write a summary 6

Teaching to

Transgress

Education as the Practice of Freedom

bell hooks

Routledge New York London

---------------·--~----

Published in 1994 by Routledge Taylor & Francis Group 711 Third Avenue NewYork, NY10017

Copyright© 1994 Gloria Watkins

Published in Great Britain by Routledgc Taylor & Francis Group 2 Park Square Milton Park, Abingdon Oxon OX14 4RN

All rights reserved. No part ofthis book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

hooks, bell. Teaching to transgress : education as the practice of freedom I

bell hooks p. cm.

Includes índex ISBN 0-415-90807-8- ISBN 0-415-90808-6 (pbk.) l. Critica! pedagogy. 2. Critical thinking-Study and teaching.

3. Feminism and education. 4. Teaching. I. Title. LC196.H66 1994 370.1!'5-dc20 94-26248

C1P

to all my students,

especially to LaRon who dances with angels in gratitude for all the times we start over-begin again-

renew our joy in learning.

" ... to begin always anew, to make, to reconstruct, and to not

spoil, to refuse to bureaucratize the mind, to understand and to li ve life as a process-live to beco me ... "

-Paulo Freire

Contents

Introduction

Teaching to Transgress

Engaged Pedagogy 13

2 A Revolution ofValues 23 --------

The Promise of Multicultural Change

J Embracing Change 35 Teaching in a Multicultural World

4 Paulo Freire 45

5 Theory as Liberatory Practice 59 ' !

6 Essentialism and Experience 77 ¡, ¡:

[I

7 Holding My Sister's Hand 93

Feminist Solidarity

8 Feminist Thinking lli In the Classroom Right Now

Feminist Scholarship 119

Black Scholars

lO Building a Teaching Community 129

A Dialogue

11 Language 167 Teaching New Worlds /New Words

Confronting Class 12 in the Classroom 177

·-----·-

Eros, Eroticism, ll and the Pedagogical Process 191

14 Ecstasy 20 I

Teaching and Learning Without Limits

Index 209

lntroduction

Teaching to Transgress

In the weeks before the English Departrnent at Oberlin Col- lege was about to decide whether or not I would be granted tenure, I was haunted by dreams of running away-of disap- pearing-yes, even of dying. These dreams were nota response to fear that I would not be granted tenure. They were a response to the reality that I would be granted tenure. I was afraid that I would be trapped in the academy forever.

Instead offeeling elated when I received tenure, I fell into a

deep, life-threatening depression. Since everyone around me believed that I should be relieved, thrilled, proud, I felt "gnilty" abont my "real" feelings and could not share them with any- one. The lecture circuit took me to sunny California and the New Age world of my sister's house in Laguna Beach where I was able to chill out for a month. When I shared my feelings with my sister (she's a therapist), she reassured me that they were entirely appropriate because, she said, ''You never wanted

2 Teaching to Transgress

to be a teacher. Since we were little, all you ever wanted to do was write." She was right. It was always assumed by everyone else that I would become a teacher. In the apartheid South, black giris from working-class backgrounds had three career

choices. We could marry. We could work as maids. We could beco me school teachers. And since, according to the sexist thinking of the tim e, men did not really desire "smart" women, it was assumed that signs of intelligence sealed one's fate. F rom grade school on, I was destined to become a teacher.

But the dream ofbecoming a writer was always present with- in me. From childhood, I believed that I would teach andwrite. Writing would be the serious work, teaching would be the not-so-serious-I-need-to-make-a-living 'Job." Writing, I believed then, was all about private longing and personal glory, but teaching was about service, giving back to one's community. For black folks teaching-educating-was fundamentally polit- icai because it was rooted in antiracist struggle. Indeed, my all- black grade schools became the location where I experienced learning as revolution.

Almost all our teachers at Booker T. Washington were black women. They were committed to nurturing intellect so that we could become scholars, thinkers, and cultural workers-black folks who used o ur "minds." We learned early that o ur devotion to learning, to a life of the mind, was a counter-hegemonic act, a fundamental way to resist every strategy o f white racist coloni- zation. Though they did not define or articulate these practices in theoretical terms, my teachers were enacting a revolutionary pedagogy of resistance that was profoundly anticolonial. Within these segregated schools, black children who were deemed exceptional, gifted, were given special care. Teachers worked with and for us to ensure that we would fulfill our intel- lectual destiny and by so doing uplift the race. My teachers were on a mission.

lntroduction 3

To fulfill that mission, my teachers made sure they "knew" us. They knew our parents, our economic status, where we wor- shipped, what o ur homes were Jike, and how we were treated in the family. I went to school ata historical moment where I was being taught by the same teachers who had taught my mother, her 81sters, and brothers. My effort and ability to Jearn was always contextualized within the framework of generational family experience. Certain behaviors, gestures, habits o f being

were traced back. Attending school then was sheer joy. I loved being a stu-

dent. I Joved learning. School was the place of ecstasy-plea- sure and danger. To be changed by ideas was pure pleasure. But to Jearn ideas that ran counter to values and beliefs Jearned at home was to place oneself at risk, to enter the dau- ger zone. Home was the place where I was forced to conform to someone else's image ofwho and what I should be. School was the place where I could forget that self and, through ideas,

reinvent myself. School changed utterly with racial integration. Gone was

the messianic zeal to transform o ur minds and beings that had characterized teachers and their pedagogical practices in our all-black schools. Knowledge was suddenly about information only. It had no relation to how one Jived, behaved. It was no longer connected to antiracist struggle. Bussed to white schools, we soon learned that obedience, and nota zealous will to Jearn, was what was expected o f us. Too much eagerness to learn could easily be seen as a threat to white authority.

When we entered racist, desegregated, white schools we left a world where teachers believed that to educate black children rightly would require a political commitment. Now, we were mainly taught by white teachers whose lessons reinforced racist stereotypes. For black children, education was no longer about the practice of freedom. Realizing this, I lost my Jove of school.

4 Teaching to Transgress

The classroom was no longer a place of pleasure or ecstasy. School was still a political place, since we were always having to counter white racist assumptions that we were genetically infe· rior, never as capable as white peers, even unable to learn. Yet, the politics were no longer counter-hegemonic. We were always and only responding and reacting to white folks.

That shift from beloved, all-black schools to white schools where black students were always seen as interlopers, as not really belonging, taught me the difference between education

as the practice o f freedom and education that merely strives to reinforce domination. The rare white teacher who dared to resist, who would not allow racist biases to determine how we

were taught, sustained the belief that learning at its most pow· erful could indeed libe rate. A few black teachers had joined us in the desegregation process. And, although it was more diffi- cult, they continued to nurture black students even as their efforts were constrained by the suspicion they were favoring their own race.

Despite intensely negative experiences, I graduated from school still believing that education was enabling, that it en- hanced our capacity to be free. When I began undergraduate work at Stanford University, I was enthralled with the process of becoming an insurgent black intellectual. It surprised and shocked me to sit in classes where professors were not excited about teaching, where they did not seem to have a clue that education was about the practice of freedom. During college, the primary lesson was reinforced: we were to learn obedience to authority.

In graduate school the classroom became a place I hated, yet a place where I struggled to claim and maintain the right to be an independent thinker. The university and the classroom hegan to feel more like a prison, a place of punishment and confinement rather than a place of promise and possibility. I

lntroduction 5

first book during those undergraduate years, even wrote my · · b t

h · s not published unti! years later. I was wntlng; u thoug Jt wa · tantly I was preparing to become a teacher. more ¡mpor . .

{1. g the teaching profess10n as my destmy, I was tor-Accep n . d by the classroom reality I had known both as an under-mwre . .

d re and a graduate student. The vast maJonty of our gra ua . . . e Jacked basic commumcatwn skJl!s, they were not pro,essors .

I. d and they often used the classroom to enact ntu-self-actua ¡ze , . als of control that were about domination and the un JUSt exer- . f power In these settings I learned a lot a bo ut the kmd of ctseo · '

teacher I did not want to become. In graduate school I found that I was often bored in clas~es.

The banking system of education (based on the assumptwn that memorizing information and regurgitating it represented

gaining knowledge that could be deposited, stored and us~~ at a later date) did not interest me. I wanted to become a cntlcal thinker. Yet that longing was often seen as a threat to authority. Individual white male studen ts who were seen as "exceptional," were often allowed to chart their intellectual journeys, but the rest of us (and particularly those from marginal groups) were always expected to conform. Nonconformity on our ~art was viewed with suspicion, as empty gestures of defiance mmed at

masking inferiority or substandard work. In those days, those ~f us from marginal groups who were allowed to enter prestJ- gious, predominantly white colleges were made to f ee! that we were there not to learn but to prove that we were the equal of whites. We were there to prove this by showing how well we could become clones of our peers. As we constantly confronted biases, an undercurrent of stress diminished our learning

experience. My reaction to this stress and to the ever-present boredom

and apathy that pervaded my classes was to imagine ways that teaching and the learning experience could be different.

'1

6 Teaching to Transgress

When I discovered the work of the Brazilian thinker Pa ¡ . no Fre1re, my first introduction to critica! pedagogy, I found a mentor and a guide, someone who understood that learnin could be liberatory. With his teachings and my growing unde; standing of the ways in wbich the education I had received in all-black Southern schools had been empowering, I began to

develop a blueprint for my own pedagogical practice. Alread

de.epl:' engaged. ~ith feminist thinking, I had no difficult~ bnngmg that cntique to Freire's work. Significantly, I felt that this mentor and guide, whom I had never seen in the flesh would encourage and support my challenge to his ideas if h~ was truly committed to education as the practice of freedom.

At t~e ~am.e time, I used his pedagogicai paradigms to critique the limita tiOns of feminist classrooms.

. During my undergraduate and graduate school years, only white women professors were involved in developing Women's Studies programs. And even though I taught my first class as a

grad~ate .stude~t on black women writers from a feminist per- spectJVe, It was m the context of a Black Studies program. At that time, I found, white women professors were not eager to nurture any interest in feminist thinking and scholarship on the part of black female students if that interest included criti- ca! ch~llenge. Yet their Jack of interest did not discourage me from mvolvement with feminist ideas or participation in the feminist classroom. Those classrooms were the on e space where pedagogical practices were interrogated, where it was assumed that the knowledge offered students would empower them to be better scholars, to live more fully in the world beyond acad- eme. The feminist classroom was the one space where students c~u.ld raise critica! questions about pedagogical process. These cnt1ques were not always encouraged orwell received, but they were allo~ed. That small acceptance of critica! interrogation was a crucial challenge inviting us as students to think seriously about pedagogy in relati on to the practice of freedom.

lntroduction 7

I t ed my first undergraduate classroom to teach,

When en er . the example of those inspired black women teach-

I rehed on e · · h' k · d chool on Freire's work, and on ,em¡mst t m - s in rny gra e s '

er . d'cal pedagogy. I longed passionately to teach ·ng about ra I 1 ¡ f m the way I had been taught since high school. different Y ro .

digm that shaped my pedagogy was the 1dea that The first para .

I O m should be an exciting place, never bormg. And

the e assro . . . f boredorn should prevail, then pedagogtcal strateg1es were 1

d d that would intervene, alter, even disrupt the atmos- nee e . . .

h Neither Freire's work nor femmtst pedagogy exammed

p ere. . ¡ · t. n of pleasure in the classroom. The 1dea that earnmg ~0010 .

should be exciting, so rne times even "fun," was the subjec~ of critica! discussion by educators writing about pedagogtcal

practices in grade schools, and sometirnes ev~n high sc.h.ools . But there seerned to be no interest among either trad1tionai or radical educators in discussing the role of exciternent in

higher education. . . Excitement in higher education was viewed as potenttally d!s-

ruptive of the atmosphere of seriousness assumed to b~ esse~­ tial to the Jearning process. To enter classroom settings m colleges and universities with the will to share the desire to encourage excitement, was to transgress. Not only did it require movernent beyond accepted boundaries, but excitement could not be generated without a full recognition of the fact that there could never be an absolute set agenda governing teach- ing practices. Agendas had to be flexible, had to allow for spon- taneous shifts in direction. Students had to be seen in their pariicularity as individuals (I drew on the strategies my grade- school teachers used to get to kn:ow us) and interacted with according to their needs (here Freire was useful). Critica! re- flection on my experience as a student in unexciting classrooms enabled me not only to imagine that the classroom could be exciting but that this excitement could co-exist with and even stimulate serio us intellectual and/ or academic engagement.

I.

8 Teaching to Transgress

But excitement about ideas was not sufficient to create an

exciting learning process. As a classroom community, our

capacity to generate excitement is deeply affected by our inter- est in one another, in hearing one another's voices, in recog-

nizing one another's presence. Since the vast majority of

students learn through conservative, traditional educational

practices and con cern themselves only with the presence of the

professor, any radical pedagogy must insist that everyone's

presence is acknowledged. That insistence cannot be simply

stated. It has to be demonstrated through pedagogical prac-

tices. To begin, the professor must genuinely value every-

one's presence. There must be an ongoing recognition that

everyone influences the classroom dynamic, that everyone

con tributes. These contributions are resources. Used construc-

tively they enhance the capacity of any class to create an open

learning community. Often before this process can begin there

has to be some deconstruction of the traditional notion that

only the professor is responsible for classroom dynamics. That responsibility is relative to status. Indeed, the professor will al-

ways be more responsible because the larger institutional struc- tures will always en sure that accountability for what happens in

the classroom rests with the teacher. It is rare that any profes-

sor, no matter how eloquent a lecturer, can generate through

his or her actions enough excitement to create an exciting

classroom. Excitement is generated through collective effort.

Seeing the classroom always as a communal place enhances

the likelihood of collective effort in creating and sustaining a

learning community. One semester, I had a very difficult class, on e that completely failed on the communallevel. Throughout

the term, I thought that the major drawback inhibiting the

development of a learning community was that the class was

scheduled in the early morning, before nine. Almost always

between a third and a half of the class was not fully awake. This, coupled with the tensions of "differences," was impossible to

lntroduction 9

overcome. Every now and then we had an exciting session, but

mostly it was a dull class. I came to ha te this class so much that I

had a tremendous fear that I would not awaken to attend it; the

night before (despite alarm clocks, wake-up calls, and the expe-

riential knowledge that I had never forgotten to attend class) I

still could not sleep. Rather than making me arrive sleepy, I

tended to arrive wired, full of an energy few students mirrored. Time was just one of the factors that prevented this class

from becoming a learning community. For reasons I cannot

explain it was also full of "resisting" students who did not want to Jearn new pedagogical processes, who did not want to be in a

classroom that differed in any way from the norm. To these stu-

dents, transgressing boundaries was frightening. And though

they were not the majority, their spirit of rigid resistance

seemed always to be more powerful than any will to intellectual

openness and pleasure in learning. More than any other class I

had taught, this one compelled me to abandon the sense that the professor could, by sheer strength o f will and desire, make

the classroom an exciting, learning community. Before this class, I considered that Teaching to Transgress:

Education as the Practice of F'reedom would be a book of essays

mostly directed to teachers. Mter the class ended, I began writ-

ing with the understanding that I was speaking to and with both students and professors. The scholarly field of writing on

critica! pedagogy and/ or feminist pedagogy continues to be primarily a discourse engaged by white women and men.

Freire, too, in conversation with me, as in much of his written

wovk, has always acknowledged that he occupies the location of

white maleness, particularly in this country. But the work of various thinkers on radical pedagogy (I use this term to include

critica! and/ or feminist perspectives) has in recent years truly

included a recognition of differences-those determined by

class, race, sexual practice, nationality, and so on. Yet this move-

ment forward does not seem to coincide with any significant

lO T eaching to T ransgress

increase in black or other nonwhite voices joining discussions about radical pedagogical practices.

My pedagogical practices bave emerged from the mutually illuminating interplay of anticolonial, critica!, and feminist pedagogies. This complex and unique blending of multiple

perspectives has beer¡ an engaging and powerful standpoint from which to work. Expanding beyond boundaries, it has made it possible for me to imagine and enact pedagogical prac- tices that engage directly both the concern for interrogating biases in curricula that reinscribe systems of domination (such as racism and sexism) while simultaneously provi ding new ways to teach di verse gro u ps of students.

In this book I want to share insights, strategies, and critica! reflections on pedagogical practice. I intend these essays to be an intervention-countering the devaluation of teaching even as they address the urgent need for changes in teaching prac- tices. They are meant to serve as constructive commentary. Hopeful and exuberant, they convey the pleasure and joy I experience teaching; these essays are celebratory! To empha- size that the pleasure of teaching is an act of resistance coun- tering the overwhelming boredom, uninterest, and apathy that so often characterize the way professors and students feel about teaching and learning, about the classroom experience.

Each essay addresses common themes that surface again and again in discussions of pedagogy, o ff e ring ways to rethink teaching practices and constructive strategies to enhance learning. Written separately for a variety of contexts there is unavoidably some degree of overlap; ideas are repeated, key phrases used again and again. Even though I share strategies, these works do not offer blueprints for ways to make the class- room an exciting place for learning. To do so would under- mine the insistence that engaged pedagogy recognize each classroom as different, that strategies must constantly be

lntroduction li

· t d reconceptualized to address each new changed, mven e , teaching experience.

