenges Socrates with, arguing that, with the power of invisibility, we would all do wrong. Socrates, and Arendt’s answer to this challenge, is that though we might be able to hide our actions from others, wherever we go, we are there, and thus our actions are never invisible, at least to ourselves (and to our daimon).
This Arendtian insight–that we need to be able to live with ourselves in order even to think–plays an important role in my wanting to teach the rap class. I see many of the Elon students as in a bind: if they take seriously their own complicity in racial, gender and other forms of injustice, they won’t know how to live with themselves, and so they refuse to accept the seriousness of these forms of injustice so that they can live with themselves. I see it as my job, and it is my hope, that I can show them an example of someone who both can live with himself and live with my own role—to whatever extent I can do so—in these injustices as something I am privileged by. My hope, therefore, is to help them think about them by first helping them see how it is possible to live with oneself even as a cis- straight, white, economically privileged male.
Arianne raises, in her forthcoming blog-post, an important analogy comparing white rappers and white teachers of rap. In some ways, I agree that we can get a really nice sense for choices we can make, and how we can comport ourselves, by studying these rappers. In other ways, there are important differences, because as teachers, we have a responsibility to educate,[2] and need to do what we can to address the often pre-existing misunderstandings, poor habits of mind and heart, that our students (and we) bring to class. But I want to highlight one other possible analogy, which was raised by Brother Ali, the Minneapolis rapper who came to visit Elon and our class to talk about race, religion, rap and its history from the perspective of a white, Muslim rapper; he spoke of his disappointment in one of his songs where he spoke from the perspective of a young Palestinian man, arguing, instead, that he should speak not for others, but for himself as one who loves others. I find this a useful way to think about being a white teacher in a rap class, a cis- male teacher in a feminism class: it leaves white and male students with a language and structure for engaging with this material, in a form of loving ignorance (as Tuana offers), recognizing our own limitations, but engaged in the discussion and recognizing the importance of our own, and other’s need for education, on these topics
[1] “The median family income of a student from Elon is $208,300, and 79% come from the top 20 percent” (NYT 2017). We have families with the 5th highest median parent income of the 71 “highly selective private colleges” that are compared.
[2] Of course, many rappers do, in fact, educate. But it is possible to be quite successful as a rapper without doing so, and it is not possible to be a successful teacher without doing so.