Teaching is a performative act. And it is that aspect of our

work that offers the space for change, ~nvention, spo~taneous

shifts, that can serve as a catalyst drawmg out the u~tque ele- ents in each classroom. To embrace the performattVe aspect

m " d' " 'd of teaching we are compelled to engage au ten ces, to const - er issues o f reciprocity. Teachers are not performers in the tra- ditional sense of the word in that o ur work is not meant to be a spectacle. Vet it is meant to serve as a catalyst that calls everyone to become more and more engaged, to become active partici-

pants in learning. Just as the way we perform changes, so should our sense of

"voice." In our everyday !ives we speak differently to diverse audiences. We communicate best by choosing that way of speaking that is informed by the particularity and uniqueness ofwhom we are speaking to and with. In keeping with this spir- it, these essays do not all sound alike. They reflect my effort to use language in ways that speak to specific contexts, as well as my desire to communicate with a diverse audience. To teach in varied communities not only o ur paradigms must shift but also the way we think, write, speak. The engaged voice must never be fixed and absolute but always changing, always evolving in

dialogue with a world beyond itself. These essays reflect my experience of critica! discussions

with teachers, students, and individuals who bave entered my classes to observe. Multilayered, then, these essays are meant to stand as testimony, bearing witness to education as the practice of freedom. Long before a public ever recognized me as a thinker or writer, I was recognized in the classroom by students -seen by them as a teacher who worked bard to create a dynamic learning experience for all of us. Nowadays, I arn rec- ognized more for insurgent intellectual practice. Indeed, the

i' '

12 T eaching to Transgress

academic public that I encounter at my lectures always shows surprise when I speak intimately and deeply about the class- room. That public seemed particularly surprised when I said that I was working on a collection of essays about teaching. This surprise is a sad reminder of the way teaching is seen as a duller, less valuable aspect of the academic profession. This perspective on teaching is a common one. Yet it must be chal- lenged ifwe are to meet the needs of our students, ifwe are to restore to education and the classroom excitement about ideas and the will to learn.

There is a serious crisis in education. Students often do not want to learn and teachers do not want to teach. More than - ever before in the recent history of this nation, educators are compelled to confront the biases that have shaped teaching practices in our society and to create new ways of knowing, dif- ferent strategies for the sharing of knowledge. We cannot ad- dress this crisis if progressive critical thinkers and social critics act as though teaching is not a subject worthy of o ur regard.

The classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy. For years it has been a place where education has been undermined by teachers and students alike who seek to use it as a platform for opportunistic con cerns rather than as a place to learn. With these essays, I add my voice to the collec- tive call for renewal and rejuvenation in our teaching practices. Urging all of us to open our minds and hearts so that we can

know beyond the bo un daries of what is acceptable, so that we can think and rethink, so that we can create new visions I

' celebrate teaching that enables transgressions-a movement against and beyond boundaries. It is that movement which makes education the practice of freedom.

I

Engaged Pedagogy

To educate as the practice of freedom is a way o f teaching that anyone can learn. That learning process comes easiest to those of us who teach who also believe that there is an aspect of our vocation that is sacred; who believe that o ur work is not merely to share information but to share in the intellectual and spiri- tual growth of o ur students. To teach in a manner that respects and cares for the souls of o ur students is essential if we are to provide the necessary conditions where learning can most

deeply and intimately begin. Throughout my years as student and professor, I have been

most inspired by those teachers who have had the courage to transgress those boundaries that would confine each pupil to a rote, assembly-line approach to learnipg. Such teachers ap- proach students with the will and desire to respond to our unique beings, even if the situation does not allow the full emergence of a relationship based on mutual recognition. Yet

the possibility of such recognition is always present.

13

14 Teaching to Transgress

Paulo Freire and the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh are two of the "teachers" who have touched me deeply with their work. When I first began college, Freire's thought gave me the support I needed to challenge the "bank- ing system" o f education, that approach to learning that is root- ed in the notion that all students need to do is consume information fed to them by a professor and be able to memo- rize and store i t. Early on, it was Freire's insistence that educa- tion could be the practice of freedom that encouraged me to create strategies for what he called "conscientization" in the classroom. Translating that term to critica! awareness and en- gagement, I entered the classrooms with the conviction that it _ was crucial for me and every other student to be an active par- ticipant, not a passive consumer. Education as the practice of freedom was continually undermined by professors who were actively hostile to the notion of student participation. Freire's work affirmed that education can only be liberatory when everyone claims knowledge as a field in which we all labor. That notion of mutual labor was affirmed by Thich Nhat Hanh 's phi- losophy of engaged Buddhism, the focus on practice in con- junction with contemplation. His philosophy was similar to Freire's emphasis on "praxis"-action and reflection upon the world in order to change it.

In his work Thich Nhat Hanh always speaks of the teacher as a healer. Like Freire, his approach to knowledge called on students to be active participants, to link awareness with prac- tice. Whereas Freire was primarily concerned with the mind, Thich Nhat Hanh offered a way of thinking about pedagogy which emphasized wholeness, a union of mind, body, and spir- it. His focus on a holistic approach to learning and spiritual practice enabled me to overcome years of socialization that had taught me to believe a classroom was diminished if stu- dents and professors regarded one another as ''whole" human

Engaged Pedagogy IS

striving not just for knowledge in books, but knowledge "'l)erngo,

how to live in the world. /a~IOUC

, _ During my twenty years of teaching, I have witnessed a grave - of dis--ease among professors (irrespective of their pali-sense

-. ) when students want us to see them as whole human beings (ICS

with complex !ives and experiences rather than simply as seek- ers after comparttnentalized bits of knowledge. When I was an undergraduate, Women's Studies wasjust finding a place in tbe academy. Those classrooms were the on e space where teach- ers were willing to acknowledge a connection between ideas !earned in university settings and those learned in life prac- tices. And, despite those times when students abused that free- dom in the classroom by only wanting to dwell on personal experience, feminist classrooms were, on the whole, one loca- tion where I witnessed professors striving to create participa- tory spaces for the sharing of knowledge. Nowadays, most women's studies professors are not as committed to exploring new pedagogical strategies. Despite this shift, many students still seek to enter feminist classrooms because they continue to believe that there, more than in any other place in the acade- my, they will have an opportunity to experience education as

the practice of freedom. Progressive, holistic education, "engaged pedagogy" is more

demanding than conventional critica! or feminist pedagogy. For, unlike these two teaching practices, it emphasizes well- being. That means that teachers must be actively committed to a process of self-actualization that promotes their own well- beiug if they are to teach in a manner that empowers students. Thich Nhat Hanh emphasized that "the practice of a healer, therapist, teacher or any helping professional should be direct- ed toward his or herself first, because if the he! per is unhappy, he or she cannot help many people." In the United States it is rare that anyone talks about teachers in university settings as

16 Teaching to Transgress

healers. And it is even more rare to hear anyone suggest that teachers have any responsibility to be self-actualized individuals,

Learning about the work o f intellectuals and academics pri- marily from nineteenth-century fiction and nonfiction during my pre-college years, I was certain that the task for those of us

who chose this vocation was to be holistica!ly questing for se!f- actualization. It was the actual experience of college that dis- rupted this image. It was there that I was made to feel as though I was terribly naive about "the profession." I learned that far from being self-actualized, the university was seen more as a haveu for those who are smart in book knowledge but who might be otherwise unfit for social interaction. Luckily, during my undergraduate years I began to make a distinction between the practice of being an intellectual/teacher and one's role as a member of the academic profession.

It was difficult to maintain fidelity to the idea ofthe intellec- tual as someone who sought to be whole-well-grounded in a

context where there was little emphasis on spiritual well-being, on care of the sou!. Indeed, the objectification of the teacher within bourgeois educational structures seemed to denigrate notions o f wholeness and uphold the idea of a mind/body split, one that promotes and supports compartrnentalization.

This support reinforces the dualistic separation of public and private, encouraging teachers and students to see no con- nection between life practices, habits of being, and the ro les of professors. The idea of the intellectual questing for a union of mind, body, and spirit had been replaced with notions that being smart meant that one was inherently emotionally unsta- ble and that the best in oneself emerged in one's academic work. This meant that whether academics were drug addicts, alcoholics, batterers, or sexual abusers, the only important aspect of our identity was whether or not our minds func- tioned, whether we were able to do our jobs in the classroom. The self was presumably emptied o ut the moment the thresh-

Engaged Pedagogy 17

d leaving in place only an objective mind-free crosse , ;;,~nPrienoes and biases. There was fear that the conditions of

L.hoPlf'w<)Uild interfere with the teaching process. Part of the and privi! e ge of the rol e of teacher I professo~ today is

absence of any requirement that we be self-actuai!Zed. Not

~;;c,;,mr·isi'n~~:IY professors who are not concerned with inner well- are the most threatened by the demand on the part of

for !iberatory education, for pedagogical processes ,, stua<'ll"'

."' .. '""' will aid them in their own struggle for self-actualization. Certainly it was naive for me to imagine during high school

that I would find spiritual and intellectual guidance in unive:- sity settings from writers, thinkers, scholars. To bave found thts would bave been to stumble across a rare treasure. I learned,

"-• ·---·-··· .along with other students, to consider myself fortunate if I found an interesting professor who talked in a compelling way. Most of my professors were not the slightest bit interested in enlightenment. More than anything they seemed enthralled by the exercisc of power and authority within their mini-kingdom,

the classroom. This is not to say that there were not compelling, benevo-

lent dictators, but it is true to my memory that it was rare-ab- solutely, astonishingly rare-to encounter professors who were deeply committed to progressive pedagogical practices. I was dismayed by this; most of my professors were not individuals

whose teaching styles I wanted to emulate. My commitrnent to learning kept me attending classes.

Yet, even so, because I did not conform-would not be an un- questioning, passive student-some professors treated me with contempt. I was slowly becoming estranged from education. Finding Freire in the mi dst of that estrangement was crucial to my survival as a student. His work offered both a way for me to understand the limitations of the type of education I was receiv- ing and to discover alternative strategies for learning and teaching. It was particularly disappointing to encounter white

18 Teaching to Transgress

male professors who claimed to follow Freire's model even

their pedagogical practices were mired in structures of domi, : nation, mirroring the styles of conservative professors even a

s .. they approached subjects from a more progressive standpoint. ':

When I first encountered Paulo Freire, I was eager to see if

his style of teaching would embody the pedagogical practices

he described so eloquently in his work. During the short tirne ¡ studied with him, I was deeply moved by his presence, by the

way in which his manner of teaching exemplified his pedagogi• cal theory. (Not all students interested in Freire have had a sim-

ilar experience.) My experience with him restored my faith in

liberatory education. I had never wanted to surrender the con-

viction that one could teach without reinforcing existing sys- tems of domination. I needed to know that professors did not have to be dictators in the classroom.

While I wanted teaching to be my career, I believed that per- sonal success was intimately linked with self-actualization. My

passion for this quest led me to interrogate constantly the

mind/body split that was so often taken to be a gi ven. Most pro-

fessors were often deeply antagonistic toward, even scornful of,

any approach to learning emerging from a philosophical stand- paint emphasizing the union of mind, body, and spirit, rather

than the separation of these elements. Like many of the stu-

dents I now teach, I was often told by powerful academics that

I was misguided to seek such a perspective in the academy.

Throughout my student years I felt deep inner anguish. Mem- ory of that pain returns as I listen to students express the con-

cern that they will not succeed in academic professions if they

want to be well, if they eschew dysfunctional behavior or partic- ipation in coercive hierarchies. These students are often fear-

ful, as I was, that there are no spaces in the academy where the will to be self-actualized can be affirmed.

This fear is present because many professors have intensely hostile responses to the visi on o f liberatory education that con-

Engaged Pedagogy 19

. will to know with the will to become. Within profes- . · dividuals often complain bitterly that students c1rcles, 1n " . . .

t..c.tas;S<" to be "encounter groups. Wh1le 1t 1s utterly unrea- for students to expect classrooms to be therapy ses- . ropriate for them to hope that the knowledge it IS app in these settings will enrich and enhance them.

Curr<:ntty, the students I encounter seem far more uncer- - -about the project of self-actualization than my peers a~d I

twenty years ago. They feel that there are no clear ethJCal

tUJ•rlCim<oo shaping actions. Yet, while they despair, they are also

['[t!àtlnmlt that education should be liberatory. They wmt and

·:-''<l'éinand more from professors than my generation did. There

s:-:.·•-.aJ:e times when I walk in to classrooms overflowing with students

S\~~;:~k~:f;e:;e::l:stt;erribly wounded in their psyches (mmy of them see " , yet I do not think that they want therapy from me.

- ·They do want an education that is healing to th~ uninf~rmed, '•>':·:''•· :_ lmknowing spirit. They do want knowledge that 1s memmgful.

'rhey rightfully expect that my colleagues md I will not offer

them information without addressing the connection between

what they are learning md their overalllife experiences. This demand on the students' part does not mem that they

will always accepto ur guidmce. This is on e of the joys o f educa-

don as the practice of freedom, for it allows students to assume

responsibility for their choices. Writing about our teacher I stu- dent relationship in a piece for the Village Voice, "How to Run the Yard: Off-Line and in to the Margins at Yale," one ofmy students,

Gary Dauphin, shares thejoys ofworking with me as well as the

tensions that surfaced between us as he begm to devote his time

to pledging a fraternity rather than cultivating his writing:

People think academics like Gloria [my given name] are all about difference: but what I learned from her was mostly about sameness, about what I had in com- mon as a black man to people of color; to Women and gays and lesbians and the poor and anyone else who

20 Teachlng to Transgress

wanted in. I did some of this learning by reading but most of it came from hanging o ut on the fringes of her life. I lived like that for a while, shuttling between high points in my classes and low points outside. Gloria was a safe ha ven ... Pledging a fraternity is about as far away as you can get from her classroom, from the yellow kitchen where she used to share her I un eh with students in need ofvarious forms of sustenance.

This is Gary writing about the joy. The tension arose as we

discussed his reason for wanting to jo in a fraternity and my dis-

dain for that decision. Gary comments, "They represented a

visi on of black manhood that she abhorred, on e where violence

and abuse were primary ciphers o f bon ding and identity."

Describing his assertion of autonomy from my influence he writes, "But she must have also known the limits of even her

influence on my life, the limits ofbooks and teachers."

Ultimately, Gary felt that the decision he had made to join a

fraternity was not constructive, that I "had taught him open-

ness" where the fraternity had encouraged one-dimensional

allegiance. Our interchange both during and after this experi-

ence was an example of engaged pedagogy.

Through critica! thinking-a process he learned by reading

theory and actively analyzing texts-Gary experienced educa- tion as the practice of freedom. His final comments about me:

"Gloria had only mentioned the entire episode once after it

was over, and this to tell me simply that there are many kinds of

choices, many kinds of logic. I could make those events mean

whatever I wanted as long as I was honest." I have quoted his

writing at length because it is testimony affirming engaged pedagogy. It means that my voice is not the only account of

what happens in the classroom.

Engaged pedagogynecessarilyvalues student expression. In

her essay, "Interrupting the Calls for Student Voice in Libera-

Engaged Pedagogy 21

íY I\dtlC<tttcm: A Feminist Poststructuralist Perspective," Mimi employs a Foucauldian framework to suggest that

Regulatory and pnnitive me ans and uses o f the confes- si on bring to mind curncular and pedagogical prac- tices which call for students to publicly reveal, even Confess, information about their lives and cultures in the presence of authority figures such as teachers.

"'"- -- education is the practice o f freedom, students are not

the only ones who are asked to share, to confess. Engaged ped- "·''c+;·.c agogy does not seek simply to empower students. Any class-

room that employs a holistic model of learning will also be a

place where teachers grow, and are empowered by the process. :=:.;:::.c·:-T]iat empowerment cannot happen ifwe refuse to be vulnera-

ble while encouraging students to take risks. Professors who

expect students to share confessional narratives but who are

themselves unwilling to share are exercising power in a manner that could be coercive. In my classrooms, I do not expect stu-

dents to take any risks that I would not take, to share in any way

that I would not share. When professors bring narratives of

their experiences into classroom discussions it eliminates the possibility that we can function as all-knowing, silent interroga-

tors. It is often productive if professors take the first risk, link- ing confessional narratives to academic discussions so as to

show how experience can illuminate and enhance our under- . standing of academic material. But most professors must prac-

ticç being vulnerable in the classroom, being wholly present in

mind, body, and spirit. Progressive professors working to transform the curriculum

so that it does not reflect biases or reinforce systems of domi-

nation are most often the individuals willing to take the risks

that engaged pedagogy requires and to make their teaching

practices a site of resistance. In her essay, "On Race and Voice:

22 Teachlng to Transgress

Challenges for Liberation Education in the 1990s," Lnan•:lra' Mohanty writes that

resistance lies in self-conscious engagement with dom- inant, normative discourses and representations and in the active creation of oppositional analytic and cul- tural spaces. Resistance that is random and isolated is clearly not as effective as that which is mobilized through systemic politicized practices of teaching and learning. Uncovering and reclaiming subjugated knowledge is one way to lay claims to alternative histo- ries. But these knowledges need to be understood and defined pedagogically, as questions of strategy and practice as well as of scholarship, in order to transform educational institutions radically.

Professors who embrace the challenge of self-actualization will

be better able to create pedagogical practices that engage stu-

dents, providing them with ways ofknowing that enhance their capacity to live fully and deeply.

2

A Revolution of Val u es

The Promise of Multicultural Change

Two summers ago I attended my twentieth high school reunion.

It was a last-minute decision. I had just finished a new book. Whenever I finish a work, I always feel lost, as though a steady anchor has been taken away and there is no sure ground under

my feet. During the time between ending one project and

beginning another, I always have a crisis of meaning. I begin to

wonder what my life is all about and what I bave been put on

this earth to do. It is as though immersed in a projectI lose all sense of myself and must then, when the work is done, rediscov-

er who I arn and where I arn going. When I heard that the

reunion was happening, it seemed just the experience to bring

me back to myself, to help in the process of rediscovery. Never

having attended any of the past reunions, I did not know what

to expect. I did know that this one would be different. For the first time we were about to bave a racially integrated reunion. In

past years, reunions had always been segregated. White folks

23

24 Teaching to Transgress

had their reunion on their side of town and black folks had a

separate reunion. None of us was sure what an integrated reunion would be

like. Those periods in our adolescent !ives of racial desegrega-

tion had been full of hostility, rage, conflict, and loss. We black

kids had been angry that we had to leave our beloved all-black

high school, Crispus Attucks, and be bussed halfway cross town

to integrate white schools. We had to make the journey and

thus bear the responsibility of making desegregation a reatity.

We had to give up the familiar and enter a world that seemed

cald and strange, not our world, not our school. We were cer-

tainly on the margin, no longer at the center, and it hurt. It was

such an unhappy time. I still remember my rage that we had to

awaken an hour early so that we could be bussed to school before the white students arrived. We were made to sit in the

gymnasium and wait. It was betieved that this practice would

prevent outbreaks of conflict and hostility since it removed the

possibitity of social contact before classes began. Yet, once

again, the burden ofthis transition was placed on us. The white

school was desegregated, but in the classroom, in the cafeteria,

and in most social spaces racial apartheid prevailed. Black and

white students who considered ourselves progressive rebelted

against the unspoken racial taboos meant to sustain white

supremacy and racial apartheid even in the face of desegrega- tion. The white folks never seemed to understand that our par-

ents were no more eager for us to socialize with them than they

were to socialize with us. Those ofus who wanted to make racial

equality a reality in every area of our life were threats to the

social order. We were proud of ourselves, proud of our willing-

ness to transgress the rules, proud to be courageous.

Part of a small integrated ctique of smart kids who consid- ered ourselves ~~artists," we believed we were destined to create outlaw culture where we would live as Bohemians forever free;

we were certain of our radicalness. Days before the reunion, I

A Revolution of Values 25

was overwhelmed by memories and shocked to discover that

our gestures of defiance had been nowhere near as daring as

they had seemed at the time. Mostly, they were acts of resis-

tance that did not truly challenge the status quo. One of my

best buddies during that time was white and mate. He had an

oid gray Volva that I loved to ride in. Every now and then he

would give me a ride home from school ifl missed the bus-an

action which angered and disturbed those who saw us. Friend-

ship across racial tines was bad enough, but across gender it was

unheard of and dangerous. (One day, we found outjust how

dangerous when grown white men in a car tried to run us off

the road.) Ken's parents were religions. Their faith compelled

them to live o ut a belief in racial justi ce. They were among the first white folks in our community to invite black folks to corne

to their house, to eat at their table, to worship together with

them. As one of Ken's best buddies, I was welcome in their ho use. Mter hours of discussion and debate a bo ut possible dan-

gers, my parents agreed that I could go there for a meal. It was

my first time eating together with white people. I was 16 years

oid. I felt then as though we were making history, that we were

living the dream of democracy, creating a culture where equali-

ty, love,justice, and peace would shape America's destiny.

Mter graduation, I lost touch with Ken even though he always had a warm place in my memory. I thought ofhim when

meeting and interacting with liberal white folks who believed

that having a black friend meant that they were not racist, who

sincerely believed that they were doing us a favor by extending

offers of friendly contact for which they felt they should be

rewarded. I thought ofhim during.years ofwatchingwhite folks

play at unlearning racism but walking away when they encoun-

tered obstacles, rejection, conflict, pain. Our high school friendship had been forged not because we were black and

white but be cause we shared a similar take on reality. Racial dif-

ference meant that we had to struggle to claim the integrity of

26 Teachlng to Transgress

that bonding. We had no illusions. We knew there would be

obstacles, conflict, and pain. In white supremacist capitalist

patriarchy-words we never used then-we knew we would

have to pay a price for this friendship, that we would need to

possess the courage to stand up for o ur belief in democracy, in

racial justice, in the transformative power of Jove. We valued

the bond between us enough to meet the challenge.

Days before the reunion, remembering the sweetness of

that friendship, I felt humbled by the knowledge of what we

give up when we are young, believing that we will find some-

thing just as good or better someday, only to discover that not

to be so. I wondered just how it could be that Ken and I had

ever lost contact with one another. Along the way I had not found white folks who understood the depth and complexity of

racial injustice, and who were as willing to practice the art ofliv-

ing a nonracist life, as folks were then. In my adult life I have

seen few white folks who are really willing togo the distance to create a world of racial equality-white folks willing to take

risks, to be courageous, to live against the grain. I went to the

reunion hoping that I would have a chance to see Ken face-to-

face, to tell him how much I cherished all that we had shared,

to tell him-in words which I never dared to say to any white

person back then-simply that I loved him.

Remembering this past, I arn most struck by our passionate commitment to a vision of social transformation rooted in the

fundamental belief in a radically democratic idea of freedom

and justice for all. Our notions of social change were not fancy.

There was no elaborate postrnodern political theory shaping our actions. We were simply trying to change the way we went

a bo ut o ur everyday !ives so that o ur values and habits of being

would reflect our commitrnent to freedom. Our major concern

then was ending racism. Today, as I witness the rise in white

supremacy, the growing social and economic apartheid that separates white and black, the haves and the have-nots, men

A Revolution of Values 27

and women, I have placed alongside the struggle to end racism

a commitment to en ding sexism and sexist oppression, to erad-

icating systems of class exploitation. Aware that we are living in a culture of domination, I ask myself now, as I did more than

twenty years ago, what values and habits of being reflect my I our commitment to freedom.

In retrospect, I see that in the !ast twenty years I have en-

countered many folks who say they are committed to freedom

andjustice for alleven though the way they live, the values and

habits ofbeing they institutionalize daily, in public and private

rituals, help maintain the culture of domination, help create

an unfree world. In the book Where Do We Go From Here? Chaos or Community, Martin Luther King, Jr. told the citizens of this nation, with prophetic insight, that we would be unable to go

forward ifwe did not experience a "true revolution ofvalues." He assured us that

the stability of the large world house which is ours will

involve a revolution ofvalues to accompany the seien~

tífic and freedom revolutions engulfing the earth. We

must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing"-oriented

society to a "person"-oriented society. When machines

and computers, profit motives and property rights are

considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism are inca-

pable of being conquered. A civilization can flounder

as readily in the face of moral and spiritual bankruptcy as it can through financial bankruptcy.

Today, we live in the midst of that floundering. We live in

chaos, uncertain about the possibility of buildin!;\ and sustain-

ing community. The public figures who speak the most to us

about a return to old-fashioned values embody the evils King

describes. They are most committed to maintaining systems of

28 T eaching to T ran s gres s

domination-racism, sexism, class exploitation, and imperial- ism. They promote a perverse vision of freedom that makes it synonymous with materialism. They teach us to believe that domination is "natural," that it is right for the strong to rule

over the weak, the powerful over the powerless. What amazes me is that so many people claim not to embrace these values and yet our collective rejection of them cannot be complete since they prevail in our daily !ives.

These days, I arn compelled to consider what forces keep us from moving forward, from having that revolution of values that would enable us to live differently. King taught us to understand that if ''we are to bave peace on earth" that "o ur loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class, and our nation." Long befo re the word "multiculturalism" becam e fash- ionable, he encouraged us to "develop a world perspective." Yet, what we are witnessing today in our everyday life is not an eagerness on the part of neighbors and strangers to develop a world perspective but a return to narrow nationalism, isola- tionisms, and xenophobia. These shifts are usually explained in New Right and neoconservative terms as attempts to bring order to the chaos, to return to an (idealized) past. The notion o f family evoked in these discussions is on e in which sexist rol es are upheld as stabilizing traditions. Nor surprisingly, this vision of family life is coupled with a notion of security that suggests we are always most safe with people of our same group, race, class, religion, and so on. No matter how many statistics on domestic violence, homicide, rape, and child abuse indicate that, in fact, the idealized patriarchal family is not a "safe" space, that those of us who experience any form of assault are more likely to be victimized by those who are like us rather than by some mysterious strange outsiders, these conservative myths persist. lt is apparent that one of the primary reasons we bave not experienced a revolution ofvalues is that a culture of domination necessarily promotes addiction to lying and denial.

A Revolution of Values 29

That Jying takes the presumably innocent form of many white people ( and even som e black folks) suggesting that racism does not exist anymore, and that conditions of social e uality are solidly in place that would enable any black person w~o works bard to achieve economic self-sufficiency. Forget about the fact that capitalism requires the existence of a mass underclass of surplus labor. Lying takes the form of mass media creating the myth that feminist movement bas completely transformed society, so much so that the po li tics of patriarchal power bave been inverted and that men, particularly white men,just like emasculated black men, have become the victims of dominating women. So, it goes, all men (especially black men) must pull together (as in the Clarence Thomas hearings) to support and reaffirm patriarchal domination. Add to this the widely held assumptions that blacks, other minorities, and white women are taking jobs from white men, and that people are poor and unemployed because they want to be, and it becomes most evident that part of our contemporary crisis is created by a Jack of meaningful access to truth. That is to say, individuals are not just presented untruths, but are told them in a manner that enables most effective communication. When this collective cultural consumption of and attachment to mis- information is coupled with the layers oflying individuals do in their personal !ives, our capacity to face reality is severely diminished as is our will to intervene and change unjust cir-

cumstances. Ifwe examine critically the traditional role of the university

in the pursuit of truth and the sharing of knowledge and infor- mation, it is painfully clear that biases that uphold and main- tain white supremacy, imperialism, sexism, and racism bave distorted education so that it is no longer about the practice of freedom. The call for a recognition of cultural diversity, a rethinking of ways of knowing, a deconstruction of oid episte- mologies, and the concomitant demand that there be a trans-

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30 Teaching to Transgress

formation in our classrooms, in how we teach and what we teach, has been a necessary revolution-one that seeks to

restore life to a corrupt and dying academy,

When everyone first began to speak about cultural diversity,

it was exciting. For those ofus on the margins (people of color,

folks from working class backgrounds, gays, and lesbians, and

so on) who had always felt ambivalent about our presence in

institutions where knowledge was shared in ways that re-

inscribed colonialism and domination, it was thrilling to think

that the vision of justice and democracy that was at the very

heart of civil rights movement would be realized in the acade-

my. At !ast, there was the possibility of a learning community, a

place where difference could be acknowledged, where we

would finally all understand, accept, and affirm that our ways

o f knowing are forged in history and relations of power. Finally,

we were all going to break through collective academic denial

and acknowledge that the education most of us had received

and were giving was not and is never politically neutral.

Though it was evident that change would not be immediate, there was tremendous hope that this process we had set in

motion would lead to a fulfillment of the dream of education

as the practice o f freedom.

Many of our colleagues were initially reluctant participants

in this change. Many folks found that as they tried to respect

"cultural diversity" they had to confront the limitations of their

training and knowledge, as well as a possible loss of "authority."

Indeed, exposing certain truths and biases in the classroom

often created chaos and confusion. The idea that the class-

room should always be a "safe," harmonious place was chal- lenged. It was hard for individuals to fully grasp the idea that

recognition of difference might also require ofus a willingness

to se e the classroom change, to allow for shifts in relati o ns

between students. A lot of people panicked. What they saw

happening was not the comforting "melting pot" idea of cul-

A Revolution of Values 31

tural diversity, the rainbow coalition where we would all be grouped together in our difference, but everyone wearing the

same have-a-nice-day smile. This was the stuff of colonizing fan-

tasy, a perversion of the progressive vision of cultural diversity.

Critiquing this longing in a recent interview, "Critica! Multi-

culturalism and Democratic Schooling" (in the International

Journal oJEducational Reform), Peter McLaren asserted:

Diversity that somehow constitutes itself as a harmo-

nious ensemble of benign cultural spheres is a conserv-

ative and liberal model of multiculturalism tbat, in my

mind, deserves to be jettisoned because, when we try to

make culture an undisturbed space of harmony and

agreement where social relations exist within cultural

forros o f uninterrupted ac cords we subscribe to a forro

of social amnesia in which we forget that all knowledge

is forged in histories that are played out in the field of

social antagonisms.

Many professors lacked strategies to dea! with antagonisms

in the classroom. When this fear joined with the refusa! to

change that characterized the s tan ce of an oid (predominantly

white male) guard it created a space for disempowered collec- tive backlash.

All of a sudden, professors who had taken issues of multi-

culturalism and cultural diversity seriously were backtracking, expressing doubts, casting votes in directions that would

restqre biased traditions or prohibit changes in faculty and cur-

ricula that were to bring diversity .of representation and per-

spective. Joining forces with the oid guard, previously open

professors condoned tactics ( ostracization, belittlement, and

so on) used by senior colleagues to dissuade junior faculty members from making paradigm shifts that would lead to

change. In one of my Toni Morrison seminars, as we went

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32 T eaching to T ransgress

around our circle voicing critica! reflections on Morrison's lan-

guage, a sort of classically white, blondish,J. Crew coed shared

that one of her other English professors, an older white man

(whose name non e of us wanted her to mention), confided

that he was so pleased to find a student still interested in read-

ing literature-words-the language of texts and "not that race

and gender stuff." Somewhat amused by the assumption he had made about her, she was disturbed by his conviction that

conventional ways of critically approaching a novel could not

coexist in classrooms that also offered new perspectives. I then shared with the class my experience of being at a

Halloween party. A new white male colleague, with whom I

was chatting for the first time, went on a tirade at the mere

mention of my Toni Morrison seminar, emphasizing that Sang

of Solomon was a weak rewrite of Hemingway's For Whom the

Bell Tolls. Passionately full of disgust for Morrison he, being a

Hemingway scholar, seemed to he sharing the often-heard con-

cern that black women writers/thinkers are just poor imita-

tions of "great" white men. Not wanting at that moment to

launch in to Unlearning Colonialism, Divesting of Racism and

Sexism 1 Ol, I opted for the strategy taught to me by that in-

denial-of-institutionalized-patriarchy, self-help book Women Who

Love Too Much. I just said, "Oh!" Later, I assured him that I

would read For Whom the Bell Tolls again to se e if I would make

the same connection. Both these seemingly trivial incidents

reveal how deep-seated is the fear that any de-centering of

Western civilizations, of the white male can on, is really an act o f

cultural genocide. Some folks think that everyone who supports cultural diver-

sity wants to replace one dictatorship ofknowing with another,

changing one set way of thinking for another. This is perhaps

the gravest misperception of cultural diversity. Even though

there are those overly zealous among us who hope to replace

one set of absolutes with another, simply changing content,

A Revolution of Yalues 33

this perspective does not accurately represent progressive visions of the way commitment to cultural diversity can con-

structively transform the academy. In all cultural revolutions

there are periods of chaos and confusion, times when grave

mistakes are made. If we fear mistakes, doing things wrongly,

constantly evaluating ourselves, we will never make the acade-

my a culturally diverse place where scholars and the curricula

address every dimension of that difference.

As backlash swells, as budgets are cut, as jobs become even

more scarce, many of the few progressive interventions that

were made to change the academy, to create an open climate

for cultural diversity are in danger of being undermined or

eliminated. These threats should not be ignored. N or should

our collective commitment to cultural diversity change because

we bave not yet devised and implemented perfect strategies for

them. To create a culturally diverse academy we must commit

ourselves fully. Learning from other movements for social

change, from civil rights and feminist liberation efforts, we

must accept the protracted nature of our struggle and be will-

ing to remain both patient and vigilant. To commit ourselves to

the work o f transforming the academy so that it will be a place

where cultural diversity informs every aspect of our learning,

we must embrace struggle and sacrifice. We cannot be easily discouraged. We cannot despair when there is conflict. Our sol-

idarity must be affirmed by shared belief in a spirit of intellec-

tnal openness that celehrates diversity, welcomes dissent, and

rejoices in collective dedication to truth.

Drawing strength from the life and work of Martin Luther

King,Jr., I arn often reminded of his profound inner struggle

when he felt called by his religions heliefs to oppose the war in

Vietnam. Fearful of alienating conservative bourgeois support- ers, and of alienating the black church, King meditated on a

passage from Romans, chapter 12, verse 2, which reminded

him of the necessity of dissent, challenge and change: "Be not

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34 Teaching to Transgress

conformed to this world but be ye transformed b th f . d "A y e 0 your mm s. 11 of us in the academy and in th 1 hI ecutureas

w o e are called to renew o ur minds if we are to tran e . . . . s10rm cat10nal mstitUtiOns-and society-so that th e way we teach, and work can reflect our joy in cultural diver 'ty . e . . SI 'our

SI on ,or JUStlce, and o ur Jove of freedom. 3

Embracing Change

Teaching in a Multicultural World

Despite the contemporary focus on multiculturalism in our society, particularly in education, there is not nearly enough practica! discussion of ways classroom settings can be trans- formed so that the learning experience is inclusive. If the effort to respect and honor the social reality and experiences of groups in this society who are nonwhite is to be reflected in a pedagogical process, then as teachers-on all levels, from ele- mentary to university settings-we must acknowledge that our styles of teaching may need to change. Let's face it: most of us were taught in classrooms where styles of teachings reflected the hotion of a single norm of thought and experience, which we were encouraged to believe was universal. This has been just as true for nonwhite teachers as for white teachers. Most of us learned to teach emulating this model. As a çonsequence, many teachers are disturbed by the political implications of a multicultural education because they fear losing control in a

35

36 Teaching to Transgress

classroom where there is no one way to approach a subject- only multiple ways and multiple referen ces.

Arnong educators there has to be an acknowledgment that any effort to transform institutions so that they reflect a multi-

cultural standpoint must take inta consideration the t'cars

teachers have when asked to shift their paradigms. There must

be training si tes where teachers have the opportunity to express those concerns while also learning to create ways to approach

the multicultural classroom and curriculum. When I first went

to O berlin College, I was disturbed by what I felt was a Jack of understanding on the apart of many professors as to what the

multicultural classroom might be like. Chandra Mohanty, m

colleague in Women's Studies, shared these concerns. Thoug~ we were both untenured, our strong belief that the Oberlin

campus was not fully facing the issue of changing curriculum

and teaching practices in ways that were progressive and pro-

moting o f inclusion led us to consider how we mig ht intervene in this process. We proceeded from the standpoint that the vast

m,Yority of Oberlin professors, who are overwhelmingly white,

were basically well-meaning, concerned about the quality of education students receive on our campus, and therefore Jikely

to be supportive of any effort at education for critica! con- sciousness. Together, we decided to have a group of seminars

focusing on transformative pedagogy that would be open to all professors. Initially, students were also welcome, but we found

that their presence inhibited honest discussion. On the first

night, for example, severa! white professors made comments

that could be viewed as horribly racist and the students left the

group to share what was said around the college. Since our intent was to educate for critica! consciousness, we did nat want

the seminar setting to be a space where anyone would feel

attacked or their reputation as a teacher sullied. We did, howev- er, want it to be a space for constructive confrontation and crit-

Embracing Change 37

· To ensure that this could happen, we had to interrogauon.

1 de students. exc u . tt'ng Chandra (whose background is in edu- At the first mee ' . . dI talked about the factors that had mfluenced our

cauon) an fF · ' k . · 1 ctices I emphasized the impacto re1re s wor dagog1ca pra · .

pe h' k' Since my formative education took place m on my tm mg. .

. ted schools I spoke about the expenence of racmlly segrega ' . .

. h one's experience IS recogmzed as central and Jearnmg w en . .

. d then how that changed w1th desegregatwn, sigmficant an bl k h ildren were forced to attend schools where we when ac e .

rded as obiects and nat subJects. Many of the profes-were rega " ent at the first meeting were disturbed by our overt sors pres . . .

d. ussion of political standpoints. Agam and agam, 1t was nec-mc . . ¡· . 11 t remind everyone that no educatwn 1s po 1tica y neu-essary o . .

1 Emphasizing that a white male professor m an Enghsh tra. ,. ak d arttnent who teaches only work by "great white men IS m -ep . . ing a political decision, we had to work cons1stently agamst

and through the overwhelming will on the part of folks to deny

the politics of racism, sexism, heterosexism, and so forth that · form how and what we teach. We found again and again that

:most everyone, especially the old guard, were more distur~ed by the overt recognition of the role our political perspectives

play in shaping pedagogy than by their pa~sive acce~tance of ways of teaching and learning that reflect bmses, particularly a

white supremacist standpoint. To share in our efforts at intervention we invited professors

from universities around the country to corne and talk-both

formally and informally-about the kind of work they were

doing aimed at transforming teaching and learning so that a multicultural education would be possible. We invited then-

Princeton professor of religion and philosophy Corne! West to

give a talk on "decentering Western civili~ation." It ~as o ur ho pe that his very traditional training and h1s progress1ve prac-

38 T eaching to Transgress

tice as a scholar would give everyone a sense of optimism about our ability to change. In the informal session, a few white male professors were courageously outspoken in their efforts to say that they could accept the need for change, but were uncertain about the implications o f the changes. This reminded us that it

is difficult for individuals to shift paradigms and that there must be a setting for folks to voice fears, to talk about what they are doing, how they are doing it, and why. One of our most useful meetings was one in which we asked professors from different

disciplines (including math and science) to talk informally about how their teaching had been changed by a desire to be more inclusive. Hearing individuals describe concrete strate-

gies was an approach that helped dispel fears. It was crucial that more traditional or conservative professors who had been will- ing to make changes talk about motivations and strategies.

When the meetings concluded, Chandra and I initially felt a

tremendous sense of disappointment. We had not realized how much faculty would need to unlearn racism to learn about col- onization and decolonization and to fully appreciate the neces- sity for creating a democratic liberal arts learning experience.

All too often we found a will to include those considered

"marginal" without a willingness to accord their work the same respect and consideration given other work. In Women's Stud- ies, for example, individuals will often focus on women of color at the very end of the semester or lump everything about race and difference together in on e section. This kind of tokenism is not multicultural transformation, but it is familiar to us as the change individuals are most likely to make. Let me give anoth- er example. What does it mean when a white female English professor is eager to include a work by Toni Morrison on the syllabus of her course but then teaches that work without ever making reference to race or ethnicity? I bave heard individual white women "boast" about how they have shown students that black writers are "as good" as the white male canon when they

Embracing Change 39

do not call attention to race. Clearly, such pedagogy is not an interrogation of the biases conventional canons (if not all can-

ons) establish, but yet another form of tokenism. The unwillingness to approach teaching from a standpoint

that includes awareness o f race, sex, and class is often rooted in the fear that classrooms will be uncontrollable, that emotions

and passions will not be contained. To some extent, we all know that whenever we address in the classroom subjects that stu- dents are passionate about there is always a possibility of con- frontation, forceful expression of ideas, or even conflict. In much of my writing about pedagogy, particularly in classroom settings with great diversity, I have talked about the need to examine critically the way we as teachers conceptualize what the

space for learning should be like. Many professors have con- veyed to me their feeling that the classroom should be a "safe" place; that usually translates to mean that the professor lectures to a group of quiet students who respond only when they are called on. The experience of professors who educate for critica! consciousness indicates that many students, especially students of color, may not feel atall "safe" in what appears to be a neutral setting. It is the absence of a feeling of safety that often pro- motes prolonged silence or lack of student engagement.

Making the classroom a democratic setting where everyone feels a responsibility to contribute is a central goa! of trans- formative pedagogy. Throughout my teaching career, white professors have often voiced concern to me about nonwhite students who do not talk. As the classroom becomes more diverse, teachers are faced with the way the politics of domina- don are often reproduced in the educational setting. For exam- ple, white male students continue to be the most vocal in our classes. Students of color and some white women express fear that they will be judged as intellectually inadequate by these peers. I have taught brilliant students of color, many of them seniors, who have skillfully managed never to speak in class-

40 T eaching to Transgress

room settings. Some express the feeling that they are less likely to suffer any kind of assault if they simply do not assert their subjectivity. They bave told me that many professors never showed any interest in hearing their voices. Accepting the decentering of the West globally, embracing multiculturalism, com pels educators to focus attention on the issue of voice.

Who speaks? Who listens? And why? Caring about whether all students fulfill their responsibility to con tribute to learning in

the classroom is not a common approach in what Freire has called the "banking system of education" where students are regarded merely as passive consumers. Since so many profes- sors teach from that standpoint, it is difficult to create the kind of learning community that can fully embrace multicultural- ism. Students are much more willing to surrender their depen- dency on the banking system of education than are their teachers. They are also much more willing to face the chal- lenge o f multiculturalism.

It has been as a teacher in the classroom setting that I have witnessed the power of a transformative pedagogy rooted in a respect for multiculturalism. Working with a critica! pedagogy based on my understanding of Freire's teaching, I enter the classroom with the assumption that we must build "communi- ty" in order to create a climate of openness and intellectual rigor. Rather than focusing on issues of safety, I think that a feeling of community creates a sense that there is shared com- mitment and a common good that binds us. What we all ideally share is the desire to learn-to receive actively knowledge that enhances our intellectual development and our capacity to live more fully in the world. It has been my experience that on e way to build community in the classroom is to recognize the value of each individual voice. In my classes, students keep journals and often write paragraphs during class which they read to on e another. This happens at least once irrespective of class size. Most of the classes I teach are not small. They range anywhere

Embracing Change 41

from thirty to sixty students, and at times I have taught more than one hundred. To hear each other (the sound of different voices), to listen to o ne another, is an exercise in recognition. It

also ensures that no student remains invisible in the classroom. Some students resent having to make a verbal contribution, and so I bave had to make it clear from the outset that this is a requirement in my classes. Even if there is a student present whose voice cannot be heard in spoken words, by "signing" (even ifwe cannot read the signs) they make their presence felt.

When I first entered the multicultural, multiethnic class- room setting I was unprepared. I did not know how to cope effective!y with so much "diflerence." Despite progressive po li- tics, and my deep engagement with the feminist movement, I had never before been compelled to work within a truly diverse setting and I lacked the necessary skills. This is the case with most educators. It is difficult for many educators in the United States to conceptualize how the classroom willlook when they are confronted with the demographics which indicate that ''whiteness" may cease to be the norm ethnicity in classroom settings on all levels. Hence, educators are poorly prepared when we actually confront diversity. This is why so many of us stubbornly ding to oid patterns. As I worked to create teacbing strategies tbat would make a space for multiculturallearning, I found it necessary to recognize wbat I have called in other writ- ing on pedagogy different "cultural codes." To teacb effectively a diverse student body, I bave to learn tbese codes. And so do students. Tbis act alone transforms tbe classroom. Tbe sbaring of ideas and information does not always progress as quickly as it may in more bomogeneous settings. Often, professors and students bave to learn to accept different ways ofknowing, new epistemologies, in the multicultural setting.

Just as it may be difficult for professors to sbift tbeir para- digms, it is equally difficult for students. I have always believed tbat students sbould enjoy learning. Yet I found that tbere was

ií

42 Teaching to Transgress

much more tension in the diverse classroom setting where the philosophy of teaching is rooted in critica! pedagogy and (in my case) in feminist critica! pedagogy. The presence of ten- sion-and at times even conflict-often meant that students did not enjoy my classes or Jove me, their professor, as I secret- ly wanted them to do. Teaching in a traditional discipline from

the perspective of critica! pedagogy means that I often encounter students who make complaints like, '1 thought this was supposed to be an English class, why are we talking so much about feminism?" (Or, they might add, race or class.) In the transformed classroom there is often a much greater need to explain philosophy, strategy, intent than in the "norm" set- ting. I have found through the years that many of my students who bitch endlessly while they are taking my classes contact me ata later date to talk about how much that experience meant

to them, how much they Jearned. In my professorial role I had to surrender my need for immediate affirmation of successful teaching ( even though som e reward is immediate) and accept that students may not appreciate the value of a certain stand- paint or process straightaway. The exciting aspect of creating a classroom community where there is respect for individual voices is that there is infinitely more feedback because students do feel free to talk-and talk back. And, yes, often this feed- back is critical. Moving away from the need for immediate affirmation was crucial to my growth as a teacher. I learned to respect that shifting paradigms or sharing knowledge in new ways challenges; it takes time for students to experience that challenge as positive.

Students taught me, too, that it is necessary to practice com- passion in these new learning settings. I bave not forgotten the day a student came to class and told me: 'We take your class. We learn to look at the world from a critica! standpoint, one that considers race, sex, and class. And we can't enjoy life anymore." Looking out over the class, across race, sexual preference, and

Embracing Change 43

ethnicity, I saw students nodding their heads. And I saw for the first tim e that there can be, and usually is, som e degree o f pain

involved in giving up oid ways of thinking and knowing and )earning new approaches. I respect that pain. And I inducte recognition of it now when I teach, that is to say, I teach about shifting paradigms and talk about the discomfort it can cause. White students learning to think more critically about ques-

tions o f race and racism may go home for the holidays and sud- denly see their parents in a different light. They may recognize nonprogressive thinking, racism, and so on, and it may hurt them that new ways of knowing may crea te estrangement where there was none. Often when students return from breaks I ask them to share with us how ideas that they bave Jearned or worked on in the classroom impacted on their experience out- side. This gives them both the opportunity to know that diffi- cult experiences may be commou and practice at integrating theory and practice: ways of knowing with habits of being. We practice interrogating habits ofbeing as well as ideas. Through

this process we build community. Despite the focus on diversity, our desires for inclusion,

many professors still teach in classrooms that are predominant- ly white. Often a spirit of tokenism prevails in those settings. This is why it is so crucial that "whiteness" be studied, under- stood, discussed-so that everyone learns that affirmation of multiculturalism, and an unbiased inclusive perspective, can and should be present whether or not people of color are pre- sent. Transforming these classrooms is as great a challenge as learning how to teach well in the setting of diversity. Often, if there is one lone person of color in the classroom she or he is objectified by others and forced to assume the role of "native informant." For example, a novel is re ad by a Korean American author. White students turn to the one student from a Korean background to explain what they do not understand. This places an unfair responsibility on to that student. Professors can

44 Teaching to Transgress

intervene in this process by making it clear from the outset that

experience does nat make one an expert, and perhaps even by explaining what it means to place someone in the role of "na-

tive informant." It must be stated that professors cannot inter-

vene if they also see students as "native informants." Often,

students have corne to my office complaining about the Jack of

inclusion in another professor' s class. For example, a course on

social and political thought in the United States includes no

work by women. When students complain to the teacher about

this Jack of inclusion, they are told to make suggestions of

material that can be used. This often places an unfair burden

on a student. It also makes it seem that it is only important to

address a bias if there is someone complaining. Increasingly,

students are making complaints because they want a democrat- ic unbiased liberal arts education.

Multiculturalism compels educators to recognize the nar-

row boundaries that have shaped the way knowledge is shared

in the classroom. It forces us all to recognize our complicity in accepting and perpetuating biases of any kind. Students are

eager to break through barriers to knowing. They are willing to

surrender to the wonder of re-learning and learning ways of

knowing that go against the grain. When we, as educators,

allow our pedagogy to be radically changed by our recognition of a multicultural world, we can give students the education

they desire and deserve. We can teach in ways that transform

consciousness, creating a climate of free expression that is the

essence of a truly liberatory liberal arts education.

4

Paulo Freire

This is a playful dialogue with myself, Gloria Watkins, talking

with bell hooks, my writing voice. I wanted to speak about

Paulo and his work in this way for it afforded me an intimacy-

a familiarity-I do nat find it possible to achieve in the essay. And here I have found a way to share the sweetness, the soli- darity I talk a bo ut.

Watkins:

Reading your books Ain 't I a Woman: Black Women a nd

Feminism, Feminist The!Yfy: From Margin to Center, and Talk-

ing Bach, it is clear that your development as a critica!

thinker has been greatly influenced by the work of Paulo

Freire. Can you speak abou~ why his work has touched your life so deeply?

hooks:

Years before I met Paulo Freire, I had learned so much

from hi s work, learned new ways o f thinking a bo ut social

reality that were liberatory. Often when university stu-

45

46 Teaching to Transgress

dents and professors read Freire, they approach his work from a voyeuristic standpoint, where as they read they see twa locations in the work, the subject position of Freire the educator (whom they are often more interested in than the ideas or subjects he speaks about) and the

oppressed/ marginalized gro u ps he speaks about. In rela- ti on to these two subject positions, they position them- selves as observers, as outsiders. When I came to Freire's work,just at that moment in my life when I was beginning to question deeply and profoundly the politics of domi- nation, the impact of racism, sexism, class exploitation, and the kind of domestic colonization that takes place in the United States, I felt myself to be deeply identified with the marginalized peasants he speaks about, or with my black brothers and sisters, my comrades in Guinea- Bissau. You see, I was coming from a rural southern black experience, into the university, and I had lived through the struggle for racial desegregation and was in resistance without having a political language to articulate that process. Paulo was one of the thinkers whose work gave me a language. He made me think deeply about the con- struction of an identity in resistance. There was this one sentence of Freire's that became a revolutionary mantra for me: "We cannot enter the struggle as objects in order la ter to beco me subjects." Really, it is difficult to find words adequate to explain how this statement was like a locked door-and I struggled within myself to find the key-and that struggle engaged me in a process of criti- ca! thought that was transformative. This experience positioned Freire in my mind and heart as a challenging teacher whose work furthered my own struggle against the colonizing process-the colonizing mind-set.

GW:· In your work, you indicate an ongoing concern with the process of decolonization, particularly as it affects

Paulo Freire 47

Mrican Americans living within the white supremacist culture of the United States. Do you see a link be- tween the process of decolonization and Freire's focus on "conscientization"?

bh: Oh, absolutely. Because the colonizing forces are so pow- erful in this white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, it

seems that black people are always having to renew a com- mitment to a decolonizing political process that should be fundamental to our !ives and is not. And so Freire's work,

in its global understanding of liberation struggles, always emphasizes that this is the important ini tia! stage of trans- formation-that historical moment when one begins to think critically about the self and identity in relation to one's political circumstance. Again, this is o ne of the con- cepts in Freire's work-and in my own work-that is fre- quently misunderstood by readers in the United States. Many times people will say to me that I seem to be sug- gesting that it is enough for individuals to change how they think. And you see, even their use of the enough tells us something about the attitude they bring to this ques- tion. It has a patronizing sound, one that does not convey any heartfelt understanding of how a change in attitude (though nota completion of any transformative process) can be significant for colonized/ oppressed people. Again and again Freire has had to remind readers that he never spoke of conscientization as an end itself, but always as it is joined by meaningful praxis. In many different ways Freire articulates this. I like when he talks about the neces- sity of verifying in praxis what we know in consciousness:

That means, and let us emphasize it, that human beings do not get beyond the concrete situation, the condition in which they find themselves, only by their consciousness or their intentions- however good those intentions may be. The pos-

48 Teachlng to Transgress

sibilities that I had for transcending the narrow limits of a five-by-two-foot cell in which I was locked after the April 1964 coup d'e tat were not sufficient to change my condition as a prisoner. I was always in the cell, deprived of freedom, even if I could imagine the outside world. But on the other hand, the praxis is not blind action, deprived of intention or of finality. It is action and reflection. Men and women are human beings because they are historically constituted as beings of praxis, and in the process they ha ve become capable of transforming the world-of giving it meaning.

I think that so many progressive political movements fai!

to have lasting impact in the United States precisely because there is not enough understanding o f "praxis."

This is what touches me a bo ut Antoni o Faundez asserting

in Learning to Question that

one of the things we learned in Chile in our early reflection on everyday life was that abstract political, religious or moral statements did not take concrete shape in acts by individuals. We were revolutionaries in the abstract, not in our daily lives. lt seems to me essential that in our individual !ives, we should day to day live out what we affirm.

It always astounds me when progressive people act as

though it is somehow a naive moral position to believe that our !ives must be a living example of our politics.

GW: There are many readers of Freire who feel that the sexist

language in his work, which went unchanged even after

the challenge of contemporary feminist movement and

feminist critique, is a negative example. When you first

read Freire what was your response to the sexism of his language?

Paulo Freire 49

bh: There has never been a moment when reading Freire

that I ha ve not remained aware of not only the sexism of

the language but the way he (like other progressi ve Third

World political leaders, intellectuals, critica! thinkers

such as Fanon, Memmi, etc.) constructs a phallocentric

paradigm of liberation-wherein freedom and the expe-

rience of patriarchal manhood are always linked as

though they are one and the same. For me this is always a source of anguish for it represents a blind spot in the

vision of men who have profound insight. And yet, I never wish to see a critique of this blind spot overshadow

anyone's (and feminists' in particular) capacity to learn

from the insights. This is why it is difficult for me to speak

about sexism in Freire's work; it is difficult to find a lan-

guage that offers a way to frame critique and yet maintain

the recognition of all that is valued and respected in the

work. It seems to me that the binary opposition that is

so much embedded in Western thought and language

makes it nearly impossible to projecta complex respon se. Freire's sexism is indicated by the language in his early

works, notwithstanding that there is so much that re-

mains liberatory. There is no need to apologize for the

sexism. Freire's own model of critica\ pedagogy invites a

critica\ interrogation of this flaw in the work. But critica\ interrogation is not the same as dismissal.

GW: So you see no contradiction in your valuing of Freire's

work and your commitrnent to feminist scholarship?

bh: It is feminist thinking that empowers me to engage in a constructive critique of Freire's work (which I needed so

that as a young reader of his work I did not passively

absorb the worldview presented) and yet there are many

other standpoints from which I approach his work that

enable me to experience its value, that make it possible

for that work to touch me at the very core of my being. In

so Teaching to Transgress

talking with academic feminists (usually white women) who feel they must either dismiss or devalue the work of Freire because of sexism, I see clearly how our different responses are shaped by the standpoint that we bring to

the work. I came to Freire thirsty, dying of thirst (in that ' way that the colonized, marginalized subject who is still unsure of how to brea!< the hold of the status quo, who longs for change, is needy, is thirsty), and I found in his work (and the work of Malcolm X, Fanon, etc.) a way to quench that thirst. To have work that promotes one's Jib- eration is such a powerful gift that it does not matter so much if the gift is flawed. Think of the work as water that contains som e dirt. Because you are thirsty you are not too proud to extract the dirt and be nourished by the water. For me this is an experience that corresponds very much to the way individuals of privilege respond to the use of water in the First World context. When you are privileged, living in on e of the richest countries in the world, you can waste resources. And you can especially justity your dispos- a! of something that you consider impure. Look at what most people do with water in this country. Many people purchase special water because they consider tap water unclean-and of course this purchasing is a luxury. Even our ability to see the water that corne through the tap as unclean is itself informed by an imperialist consumer per- spective. It is an expression ofluxury and notjust simply a response to the condition of water. If we approach the drinking of water that comes from the tap from a global perspective we would have to talk about it differently. We would have to consider what the vast majority of the peo-

ple in the world who are thirsty must do to obtain water. Paulo's work has been living water for me.

GW· To what extent do you think your experience as an Mri- can American has made it possible for you to relate to Freire's work?

Paulo Frelre Sl

As I already suggested, growing up in a rural area in the agrarian south, among black people who worked the land, I felt intimately linked to the discussion of peasant life in Freire's work and its relation to literacy. You know there are no history books that really tell the story o f how

difficult the politics of everyday life was for black people in the racia!ly segregated south when so many folks did not read and were so often dependent on racist people to explain, to read, to write. And I was among a generation Jearning those skills, with an accessibility to education that was still new. The emphasis on education as neces- sary for liberation that black people made in slavery and then on into reconstruction informed our !ives. And so Freire's emphasis on education as the practice of free- dom made such immediate sense to me. Conscious of the need for literacy from girlhood, I took with me to the university memories of reading to folks, of writing for folks. I took with me memories of black teachers in the segregated school system who had been critica! peda- gogues providing us liberatory paradigms. It was this early experience of a liberatory education in Booker T. Washington and Crispus Attucks, the black schools o f my formative years, that made me forever dissatisfied with the education I received in predominantly white settings. And it was educators like Freire who affirmed that the difficulties I had with the banking system of education, with an education that in no way addressed my social real-

, ity, were an important critique. Returning to the discus- sion of feminism and sexism, I want to say that I felt myself included in Pedagogy of the oppressed, one of the first Freire books I read, in a way that I never felt myself- in my experience as a rural black person-included in the first feminist books I read, works like The Feminine Mystique and Born Female, In the United States we do not talk enough about the way in which class shapes our

52 Teachlng to Transgress

perspective on reality. S in ce so many o f the early feminist

books really reflected a certain type of white bourgeois

sensibility, this work did not touch many black women

deeply; not because we did not recognize the commou

experiences women shared, but because those commou-

ali ties were mediated by profound differences in our real-

iries created by the po li tics of race and class.

GW: Can you speak about the relationship between Freire's work and the development ofyour work as feminist theo- rist and social crític?

bh: U nlike feminist thinkers who make a clear separation

between the work of feminist pedagogy and Freire's

work and thought, for me these two experiences con-

verge. Deeply committed to feminist pedagogy, I find that, much like weaving a tapestry, I have taken threads of

Paulo's work and woven it in to that version of feminist

pedagogy I believe my work as writer and teacher embod-

ies. Again, I want to assert that it was the intersection of

Paulo's thought and the lived pedagogy of the many

black teachers of my girlhood (most of them women)

who saw themselves as having a liberatory mission to edu-

cate us in a manner that would prepare us to effectively

resist racism and white supremacy, that has had a pro-

found impact on my thinking about the art and practice

of teaching. And though these black women did not

openly advocate feminism (if they even knew the word)

the very fact that they insisted on academic excellence and open critica! thought for young black females was an antisexist practice.

GW.· Be more specific about the work you have done that has been influenced by Freire.

bh: Let me say that I wrote Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and

Feminism when I was an undergraduate (though it was not published unti! years later). This book was the concrete

manifestation of my struggle with the question of moving

Paulo Freire 53

from object to subject-the very question Paulo had pose d. And it is so easy, now that many, if not most, femi-

nist scholars are willing to recognize the impact of race and class as factors that shape female identity, for every-

one to forget that early on feminist movement was nota

!ocation that welcomed the radical struggle of black

women to theorize our subjectivity. Freire's work (and

that of many other teachers) affirmed my right as a sub-

jectin resis tan ce to de fine my reality. His writing gave me

a way to place the politics of racism in the United States

in a global context wherein I could see my fate linked

with that of colonized black people everywhere strug-

gling to decolonize, to transform society. More than in

the work of many white bourgeois feminist thinkers,

there was always in Paulo's work recognition of the sub-

ject position of those most disenfranchised, those who

suffer the gravest weight of oppressive forces (with the

exception of his not acknowledging always the specific

gendered realities of oppression and exploitation). This

was a standpoint which affirmed my own desire to work

from a lived understanding of the !ives of poor black

women. There has been only in recent years a body of scholarship in the United States that does not look at the

!ives of black people through a bourgeois Iens, a funda-

mentally radical scholarship that suggests that indeed the

experience of black people, black females, might tell us

more about the experience of women in general than

simply an analysis that looks first, foremost, and always at

those women wbo reside in privileged locations. One of

the reasons that Paulo's book, Pedagogy in Process: The

Letters to Guinea-Bissau, has been important for mywork is that it is a crucial example of how a privileged critica!

thinker approaches sharing knowledge and resources

with those who are in need. He re is Paulo at on e of those

insightful moments. He writes:

54 Teaching to Transgress

Authentic help means that all who are involved help each other mutually, growing together in the commou effort to understand the reality which they seek to transform. Only through such praxis-in which those who help and those who are being helped help each other simultaneously -can the act of helping become free from the distortion in which the helper dominates the helped.

In American society where the intellectual-and specifi- cally the black intellectual-has often assimilated and

betrayed revolutionary concerns in the interest of main-

taining class power, it is crucial and necessary for insur- gent black intellectuals to have an ethics of struggle that

informs our relationship to those black people who have

not had access to ways of knowing shared in locations of privilege.

GW: Comment, if you will, on Freire's willingness to be cri- tiqued, especially by feminist thinkers.

bh: In so much of Paulo's work there is a generous spirit, a

quality of open-mindedness that I feel is often missing

from intellectual and academic arenas in U.S. society, and

feminist circles have not been an exception. Of course, Paulo seems to grow more open as he ages. I, too, feel

myself more strongly committed to a practice of open-

mindedness, a willingness to engage critique as I age, and

I think the way we experience more profoundly the grow-

ing fascism in the world, even in so-called "liberal" circles,

reminds us that our lives, our work, must be an example.

In Freire's work in the !ast few years there are many responses to the critiques made of his writing. And there

is that lovely critica! exchange between him and Antonio

Faundez in Learning to QJ,testion on the question of lan- guage, on Paulo's work in Guinea-Bissau. I learn from this

ow.·

bh:

Paulo Freire ss

example, from seeing his willingness to struggle non-

defensively in print, naming shortcomings of insight,

changes in thought, new critica! reflections.

What was it like for you to interact personally with Paulo

Freire? For me o ur meeting was incredible; it made me a devoted

student and comrade of Paulo's for life. Let me tell you

this story. Some years ago now, Paulo was invited to the

University of Santa Cruz, where I was then a student and

teacher. He came to do workshops with Third World stu-

dents and faculty and to give a public lecture. I had not

heard even a whisper that he was coming, though many

folks knew how much bis work meant to me. Then some-

how I found out that he was coming only to be told that

all the slots were filled for participants in the workshop. I

protested. And in the ensuing dialogue, I was told that I

had not been invited to the vario us meetings for fear that

I would disrupt the discussion of more important issues

by raising feminist critiques. E ven though I was allowed to

participate when someone dropped out at the !ast min- ute, my he art was heavy be cause already I felt that there

had been this sexist attempt to control my voice, to con-

trol the encounter. So, of course, this created a war with-

in myself because indeed I did want to interrogate Paulo

Freire personally about the sexism in his work. And so

with courtesy, I forged ahead at the meeting. Immedi-

ately individuals spoke against me raising these questions and devalued their importance, Paulo intervened to say

that these questions were crucial and he addressed them.

Truthfully, I loved him at this moment for exemplifying

by hi s ac tions the principies of his work. So much would

bave changed for me had he tried to silence or belittle a

feminist critique. And it was not enough for me that he owned his "sexism," I want to know why he had not seen

56 Teaching to Transgress

that this aspect o f earlier work be changed, be responded

to in writing by him. And he spoke then about making

more of a public effort to speak and write on these issues

-this has been evident in his later work.

GW· Were you more affected by his presence than his work?

bh: Another great teacher of mine ( even though we have not

met) is the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat

Hanh. And he says in The Raft Is Not the Shore that "great humans bring with them something like a hallowed

atmosphere, and when we seek them out, then we feel

peace, we feellove, we feel courage." His words appropri-

ately define what it was like for me to be in the presence

of Paulo. I spend ho urs alo ne with him, talking, listening

to music, eating ice cream at my favorite cafe. Seriously,

Thich Nhat Hanh teaches that a certain milieu is born at

the same time as a great teacher. And he says:

When you [ the teacher] corne and stay on e ho ur with us, you bring that milieu .... It is as though you bring a candle in to the room. The candle is there; there is a kind of light-zone you bring in. When a sage is there and you sit near him, you feellight, you feel peace.

The lesson I learned from witnessing Paulo em body the

practice he describes in theory was profound. It entered

me in a way that writing can never touch one and it gave

me courage. It has not been easy for me to do the work I

do and resi de in the academy (lately I think it has beco me

almost impossible) but one is inspired to persevere by the

witness of others. Freire's presence inspired me. And it

was not that I did not see sexist behavior on his part, only that these contradictions are embraced as part of the

learning process, part o f what on e struggles to change-

and that struggle is often protracted.

Paulo Freire 57

GW: Have you anything more to say about Freire's response to

feminist critique?

bh: I think it important and significant that despite feminist critiques of his work, which are often harsh, Paulo recog-

nizes that he must play a role in feminist movements.

This he declares in Leaming to Q;testion:

If the women are critical, they bave to accepto ur contribution as men, as well as the workers ha ve to accept our contribution as intellectuals, because it is a duty and right that I have to par- ticipate in the transformation of society. Then, if the women must have the main responsibility in tbeir struggle they have to know that their strug- gle also belongs to us, that is, to those men who don't accept the machista position in the world. The sam e is true of racism. As an apparent white man, because I always say that I arn not quite sure o f my whiteness, the question is to know if I arn really against racism in a radical way. If I arn~ then I have a duty and a right to light with black people against racism.

GW: Does Freire continue to influence your work? There is

not the constant mention of him in your latest work as

was the case with the first books.

bh: Though I may not quote Freire as much, he still teaches me. When I read Learning to Q;testion, justat a tim e when I had begun to engage in critica! reflections on black peo-

ple and exile, there was so much there about the experi-

ence of exile that helped m<;. And I was thrilled with the

book. It had a quality of that dialogue that is a true ges- ture of Jove that Paulo speaks about in other work. So it

was from reading this book that I decided that it would be

useful to do a dialogical work with the philosopher

Corne! West. We have what Paulo calls "a talking book,"

58 Teaching to Transgress

Breaking Bread. Of course my great wish is to do such a book with Paulo. And then for some time I have been

working on essays on death and dying, particularly Mri- can American ways of dying. Then just quite serendip-

itously I was searching for an epigraph for this work, and

came across these lovely passages from Paulo that echo so

intimately my own worldview that it was as though, to use

an oid southern phrase, "My tongue was in my friend's mouth." He writes:

I like to live, to live my life intensely. I arn the type of person who loves his life passionately. Of course, someday, I will die, but I have the impression that when I die, I will die intensely as well. I will die experimenting with myself in- tensely. For this reason I arn going to die with an immense longing for life, since this is the way I have been living.

GW.· Yes! I can hear you saying those very words. Any !ast com- ments?

bh: Only that words seem to be not good enough to evoke all

that I have learned frorn Paulo. Our rneeting had that

quality of sweetness that lingers, that !asts for a lifetirne;

even if you never speak to the person again, see their

face, you can always return in your heart to that moment

when you were together to be renewed-that is a pro- found solidarity.

5

Theory as Liberatory Practice

I came to theory because I was hurting-the pain within rne was

so intense that I could not go on living. I came to theory des-

perate, wanting to cornprehend-to grasp what was happening around and within rne. Most irnportantly, I wanted to rnake the

hurt go away. I saw in theory then a location for healing. I came to theory young, when I was still a child. In The Sig-

ni:ficance ofTheory Terry Eagleton says:

Children make the best theorists, since they have not yet been educated into accepting our routine social practices as "natural," and so insist on posing to those practices the most embarrassingly general and funda- mental questions, regarding them with a wondering estrangement which we adults have long forgotten. Since they do nat yet grasp 'our social practices as inevitable, they do not see why we might not do things differently.

Whenever I tried in childhood to cornpel folks around rne

to do things differently, to look at the world differently, using

59

60 Teaching to Transgress

theory as intervention, as a way to challenge the status quo, I was punished. I remember trying to explain at a very young

age to Mama why I thought it was highly inappropriate for Daddy, this man who hardly spoke to me, to bave the right to

discipline me, to punish me physically with whippings. Her response was to suggest I was losing my mind and in need of more frequent punishment.

Imagine if you will this young black cou ple struggling first and fo remost to realize the patriarchal norm ( that is of the woman staying home, taking care of the household and chil- dren while the man worked) even though such an arrange- ment me ant that economically, they would always be living with less. Try to imagine what it must bave been like for them, each of them working bard all day, struggling to maintain a family of seven children, then having to cope with one bright-eyed child relentlessly questioning, daring to challenge male authority, rebelling against the very patriarchal norm they were trying so bard to institutionalize.

It must bave seemed to them that some monster had ap- peared in their midst in the shape and body of a child-a demonic little figure who threatened to subvert and under- mine all that they were seeking to build. No wonder then that their response was to repress, contain, punish. No wonder that

Mama would say to me, now and then, exasperated, frustrated, "I don't know where I got you from, but I sure wish I could give you back."

Imagine then if you will, my childhood pain. I did not fe el truly connected to these strange people, to these familia! folks who could not onlyfail to grasp myworldview but who just sim- ply did not want to hear it. As a child, I didn't know where I had corne from. And when I was not desperately seeking to belong to this family community that never seemed to accept or want me, I was desperately trying to discover the place of my belonging. I was desperately trying to find my way home.

Theory as Liberatory Practice 61

f[ow I envied Dorothy her journey in The Wizard o f Oz, that she could trave! to her worst fears and nightrnares only to find at the e nd that "there is no place like home." Living in childhood without a sense of home, I found a place of sanctuary in "the- orizing," in making sense out ofwhat was happening. I found a place where I could imagine possible futures, a place where Jife could be lived differen tly. This "lived" experience of criti-

ca! thinking, of reflection and analysis, because a place where 1 worked at explaining the hurt and making it go away. Fun- damentally, I learned from this experience that theory could

be a healing place. Psychoanalyst Alie e Miller !ets you know in her introduction

to the book Prisoners of Childhood that it was her own personal struggle to recover from the wounds of childhood that led her to rethink and theorize anew prevailing social and critica! thought about the meaning of childhood pain, of child abuse. In her adult life, through her practice, she experienced theory as a healing place. Significantly, she had to imagine herself in the space of childhood, to look again from that perspective, to remember "crucial information, answers to questions which had gone unanswered throughout [her] study of philosophy and psychoanalysis." When o ur lived experience of theorizing is fundamentally linked to processes of self-recovery, of collec- tive liberation, no gap exists between theory and practice. lndeed, what such experience makes more evident is the bond between the two-that ultimately reciproca! process wherein

one enables the other. Theory is not inherently healing, liberatory, or revolution-

ary. lt fulfills this function only when we ask that it do so and direct our theorizing towards this end. When I was a child, I certainly did not describe the processes ofthought and critique I engaged in as "theorizing." Yet, as I suggested in Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, the possession of a term does not bring a process or practice into being; concurrently one may

62 Teaching to Transgress

practice theorizing without ever knowing/possessing the term . , JUSt as we can live and act in feminist resistance without ever using the word "feminism."

Often individuals who employ certain terms freely-terms like "theory" or "feminism "-are not necessarily practitioners whose habits of being and Iiving most embody the action, the practice of theorizing or engaging in feminist struggle. Indeed, the privileged act of naming often affords those in power access to modes of communication and enables them to pro- ject an interpretation, a definition, a description of their work and actions, that may nat be accurate, that may obscure what is really taking place. Katie King's essay "Producing Sex, Theory, and Culture: Gay/Straight Re-Mappings in Contemporary Feminism" (in Conflicts in Feminism) offers a very useful discus- sion o f the way in which academic production offeminist theo- ry formulated in hierarchical settings often enables women, particularlywhite women, with high status and visibility to draw upon the works of feminist scholars who may have less or no status, Iess or no visibility, without giving recognition to these sources. King discusses the way work is appropriated and the way readers will often attribute i de as to a well-known scholar ¡ feminist thinker, even if that individual has cited in her work that she is building on ideas gleaned from Iess well-known sources. Focusing particularly on the work of Chicana theorist Chela Sandoval, King states, "Sandoval has been published

only sporadically and eccentrically, yet her circulating unpub- Iished manuscripts are much more cited and often appropriat-

ed, even while the range of her influence is rarely understood." Though King risks positioning herself in a caretaker role as she rhetorically assumes the pasture of feminist authority, deter- mining the range and scope of Sandoval's influence, the criti- ca! paint she works to emphasize is that the production of feminist theory is complex, that it is an individual practice Iess often than we think and usually emerges from engagement with collective sources. Echoing feminist theorists, especially

Theory as Liberatory Practice 63

en of color who bave worked consistently to resist the wom truction of restrictive critica! boundaries within feminist cons

thought, King encourages us to have an expansive perspective

on the theorizing process. Critica! reflection on contemporary production of feminist

theory makes it apparent that the shift from early conceptual-

izations offeminist theory (which insisted that it was most vital when it encouraged and enabled feminist practice) begins to occur or at least becomes most obvious with the segregation and institutionalization of the feminist theorizing process in the academy, with the privileging ofwritten feminist thought/ theory over oral narratives. Concurrently, the efforts of black women and women of color to challenge and deconstruct the category "woman"-the insistence on recognition that gender is nat the sale factor determining constructions of female- ness-was a critica! intervention, one which led to a profound revolution in feminist thought and truly interrogated and dis- rupted the hegemonic feminist theory produced primarily by academic women, most ofwhom were white.

In the wake ofthis disruption, the assault on white suprema- cy made manifest in alliances between white women academics and white male peers seems to bave been formed and nurtured around commou efforts to formulate and impose standards of critica! evaluation that would be used to define what is theoret- ical and what is no t. These s tan dards often led to appropriation and/or devaluation ofwork that did nat "fit," that was sudden- Iy deemed nat theoretical-or nat theoretical enough. In som e circles, there seems to be a direct connection between white feminist scholars turning towards.critical work and theory by white men, and the turning away of white feminist scholars from fully respecting and valuing the critica! insights and theo- retical offerings of black women or women of color.

Work by women of color and marginalized gro u ps or white women (for example, lesbians, sex radicals), especially if writ- ten in a manner that renders it accessible to a broad reading

64 Teaching to Transgress

public, is often de-legitimized in academic settings, even if that work enables and promotes feminist practice. Though such

work is often appropriated by the very individuals setting re-

strictive critica! standards, it is this work that they most often

claim is not really theory. Clearly, on e of the uses these individ-

uals make of theory is instrumental. They use it to set up unnec-

essary and competing heirarchies of thought which reinscribe

the politics of domination by designating work as either inferi-

or, superior, or more or less worthy of attention. King empha-

sizes that "theory finds different uses in different locations." It

is evident that on e o f the many uses of theory in academic Joca-

tions is in the production of an intellectual class hierarchy

where the only work deemed truly theoretical is work that is

highly abstract, jargonistic, difficult to read, and containing

obscure references. In Childers and hooks's "A Conversation

a bo ut Race and Class" ( also in Conflicts in Feminism) literary crit- ic Mary Childers declares that it is highly ironic that "a certain

kind of theoretical performance which only a small cadre of

people can possibly understand" has corne to be seen as repre-

sentative of any production of critica! thought that will be given

recognition within many academic circles as "theory." It is espe-

cially ironic when this is the case with feminist theory. And, it is easy to imagine different locations, spaces outside academic

exchange, where such theorywould not only be seen as useless,

but as politically nonprogressive, a kind of narcissistic, self-

indulgent practice that most seeks to create a gap between the-

ory and practice so as to perpetuate class elitism. There are so

many settings in this country where the written word has only

slight visual meaning, where individuals who cannot read or

write can find no use for a published theory however lucid or

opaque. Hence, any theory that cannot be shared in everyday conversation cannot be used to educate the public.

Imagine what a change has corne about within feminist

movements when students, most of whom are fema! e, corne to

Theory as Liberatory Practice 65

Women's Studies classes and read what they are told is feminist

theory only to fe el that what they are reading has no meaning, cannot be understood, or when understood in no way connects

to "lived" realities beyond the classroom. As feminist activists we might ask ourselves, ofwhat use is feminist theory that assaults

the fragile psyches of women struggling to throw off patri-

archy's oppressive yoke? We might ask ourselves, ofwhat use is

feminist theory that literally beats them down, leaves them

stumbling bleary-eyed from classroom settings feeling humiliat-

ed. feeling as though they could easily be standing in a living room or bedroom somewhere naked with someone who has

seduced them or is going to, who also subjects them to a

process of interaction that humiliates, that strips them of their

sense of value? Clearly, a feminist theory that can do this may

function to legitimize Women's Studies and feminist scholar-

ship in the eyes o f the ruling patriarchy, but it undermines and

subverts feminist movements. Perhaps it is the existence o f this

most highly visible feminist theory that com pels us to talk a bo ut

the gap between theory and practice. For it is indeed the pur- pose of such theory to divide, separate, exclude, keep at a dis-

tance. And because this theory continues to be used to silence,

censor, and devalue various feminist theoretical voices, we can-

nat simply ignore it. Yet, despite its uses as an instrument of

domination, it may also contain important ideas, thoughts,

visions, that could, if used differently, serve a healing, liberato-

ry function. However, we cannot ignore the dangers it poses to

feminist struggle which must be rooted in a theory that in-

forms, shapes, and makes feminist practice possible. Within feminist circles, many. women have responded to

hegemonic feminist theory that does not speak clearly to us by

trashing theory, and, as a consequence, further promoting the

false dichotomy between theory and practice. Hence, they col-

lude with those whom they would oppose. By internalizing the false assumption that theory is not a social practice, they pro-

66 Teaching to Transgress

mate the formation within feminist circles of a potentially op-

pressive hierarchy where all concrete action is viewed as more

important than any theory written or spoken. Recently, I went

to a gathering of predominantly black women where we dis-

cussed whether or not black male leaders, such as Martin

Luther King and Malcolm X, should be subjected to feminist

critiques that pose hard questions about their stance on gender

issues. The en tire discussion was less than two ho urs. As it drew

to a close, a black woman who had been particularly silent, said

that she was not interested in all this theory and rhetoric, all

this talk, that she was more interested in action, in doing some-

thing, that s he was just "tired" of all the talk. This woman's response disturbed me: it is a familiar reac-

tion. Perhaps in her daily life she inhabits a world different

from mine. In the world I live in daily, there are few occasions

when black women or women-of-color thinkers corne together

to debate rigorously issues of race, gender, class, and sexuality.

Therefore, I did not know where she was coming from when

she suggested that the discussion we were having was commou,

so common as to be something we could dispense with or do

without. I felt that we were engaged in a process of critica! dia-

logue and theorizing that has long been taboo. Hence, from

my perspective we were charting new journeys, claiming for ourselves as black women an intellectual terrain where we

could begin the collective construction offeminist theory.

In many black settings, I have witnessed the dismissal of

intellectuals, the putting down of theory, and remained silent.

I have came to see that silence is an act of complicity, one that

he! ps perpetuate the idea that we can engage in revolutionary

black liberation and feminist struggle without theory. Like

many insurgent black intellectuals, who se intellectual work and

teaching is often done in predominantly white settings, I am often so pleased to be engaged with a collective group ofblack

folks that I do not want to make waves, or make myself an out-

Theory as Liberatory Practice 67

sider by disagreeing with the group. In such settings, when the work of intellectuals is devalued, I have in the past rarely con-

tested prevailing assumptions, or have spoken affirmatively or

ecstatically about intellectual process. I was afraid that if I took

a stance that insisted on the importance of intellectual work,

particularly theorizing, or ifl just simply stated that I thought it

was important to ready wide!y, I would risk being seen as uppi- ty, or as lording it over. I have often remained silent.

These risks to one's sense of self now seem trite when

considered in relation to the crises we are facing as Africau

Americans, to our desperate need to rekindle and sustain the

flame of black liberation struggle. At the gathering I men-

tioned, I dared to speak, saying in response to the suggestion

that we were just wasting o ur tim e talking, that I saw o ur words

as an action, that o ur collective struggle to discuss issues of gen-

der and blackness without censorship was subversive practice.

Many o f the issues that we continue to confront as black people -low self-esteem, intensified nihilism and despair, repressed

rage and violence that destroys our physical and psychological well-being-cannot be addressed by survival strategies that have

worked in the past. I insisted that we needed new theories

rooted in an attempt to understand both the nature o f o ur con-

temporary predicament and the me ans by which we mig ht col-

lectively engage in resistance that would transform our current

reality. I was, however, not as rigorous and relentless as I would

have been in a different setting in my efforts to emphasize the

importance of intellectual work, the production of theory as a

social practice that can be liberatory. Though not afraid to

speak, I did not want to be seen as.the one who "spoiled" the good time, the collective sense of sweet solidarity in blackness.

This fear reminded me of what it was like more than ten years

ago to be in feminist settings, posing questions about theory

and practice, particularly about issues of race and racism that

were seen as potentially disruptive of sisterhood and solidarity.

I.

68 Teaching to Transgress

It seemed ironic that ata gathering called to honor Martin

Luther King, Jr., who had often dared to speak and act in resis-

tanc e to the status quo, black women were still negating our

right to engage in oppositional political dialogue and debate , especially since this is not a commou occurrence in black corn-

munities. V\Thy did the black women there feel the need to

police one another, to deny one another a space within black-

ness where we could talk theory without being self-conscious?

V\Thy, when we could celebrate together the power of a black

male critica! thinker who dared to stand apart, was there this

eagerness to rep re ss any viewpoint that would suggest we might

collectively learn from the ideas and visions of insurgent black

female intellectuals/theorists, who by the nature of the work

they do are necessarily breaking with the stereotype that would

bave us believe the "real" black woman is always the one who

speaks from the gut, who righteously praises the concrete over the abstract, the material over the theoretical?

Again and again, black women find our efforts to speak, to

break silence and engage in radical progressive political de- bates, opposed. There is a link between the silencing we experi-

ence, the censoring, the anti-intellectualism in predominantly

black settings that are supposedly supportive (like all-black

woman space), and that silencing that takes place in institutions

wherein black women and women of color are told that we can-

nat be fully heard or listened to because our work is not theo-

retical enough. In "Travelling Theory: Cultural Po li tics of Race

and Representation," cultural critic Kobena Mercer reminds us that blackness is complex and multifaceted and that black peo-

ple can be interpolated into reactionary and antidemocratic

politics. Just as some elite academics who construct theories of

"blackness" in ways that make it a critica! terrain which only the

chosen few can enter-using theoretical work on race to assert

their authority over black experience, denying democratic ac-

cess to the process of theory making-threaten collective black

Theory as Liberatory Practice 69

Jiberation struggle, so do those among us who react to this by

O ting anti-intellectualism by declaring all theory as worth-

prom . . . By reinforcing the ¡dea that there 1s a spht between theory !ess.

and practice or by creating such a split, both groups deny the ower of Jiberatory education for critica! consciousness, there-

~y perpetuating conditions that reinforce our collective exploi- tation and repression.

I was reminded recently of this dangerous anti-intellectual-

ism when I agreed to appear on a radio show with a group of black women and men to discuss Shahrazad Ali's The

Blackman 's Cuide to Understanding the Blackwoman. I listened to

speaker after speaker express contempt for intellectual work,

and speak against any call for the production of theory. One black woman was vehement in her insistence that ''we don't

need no theory." Ali's book, through written in plain language,

in a style that makes use of engaging black vernacular, has a theoretical foundation. It is rooted in theories of patriarchy

(for example, the sexist, essentialist belief that male domina-

tion of fe males is "natural"), that misogyny is the only possible

response black men can bave to any attempt by women to be

fully self-actualized. Many black nationalists will eagerly em-

brace critica! theory and thought as a necessary weapon in the

struggle against white supremacy, but suddenly lose the insight that theory is important when it comes to questions of gender,

of analyzing sexism and sexist oppression in the particular and specific ways it is manifest in black experience. The discussion

of Ali' s book is one of many possible examples illustrating the way contempt and disregard for theory undermines collective

struggle to resist oppression and exploitation. Within revolutionary feminist movements, within revolu-

tionary black liberation struggles, we must continually claim

theory as necessary practice within a holistic framework of lib-

eratory activism. We must do more than call attention to ways

theory is misused. We must do more than critique the conserva-

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70 Teaching to Transgress

tive and at times reactionary uses some academic women make of feminist theory. We must actively work to call attention to the

importance of creating a theory that can advance renewed fem-

inist movements, particularly highlighting that theory which

seeks to further feminist opposition to sexism, and sexist op-

pression. Doing this, we necessarily celebrate and value theory

that can be and is shared in oral as well as written narrative.

Reflecting on my own work in feminist theory, I find writing

-theoretical talk-to be most meaningful when it invites read-

ers to engage in critica! ref!ection and to engage in the practice

of feminism. To me, this theory emerges f'rom the concrete,

from my efforts to make sense of everyday !ife experiences,

from my efforts to intervene critically in my life and the !ives of

others. This to me is what makes feminist transformation possi-

ble. Personal testimony, personal experience, is such fertile

ground for the production of liberatory feminist theory

because it usually forms the base of our theory making. While

we work to resolve those issues that are most pressing in daily

life (o ur need for literacy, an end to violence against women

and children, women's health and reproductive rights, and sex-

ual freedom, to name a few), we engage in a critica! process of

theorizing that enables and empowers. I continue to be amazed

that there is so much feminist writing produced and yet so little feminist theory that strives to speak to women, men and chil-

dren about ways we mig ht transform our !ives via a conversion

to feminist practice. Where can we find a body offeminist theo-

ry that is directed toward he! ping individuals integrate feminist

thinking and practice in to daily life? What feminist theory, for example, is directed toward assisting women who live in sexist

households in their efforts to bring about feminist change?

We know that many individuals in the United States bave

used feminist thinking to educate themselves in ways that allow

them to transform their !ives. I arn often critica! of a life-style-

based feminism, because I fear that any feminist transforma-

Theory as Liberatory Practice 71

tional process that seeks to change society is easily co-opted ifit

is not rooted in a political commitment to mass-based feminist

movement. Within white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, we

have already witnessed the commodification of feminist think-

ing (just as we experience the commodification of blackness)

in ways that make it seem as though one can partake of the

"good" that these movements produce without any commit-

ment to transformative polítics and practice. In this capitalist

culture, feminism and feminist theory are fast becoming a

commodity that only the privileged can afford. This process of

commodification is disrupted and subverted when as feminist

activists we affirm our commitment to a politicized revolu-

tionary feminist movement that has as its central agenda the

transformation of society. F rom such a starting paint, we auto-

matically think of creating theory that speaks to the widest

audience of people. I have written elsewhere, and shared in

numerous public talks and conversations, that my decisions about writing style, about not using conventional academic for-

mats, are political decisions motivated by the desire to be inclu-

sive, to reach as many readers as possible in as many different locations. This decision has had consequences both positive

and negative. Students at various academic institutions often

complain that they cannot include my work on required read-

ing lists for degree-oriented qualifying exams because their

professors do not see it as scholarly enough. Any of us who cre-

ate feminist theory and feminist writing in academic settings in

which we are continually evaluated know that work deemed "not scholarly" or "not theoretical" can resultin one not receiv-

ing deserved recognition and reward. Now, in my life these negative responses seem insignificant

when compared to the overwhelmingly positive responses to

my work both in and outside the academy. Recently, I have

received a spate of letters from incarcerated black men who

read my work and wanted to share that they are working to

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72 Teachlng to Transgress

unlearn sexism. In one letter, the writer affectionately boasted

that he has made my name a "household word around that

prison." These men talk about solitary critica! reflection, about

using this feminist work to understand the implications of

patriarchy as a force shaping their identities, their ideas of

manhood. Mter receiving a powerful critica! response by one

of these black men to my book Yearning: Race, Gender and

Cultural Politics, I closed my eyes and visualized that work being

read, studied, talked about in prison settings. Since the loca-

tion that has most spoken back to me critically about the study

o f my work is usually an academic o ne, I share this with you not

to brag or be immodest, but to testify, to !et you know from first-

hand experience that all our feminist theory directed at trans- forming consciousness, that truly wants to speak with diverse audiences, does work: this is nota naive fantasy.

In more recent talks, I bave spoken about how "blessed" I feel to have my work affirmed in this way, to be among those

feminist theorists creating work that acts as a catalyst for social

change across false boundaries. There were many times ear!y

on when my work was subjected to forms of dismissal and deval-

uation that created within me a profound despair. I think such

despair h.as been felt by every black woman or woman-of-color

thinker/theorist whose work is oppositional and moves against the grain. Certainly Michele Wallace has written poignantly in

her introduction to the re-issue of Black Macho and the Myth of

the Superwoman that she was devastated and for a time silenced by the negative critica! responses to her early work.

I arn grateful that I can stand he re and testify that if we hold

fast to our beliefs that feminist thinking must be shared with

everyone, whether through talking or writing, and create theo- rywith this agenda in mind we can advance feminist movement

that folks willlong-yes, yearn-to be a part of. I share feminist

thinking and practice wherever I am. When asked to talk in

Theory as Liberatory Practice 73

university settings, I search out other settings or respond to those who search me o ut so that I can give the riches of femi-

nist thinking to anyone. Sometimes settings emerge sponta- neously. Ata black-owned restaurant in the South, for instance,

I sat for hours with a diverse group of black women and men [rom various class backgrounds discussing issues of race, gen-

der and class. Some of us were college-educated, others were

not. We had a heated discussion of abortion, discussing

whether black women should bave the right to choose. Severa!

of the Mrocentric black men present were arguing that the

male should bave as much choice as the female. One of the

feminist black women present, a director of a health clínic for

women, spoke eloquently and convincingly about a woman's

right to choose. During this heated discussion on e of the black women pre-

sent who had been silent for a long time, who hesitated before

she entered the conversation because she was unsure about

whether or not she could convey the complexity ofher thought

in black vernacular speech (in such a way that we, the listeners,

would hear and understand and not make fun of her words),

came to voice. As I was leaving, this sister came up to me and

grasped both my hands tightly, firmly, and thanked me for the

discussion. S he prefaced her words of gratitude by sharing that

the conversation had not only enabled her to give voice to feel-

ings and ideas she had always "kept" to herself, but that by say-

ing it she had created a space for her and her partner to change thought and action. She stated this to me directly, in-

tently, as we stood facing one another, holding my hands and

saying again and again, "there's been so much hurt in me." She

gave thanks that our meeting, our theorizing of race, gender,

and sexuality that afternoon had eased her pain, testifying that

she could fe el the hurt going away, that she could f ee! a healing taking place within. Holding my hands, standing body to body,

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74 Teachlng to Transgress

eye to eye, she allowed me to share empathically the warmth of

that healing. S he wanted me to bear witness, to hear again hoth

the naming of her pain and the power that emerged when she felt the hurt go away.

It is not easy to name our pain, to make it a location for the-

orízing. Patrícia Williams, in her essay "On Being the Object of

Property" (in T'he Alchemy oj Race and Rights), writes that even

those of us who are "aware" are made to feel the pain that all

forms of domination (homophobia, class exploitation, racism, sexism, imperialism) engender.

There are moments in my life when I feel as though a part of me is missing. There are days when I feel so invisible that I can't remember what day of the week it is, when I fee 1 so manipulated that I can 't remember my own name, when I feel so lost and angry that I can't speak a civil word to the people who love me best. These are the times when I catch sight of my reflectien in store windows and arn surprised to see a whole per- son looking back ... I have to close my eyes at such times and remember myself, draw an interna! pattern that is smooth and whole.

It is not easy to name our pain, to theorize from that location.

I arn grateful to the many women and men who dare to cre-

ate theory from the location of pain and struggle, who coura- geously expose wounds to give us their experience to teach and

guide, as a me ans to chart new theoretical journeys. Their work

is Iiberatory. It not only enables us to remember and recover

ourselves, it charges and challenges us to renew our commit-

ment to an active, inclusive feminist struggle. We have still to

collectively make feminist revolution. I arn grateful that we are collectively searching as feminist thinkers/ theorísts for ways to

make this movement happen. Our search leads us back to

where it all began, to that moment when an individual woman

Theory as Liberatory Practice 75

or child, who may have thought she was all alone, began a fem-

inist uprising, began to name her practice, indeed began to for-

mulate theory from Iived experience. Let us imagine that this woman or child was suffering the pain of sexism and sexist

oppression, that she wan ted to make the hurt go away. I arn

grateful that I can be a witness, testifying that we can create a

feminist theory, a feminist practice, a revolutionary feminist

movement that can speak directly to the pain that is within

folks, and offer them healing words, healing strategies, healing

theory. There is no one among us who has not felt the pain of

sexism and sexist oppression, the anguish that male domina-

don can create in daily life, the profound and unrelenting mis-

ery and sorrow. Marí Matsuda has told us that "we are fed a lie that there is

no pain in war," and that patriarchy makes this pain possible.

Catharine MacKinnon reminds us that "we know things with

our !ives and we Iive that knowledge, beyond what any theory has yet theorized." Making this theory is the challenge befo re

us. For in its production Iies the hope of our Iiberation, in its

production Iies the possibility of naming all our pain-of mak-

ing all our hurt go away. If we crea te feminist theory, feminist

movements that address this pain, we will have no difficulty

building a mass-based feminist resistance struggle. There will

be no gap between feminist theory and feminist practice.

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6

Essentialism and Experience

Individual black women engaged in feminist movement, writ-

íng feminist theory, bave persisted in o ur efforts to deconstruct

the category "woman" and argued that gender is not the sole determinant ofwoman's ídentity. That this effort has succeed-

ed can be measured not only by the extent to which feminist

scholars have confronted questions of race and racism but by

the emerging scholarship that looks at the intertwining of race

and gender. Often it is forgotten that the hope was not simply

that feminist scholars and activists would focus on race and

gender but that they would do so in a manner that would not reinscribe conventional oppressive hierarchies. Particularly, it

was,seen as crucial to building mass-based feminist movement

that theory would not be written fn a manner that would fur-

ther erase and exclude black women and women of color, or,

worse yet, include us in subordinate positions. Unfortunately,

much feminist scholarship dashes these hopes, largely because

critics fai! to interrogate the location from which they speak, often assuming, as it is now fashionable to do, that there is no

77

78 Teaching to Transgress

need to question whether the perspective from which they

write is informed by racist and sexist thinking, specifically as feminists perceive black women and women of color.

I was particularly reminded of this problem within feminist

scholarship focusing on race and gender while reading Diana

Fuss's Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference. In-

trigued by Fuss's discussion of current de bates about essential-

ism and her problematizing of the issue, I was intellectually excited. Throughout much of the book she offers a brilliant analysis that allows crítics to consider the positive possibilities of essentialism, even as she raises relevant critiques of its lim-

itations. In my writing on the subject ("The Politics of Radi-

cal Black Subjectivity," "Post-Modern Blackness" in Yearning),

though not as specifically focused on essentialism as the Fuss

discussion, I concentrate on the ways critiques ofessentialism

have usefully deconstructed the idea of a monolithic homoge-

nous black identity and experience. I also discuss the way a

totalizing critique of "subjectivity, essence, identity" can seem

very threatening to marginalized groups, for whom it has been

an active gesture of political resistance to name one's identity

as part of a struggle to challenge domination. Essentially Speak-

ing provided me with a critica! framework that added to my understanding of essentialism, yet halfWay through the Fuss book I began to feel dismayed.

That dismay began with my reading of "'Race' under Era- sure? Poststructuralist Mro-American Literary Theory." Here,

Fuss makes sweeping statements about Mrican American liter-

ary criticism without offering any sense of the body ofwork she

draws on to make her conclusions. Her pronouncements about

the work of black feminist crítics are particularly disturbing. Fuss asserts, "With the exception of the recent work of Hazel

Carby and Hortense Spillers, black feminist crítics have been

reluctant to renounce essentialist critica! posi tions and human- ist literary practices." Curi ous to know what works would !e nd

Essentialism and Experlence 79

themselves to this assessment, I was stunned to see Fuss cite only

essays by Barbara Christian, Joyce Joyce, and Barbara Smith. While these individuals all do valuable literary criticism, they

certainly do not represent all black feminist critics, particularly

literary critics. Summing up her perspectives on black feminist

writing in a few paragraphs, Fuss concentrates on black mal e lit-

erary critics Houston Baker and Henry Louis Gates, citing a sig-

nificant body of their writings. It seems as though a racialized

gender hierarchy is established in this eh ap ter wherein the writ-

ing on "race" by black men is deemed worthier of in-depth

study than the work of black women critics. Her one-sentence dismissal and devaluation of work by

most black feminist critics raises problematic questions. Since

Fuss does not wish to examine work by black feminist critics

comprehensively, it is difficult to grasp the intellectual ground-

work forming the basis of her critique. Her comments on black

feminist critics seem like additions to a critique that did not

really start off including this work in its analysis. And as her rea-

sons are not made explicit, I wonder why she needed to invoke

the work of black feminist critics, and why she used it to place the work of Spillers and Carby in opposition to the writing of

other black feminist critics. Writing from her perspective as a

British black person from a West Indian background, Carby is

by no means the first or only black woman critic, as Fuss sug-

gests, to com pel "us to interroga te the essentialism o f tradition-

al feminist historiography which posits a universalizing and

hegemonizing notion of global sisterhood." If Carby's work is

more convincing to Fuss than other writing by black feminists

she has read (if indeed she has read a wide range o f black fem-

inist work; nothing in her comments or bibliography suggests that she has), she could have affirmed that appreciation with-

out denigrating other black feminist critics. This cavalier treat-

ment reminds me of the way the tokenism of black women in

feminist scholarship and professional encounters takes on

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80 Teaching to Transgress

dehumanizing forms. Black women are treated as though we are a box of chocolates presented to individual white women for their eating pleasure, so that they can decide for themselves and others which pieces are most tasty.

Ironically, even though Fuss praises the work of Carby and Spillers, it is not their work that is given extensive critica! read-

ing in this chapter. Indeed, she treats black women 's subjectivi- ty as a secondary issue. Such scholarship is permissible in an academic context that consistently marginalizes black women critics. I arn always amazed by the complete absence of refer- enees to work by black women in contemporary critica! works claiming to address in an inclusive way issues of gender, race, feminism, postcolonialism, and so on. Confronting colleagues about such absences, I, along with other black women critics,

arn often told that they were simply unaware that such material exists, that they were often working from their knowledge of

available sources. Reading Essentially Speaking, I assumed Diana Fuss is either unfamiliar with the growing body of work by black feminist critics-particularly literary criticism-or that she ex- cludes that work because she considers it unimportant. Clearly, she bases her assessment on the work she knows, rooting her analysis in experience. In the concluding chapter to her book, Fuss particularly criticizes using experience in the classroom as a base from which to es po use totalizing truths. Many of the lim- itations she points out could be easily applied to the way expe- rience informs not only what we write about, but how we write a bo ut it, the judgments we make.

More than any other chapter in Essentially Speaking, this concluding essay is profoundly disturbing. It also undermines Fuss' previous insightful discussion of essentialism. Just as my experience of critica! writing by black feminist thinkers would lead me to make different and certainly more complex assess- ments from those Fuss makes, my response to the chapter "Essentialism in the Classroom" is to some extent informed by

Essentialism and Experience 81

rny different pedagogical experiences. This chapter provided me with a text I could engage dialectically; it served as a catalyst

for clarif)'ing my thoughts on essentialism in the classroom. According to Fuss, issues o f "essence, i den tity, and experi-

ence" erupt in the classroom primarily because of the critica!

input from marginalized groups. Throughout her chapter, whenever she offers an example of individuals who use essen- tialist standpoints to dominate discussion, to silence others via their invocation of the "authority of experience," they are rnembers of groups who historically bave been and are op- pressed and exploited in this society. Fuss does not address how systems of domination already at work in the academy and the classroom silence the voices of individuals from marginalized gro u ps and give space only when on the basis of ex perien ce it is demanded. She does not suggest that the very discursive prac- tices that allow for the assertion of the "authority of experi- ence" bave already been determined by a politics of race, sex, and class domination. Fuss does not aggressively suggest that dominant groups-men, white people, heterosexuals-per-

petuate essentialism. In her narrative it is always a marginal "other" who is essentialist. Yet the politics of essentialist exclu- sion as a means of asserting presence, identity, is a cultural practice that does not emerge solely from marginalized groups. And when those groups do employ essentialism as a way to dominate in institutional settings, they are often imitating par- adigms for asserting subjectivity that are part o f the controlling apparatus in structures of domination. Certainly many white rnale students bave brought to my classroom an insistence on the authority of experience, one that enables them to feel that anything they bave to say is worth hearing, that indeed their ideas and experience should be the central focus of classroom discussion. The politics of race and gender within white supremacist patriarchy grants them this "authority" without their having to name the desire for it. They do not attend class

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82 Teaching to Transgress

and say, "I think that I arn superior intellectually to my class- mates because I arn white and male and that my experiences

are much more important than any other group's." And yet their behavior often announces this way of thinking about identity, essence, subjectivity.

Why does Fuss's chapter ignore the subtle and overt ways essentialism is expressed from a location of privilege? Why does she primarily critique the misuses of essentialism by centering her analysis on marginalized groups? Doing so makes them the culprits for disrupting the classroom and making it an "unsafe" place. Is this nota conventional way the colonizer speaks of the colonized, the oppressor of the oppressed? Fuss asserts, "Prob- lems often begin in the classroom when those 'in the know' commerce only with others 'in the know,' excluding and mar- ginalizing those perceived to be outside the magic circ! e." This observation, which could certainly apply to any group, prefaces a focus on critica] commentary by Edward Said that reinforces her critique of the dangers of essentialism. He appears in the text as resident "Third World authority" legitimating her argu- ment. Critically echoing Said, Fuss comments: "For Said it is both dangerous and misleading to base an identity politics upon rigid theories of exclusions, 'exclusions that stipulate, for instance, only women can understand feminine experience, only Jews can understandJewish suffering, only formerly colo- nial subjects can understand colonial experience."' I agree with Said's critique, but I reiterate that while I, too, critique the use of essentialism and identity politics as a strategy for exclu- sion or domination, I arn suspicions when theories call this practice harmful as a way of suggesting that it is a strategy only marginalized groups employ. My suspicion is rooted in the awareness that a critique of essentialism that challenges only marginalized gro u ps to interrogate their use of identity po li tics or an essentialist standpoint as a means of exerting coercive power leaves unquestioned the critica] practices of other

Essentialism and Experience 83

groups who employ the same strategies in different ways. an~ whose exclusionary behavior may be firmly buttressed by msu- tutionalized structures of domination that do not critique or check i t. At the sam e tim e, I arn concerned that critiques of identity politics not serve as the new, chic way to silence stu-

dents from marginal groups. Fuss makes the point that "the artificial boundary between

insider and outsider necessarily contains rather than dissemi- nates knowledge." While I share this perception, I arn dis- turbed that she never acknowledges that racism, sexism, and class elitism shape the structure of classrooms, creating a lived

reality of insider versus outsider that is predetermined, often in place before any class discussion begins. There is rarely any need for marginalized groups to bring this binary opposition in to the classroom because it is usually already operating. They may simply use it in the service of their concerns. Looked at from a sympathetic standpoint, the assertion of an excluding essentialism on the part of students from marginalized groups can be a strategic response to domination and to colonization, a survival strategy that may indeed inhibit discussion even as it resenes those students from negation. Fuss argues that "it is the unspoken law of the classroom not to trust those who cannot cite experience as the indisputable grounds of their knowl- edge. Such unwritten laws pose perhaps the most serio us threat to classroom dynarnics in that they breed suspicion amongst those inside the circle and guilt (sometimes anger) arnongst those outside the circle." Yet she does not discuss who makes thesè laws, who determines classroom dynamics. Does she per- haps assert her authority in a manner that unwittingly sets up a competitive dynamic by suggesting that the classroom belongs more to the professor than to the students, to some students

more than others? As a teacher, I recognize that students from marginalized

groups enter classrooms within institutions where their voices

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84 Teaching to Transgress

have been neither heard nor welcomed, whether these stu- dents discuss facts-those which any ofus might know-or per-

sonal experience. My pedagogy has been shaped to respond to this reality. If I do not wish to see these students use the

"authority of experience" as a means of asserting voice, I can

circumvent this possible misuse of power by bringing to the

classroom pedagogical strategies that affirm their presence,

their right to speak, in multiple ways on diverse tapies. This pedagogical strategy is rooted in the assumption that we all

bring to the classroom experiential knowledge, that this knowl-

edge can indeed enhance our learning experience. If experi- ence is already invoked in the c!assroom as a way of knowing

that coexists in a nonhierarchical way with other ways of know-

ing, then it lessens the possibility that it can be used to silence.

When I teach Toni Morrison 's The Bluest Eye in introductory courses on black women writers, I assign students to write an

autobiographical paragraph about an early racial memory.

Each person reads that paragraph aloud to the c!ass. Our col-

lective listening to one another affirms the value and unique-

ness of each voice. This exercisc highlights experience without

privileging the voices of students from any particular group. It helps create a communal awareness of the diversity of our ex-

periences and provides a limited sense of the experiences that

may inform how we think and what we say. Since this exercisc

makes the classroom a space where experience is valued, not

negated or deemed meaningless, students seem less inc!ined to make the telling of experience that site where they com pete for

voice, ifindeed such a competition is taking place. In our c!ass-

room, students do not usually feel the need to compete

be cause the concept o f a privileged voice o f authority is decon- structed by our collective critica! practice.

In the chapter "Essentialism in the Classroom" Fuss centers her discussion on locating a particular voice of authority. Here

it is her voice. When she raises the question "how are we to han-

Essentialism and Experience 85

die" students, her use of the word "handle" suggests images of rnanipulation. And her use of a collective "we" implies a sense

of a unified pedagogical practice shared by other professors. In

the institutions where I have taught, the prevailing pedagogical model is authoritarian, hierarchical in a coercive and often

dorninating way, and certainly one where the voice of the

professor is the "privileged" transmitter of knowledge: Usual.ly these professors devalue including personal expenence m

classroom discussion. Fuss admits to being wary of attempts to

censor the telling of personal histories in the classroom on the

basis that they have not been "adequately 'theorized' ," but she

indicates throughout this chapter that on a fundamentallevel

she does not believe that the sharing of personal experience can be a meaningful addition to classroom discussions. If this

bias informs her pedagogy, it is not surprising that invocations

of experience are used aggressively to assert a privileged way of

knowing, whether against her or other students. If a professor' s

pedagogy is not liberatory, then students will probably not com pete for value and voice in the classroom. That essentialist

standpoints are used competitively does not mean that the tak-

ing of those posi tions crea tes the situation of conflict. Fuss's experiences in the classroom may reflect the way in

which "competition for voice" is an integral part of her peda-

gogical practice. Most of the comments and observations she

makes about essentialism in the classroom are based on her

experience ( and perhaps that of her colleagues, though this is

not explicit). Based on that experience she can confidently as-

sert ihat she "remain[s] convinced that appeals to the authority

of experience rarely advance discussion and frequently pro- voke confusion." To emphasize this point further she says, "I

arn always struck by the way in which introjections of experien-

tial truths into classroom debates dead-end the discussion."

Fuss draws on her particular experience to make totalizing gen-

eralizations. Like her, I have seen the way essentialist stand-

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86 Teaching to Transgress

points can be used to silence or assert authority over the oppo-

sition, but I most often see and experience the way the telling

of personal experience is incorporated in to classrooms in ways

that deepen discussion. And I arn most thrilled when the tell-

ing of experience links discussions of facts or more abstract

constructs to concrete reality. My experience in the classroom

may be different from Fuss's because I speak as an institution-

ally marginalized other, and here I do not mean to assume an

essentialist position. There are many black women professors

who would not claim this location. The majority of students

who enter our classrooms have never been taught by black

women professors. My pedagogy is informed by this knowl-

edge, because I know from experience that this unfamiliarity

can overdetermine what takes place in the classroom. Also, knowing from personal experience as a student in predomi-

nantly white institutions how easy it is to feel shut o ut or closed down, I arn particularly eager to help create a learning process

in the classroom that engages everyone. Therefore, biases

imposed by essentialist standpoints or identity politics, along-

side those perspectives that insist that experience has no place in the classroom (both stances can create an atmosphere of

coe rei on and exclusion), must be interrogated by pedagogical

practices. Pedagogical strategies can determine the extent to

which all students learn to engage more fully the ideas and

issues that seem to have no direct relation to their experience.

Fuss does not suggest that teachers who are aware of the

multi ple ways essentialist standpoints can be used to shut down

discussion can construct a pedagogy that critically intervenes before one group attempts to silence another. Professors, espe-

cially those from dominant groups, may themselves employ

essentialist notions to constrain the voices of particular stu-

dents; hence we must all be ever-vigilant in our pedagogical

practices. Whenever students share with me the sense that my

pedagogical practices are silencing them, I have to examine

Essentialism and Experience 87

that process critically. Even though Fuss grudgingly acknowl-

edges that the telling of experience in the classroom may have

some positive implications, her admission is quite patronizing:

while truth clearly does not equate with experience, it cannot be denied that it is precisely the fiction that they are the same which prompts many students, who would not perhaps speak otherwise, to enter ener .. getically into those debates they perceive as pertain- ing directly to them. The authority of experience, in other words, not only works to silence students, it also works to empower them. How are we to negotiate the gap between the conservative fiction of experience as the ground of all truth-knowledge and the immense power of this fiction to enable and encourage student participation?

All students, not just those from marginalized groups, seem

more eager to enter energetically into classroom discussion

when they perceive it as pertaining directly to them (when non-

white students talk in class only when they feel connected via experience it is not aberrant behavior). Students may be well

versed in a particular subject and yet be more inclined to speak

confidently if that subject directly relates to their experience.

Again, it must be remembered that there are students who may

not feel the need to acknowledge that their enthusiastic partic-

ipation is sparked by the connection of that discussion to per-

sonal experience.

In the introductory paragraph to "Essentialism in the Class- roorn" Fuss asks, "Exactly what counts as 'experience,' and should we defer to it in pedagogical situations?" Frarning the

question in this way makes it appear that comments about

experiences necessarily disrupt the classroom, engaging the

professor and students in a struggle for authority that can be

mediated if the professor defers. This question, however, could

be posed in a manner that would not imply a condescending

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88 Teaching to Transgress

devaluation of experience. We might ask: How can professors and students who want to share personal experience in the classroom do so without promoting essentialist standpoints that exclude? Often when professors affirm the importance of experience students feelless need to insist that it is a privileged way of knowing. Henry Giroux, in his writing on critica! peda-

gogy, suggests that "the notion of experience has to be situated within a theory of learning." Giroux suggests that professors must learn to respect the way students feel about their experi- ences as well as their need to speak about them in classroom settings: "You can't deny that students have experiences and you can't deny that these experiences are relevant to the learn- ing process even though you might say these experiences are limited, raw, unfruitful or whatever. Students have memories, families, religions. feelings, languages and cultures that give them a distinctive voice. We can critically engage that experi- ence and we can move beyond it. But we can't deny it." Usually it is in a context where the experiential knowledge of students is being denied or negated that they may f ee! most determined to impress upon listeners both its value and its superiority to other ways of knowing.

Unlike Fuss, I have not been in classrooms where students find "empírica! ways of knowing analytically suspect." I have taught feminist theory classes where students express rage against work that does not clarify its relationship to concrete experience, that does not engage feminist praxis in an intelligi- ble way. Student frustration is directed against the inability of methodology, ana!ysis, and abstract writing (usually blamed on the material and often justifiably so) to make the work connect to their efforts to live more fully, to transform society, to live a politics offeminism.

Identity politics emerges out of the struggles of oppressed or exploited groups to have a standpoint on which to critique dominant structures, a position that gives purpose and mean-

Essentialism and Experience 89

ing to struggle. Critica! pedagogies of liberation respond to these concerns and necessarily embrace experience, confes-

sions and testimony as relevant ways of knowing, as important, vital dimensions of any learning pro ce ss. Skeptically, Fuss asks, "Ooes experience of oppression confer special jurisdiction over the right to speak about that oppression?" This is a ques- tion that she does not answer. Were it posed to me by students in the classroom, I would ask them to consider whether there is any "special" knowledge to be acquired by hearing oppressed individuals speak from their experience-whether it be o f vic- timization or resistance-that might make one want to create a privileged space for such discussion. Then we might explore ways individuals acquire knowledge about an experience they have not lived, asking ourselves what moral questions are raised when they speak for or about a reality that they do not know experientially, especially if they are speaking about an op- pressed gro up. In classrooms that ha ve been extremely diverse, where I have endeavored to teach material about exploited gro u ps who are not black, I have suggested that if I bring to the class only analytical ways of knowing and someone else brings personal experience, I welcome that knowledge because it will enhance our learning. A!so, I share with the class my convic- tion that if my knowledge is limited, and if someone else brings a combination of facts and experience, then I humble myself and respectfully learn from those who bring this great gift. I can do this without negating the position of authority profes- sors have, since fundamentally I believe that combining the analytical and experiential is a richer way of knowing.

Years ago, I was thankful to discover the phrase "the au- thority of experience" in feminist writing because it gave me a name for what I brought to feminist classrooms that I thought was not present but believed was valuable. As an undergraduate in feminist classrooms where woman's experience was univer- salized, I knew from my experience as a black fema! e that black

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90 Teaching to Transgress

women's reality was being excluded. I spoke from that knowl-

edge. There was no body of theory to invoke that would sub.

stantiate this truth claim. No que really wanted to hear about

the deconstruction of woman as a category of analysis then.

Insisting on the val u e of my experience was crucial to gaining a

hearing. Certainly, the need to understand my experience

motivated me as an undergraduate to write A in 't I a Woman: Black Women andFeminism.

Now I arn troubled by the term "authority of experience,"

acutely aware of the way it is used to silence and exclude. Yet I

want to ha ve a phrase that affirms the specialness of those ways

of knowing rooted in experience. I know that experience can

be a way to know and can inform how we know what we know.

Though opposed to any essentialist practice that constructs identity in a monolithic, exclusionary way, I do not want to

relinquish the power of experience as a standpoint on which to

base analysis or formulate theory. For example, I arn disturbed

when all the courses on black history or literatnre at some col-

leges and nniversities are taught solely by white people, not

because I think that they cannot know these realities but that

they know them differendy. Truthfully, if I had been given the opportunity to study Mrican American critica! thought from a

progressive black professor instead of the progressive white woman with whom I studied as a first-year student, I would have

chosen the black person. Although I learned a great dea! from

this white woman professor, I sincerely believe that I would

have learned even more from a progressive black professor,

because this individual would have brought to the class that

unique mixture of experiential and analytical ways of know· ing-that is, a privileged standpoint. It cannot be acquired

through books or even distanced observation and study of a

particular reality. To me this privileged standpoint does not

emerge from the "authority of experience" but rather from the passion of experience, the passion ofremembrance.

Essentialism and Experience 91

Often experience enters the classroom from the location of

memory. Usually narratives of experience are told retrospec-

tively. In the testimony of Guatemalan peasant and activist

Rigoberta Menchú, I hear the passion of remembrance in her

words:

My mother úsed to say that through her life, through her living testimony, she tried to tell women that they too had to participate, so that when the repression comes and with it a lot of suffering, it's not only the men who suffer. Women must join the struggle in their own way. My mother's words told them that any evolu- tion, any change, in which women had nat participat- ed. would not be change, and there would be no victory. She was as clear about this as if she were a woman with all sorts oftheories and a lot ofpractice.

I know that I can take this knowledge and transmit the mes-

sage of her words. Their meaning could be easily conveyed.

What would be lost in the transmission is the spirit that orders

those words, that testifies that, behind them-underneath,

every where-there is a lived reality. When I use the phrase

"passion of experience," it encompasses many feelings but par-

ticularly suffering, for there is a particular knowledge that

comes from suffering. It is a way of knowing that is ofÚm

expressed through the body, what it knows, what has been

deeply inscribed on it through experience. This complexity of

experience can rarely be voiced and named from a distance. It is a privileged location, even as it is not the only or even always

the most important location from which one can know. In the

classroom, I share as much as possible the need for critica!

thinkers to engage multi ple locations, to address diverse stand-

points, to allow us to gather knowledge fully and inclusively.

Sometimes, I tell students, it is like a recipe. I tell them to imag- ine we are baking bread that needs flour. And we have all the

other ingredients but no flour. Suddenly, the flour becomes

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92 Teaching to Transgress

most important even though it alone will nat do. This is a way to think about experience in the classroom.

On another day, I might ask students to ponder what we want to make happen in the class, to name what we hope to know, what mig ht be most useful. I ask them what standpoint is a personal experience. Then there are times when personal

experience keeps us from reaching the mountaintop and so we !et it go because the weight of it is too heavy. And sometimes

the mountaintop is difficult to reach with all our resources, fac- tual and confessional, so we are just there collectively grasping, feeling the limitations of knowledge, longing together, yearn- ing for a way to reach that highest paint. Even this yearning is a waytoknow.

7

Holding My Sister's Hand

Feminist Solidarity

"Feminism must be on the cutting edge of real social change if it is to survive as a movement in any particular country."

-Audre Lorde, A Burst of Light

"We are the victims of our History and our Present. They place too many obstacles in the Way of Love. And we can- nat enjoy even o ur differences in peace."

-Ama Ata Aidoo, Our Sister Killjoy

Patriarchal perspectives on race relations bave traditionally evoked the image of black men gaining the freedom to be sex- ual with white women as that personal relationship which best exemplifies the connection between public struggle for racial equality and the private pali tics of racial intimacy. Racist fears that socially sanctioned romantic relationships between black

93

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94 T eaching to T ransgress

men and white women would dismantle the white patri:arch"T farnily structure historically heightened the sense of

even as individuals chose to transgress boundaries. But between black men and white women, even when legally tioned through marriage, did not bave the feared impact. did not fundamentally threaten white patriarchy. It did not

ther the struggle to end racism. Making heterosexual sexual. experience-particularly the issue of black men gaining access to the badies of white women-the quintessential expression of racial liberation deflected attention away from the signifi, can ce of social relations between white and black women, and o f the ways this contact determines and affects race relati o ns.

As a teenager in the late sixties, living in a racially segregat- ed Southern town, I knew that black men who desired intima- cy with white women, and vice versa, forged bonds. I knew of no intimacy, no deep closeness, no friendship between black ·

and white women. Though never discussed, it was evident in daily life that definite barriers separated the two groups, mak- ing close friendship impossible. The point of contact between black women and white women was one of servant-served, a hierarchal, power-based relationship unmediated by sexual desire. Black women were the servants, and white women were the served.

In those days, a poor white woman who mig ht never be in a position to hire a black woman servant would still, in all her encounters with black women, assert a dominating presence, ensuring that contact between the two groups should always place white in a position of power over black. The servant- served relationship was established in domestic space, in the household, within a context of familiarity and commonality (the belief that it was the female's role to tend the home was shared by white and black women). Given this similarity ofposi- tioning within sexist norms, personal contact between the two

Holding My Sister's Hand 95

was carefully constructed to reinforce difference in sta-

based on race. Recognizing class difference was not enough ' of a divisi on; white women wanted their racial status affirmed. They devised strategies both subtle and overt to reinforce racial

· difference, to assert their superior posi tions. This was especial- ly the case in households where white women remained home during the day while black female servants worked. White

:e ·wo1rnen might talk about "niggers" or enact ritualized scenarios · ·· focusing on race in order to stress differentiation in status.

· Even a small gesture-like showing a black servant a new dress that she would not be able to try on in a s to re because of Jim Crow laws-reminded all concerned of the difference in status

based on race. Historically, white female efforts to maintain racial domi-

nance were directly connected to the politics of heterosexism within a white supremacist patriarchy. Sexist norms, which deemed white women inferior because of gender, could be mediated by racial bonding. Even though males, white and black, may have been most concerned with policing or gaining access to white women's bodies, the social reality white women !ived was on e in which white males did actively engage in sexual relationships with black women. In the minds of most white women, it was not important that the overwhelming majority of these liaisons were forged by aggressive coercion, rape, and other forms of sexual assault; white women saw black women as

competitors in the sexual marketplace. Within a cultural setting where a white woman's status was overdetermined by her rela- tionship to white men, it follows that white women desired to maintain clear separations between their status and that of black women. It was crucial that black women be kept at a dis- tance, that racial taboos forbidding legal relacions between the two groups be reinforced either by law or social opinion. (In those rare cases where slaveholding white men sought divorces

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96 Teaching to Transgress

to legitimate liaisons with black slave women, they were most

often judged insane.) In a white supremacist patriarchy, that

relationship which most threatened to disrupt, challenge, and

dismantle white power its concomitant social order was the

legalized union between a white man and a black woman. Slave

testimony, as well as the diades of southern white women,

record incidents of jealousy, rivalry, and sexual competition be-

tween white mistresses and enslaved black women. Court rec-

ords document that individual white men did try to gain public

recognition of their bonds with black women either through

attempts to marry or through efforts to leave property and

money in wills. Most of these cases were contested bywhite fam-

ily members. Important!y, white females were protecting their

fragile social positions and power within patriarchal culture by

asserting their superiority over black women. They were not nec-

essarily trying to prevent white men from engaging in sexual

relations with black women, for this was not in their power-

such is the nature of patriarchy. So long as sexual unions with

black women and white men took place in a nonlegalized con- text, within a framework of subjugation, coercion, and degrada-

tia o, the split between white female's status as "!adies" and black

women's representation as ''whores" could be maintained. Thus

to some extent, white women's class and race privilege was rein-

forced by the maintenance of a system where black women were

the objects ofwhite male sexual subjugation and abuse.

Contemporary discussions of the historical relationship be-

tween white and black women must include acknowledgment of the bitterness black slave women felt towards white women.

They harbored understandable resentment and repressed rage

about racial oppression, but theywere particularly aggrieved by

the overwhelming absence of sympathy shown by white women

in circumstances involving sexual and physical abuse of black women as well as situations where black children were taken

away from their enslaved mothers. Again it was within this

Holding My Slster's Hand 97

realm o f shared con cern (white women knew the horror of sex-

ual and physical abuse as well as the depth of a mother's attach-

ment to her children) that the majority of white women who

might bave experienced empathic identification turned their

backs on black women's pain.

Shared understanding o f particular fe mal e experiences did

not mediate relations between most white mistresses and black

slave women. Though there were rare exceptions, they had little

impact on the averaU structure of relations between black and

white women. Despite the brutal oppression of black female

slaves, many white women feared them, They may bave believed

that, more than anything, black women wanted to change

places with them, to acquire their social status, to marry their men. And they must have feared (given white male obsessions

with black women) that, were there no legal and social taboos

forbidding legalized relations, they would lose their status. The abolition of slavery had little meaningful positive im-

pact on relations between white and black women. Without the

structure of slavery, which institutionalized, in a fundamental

way, the different status of white and black women, white

women were all the more concerned that social taboos uphold

their racial superiority and forbid legalized relations between

the races. They were instrumental in perpetuating degrading

stereotypes about black womanhood. Many of these stereo- types reinforced the notion that black women were lewd,

immoral, sexually licentious, and lacking in intelligence. White

women had a closeness with black women in the domestic

household that made it appear that they knew what we were

really like; they had direct contact, Though there is little pub-

lished material from the early twentieth century documenting

white female perceptions ofblack women and viceversa, segre-

gatino diminished the possibility that the twa groups might develop a new basis of contact with one another outside the

realm of servant-served. Living in segregated neighborhoods,

98 Teaching to Transgress

there was little chance that white and black women would meet one another on common, neutral ground.

The black woman who traveled from her segregated neigh- borhood inta "unsafe" white areas, to work in the homes of white families, no longer had a set of familia! relations, howev- er tenuous, that were visible and known by white women

employers as had been the case under slavery. The new social arrangement was as much a context for dehumanization as the plantation household, with the one relief that black women could return home. Within the social circumstance of slavery, white mistresses were sometimes compelled by circumstance, caring feelings, or concern for property to enter the black fe- male's place of residence and be cognizant o f a reahn of expe- rience beyond the servant-served sphere. This was not the case

with the white female employer. Racially segregated neighborhoods (which were the norm

in most cities and rural areas) meant that black women left poor neighborhoods to work in privileged white homes. There was little or no chance that this circumstance would promote and encourage friendship between the two groups. White women continued to see black women as sexual competitors, ignoring white mal e sexual assa uit and abuse of black fema! es. Although they have written poignant memoirs which describe affectional bonds between themselves and black female ser- vants, white women often failed to aclmowledge that intimacy and care can coexist with domination. It has been difficult for white women who perceive black women servants to be "like one of the family" to understand that the servant might have a completely different understanding of their relationship. The servant may be ever mindful that no degree o f affection or care altered differences in status-or the reality that white women exercised power, whether benevolently or tyrannically.

Much of the current scholarship by white women focusing on relationships between black women domestics and white

Holding My Sister's Hand 99

female employers presents perspectives that highlight posi- tives, obscuring the ways negative interaction in these settings have created profound mistrust and hostility between the two groups. Black female servants interviewed by white women often give the impression that their relationships with white

women employers had many positive dimensions. They say what they f ee! is the po li te and correct versi on of reality, often suppressing truths. Again it must be remembered that ex- ploitative situations can also be settings where caring ties emerge even in the face of domination (feminists should know this from the evidence that care exists in heterosexual rela- tionships where men abuse women). Hearing Susan Tucker give an oral presentation discussing her book 1èlling Memories

Among Southern Women: Domestic Workers Employers in the Seg-

regated South, I was struck by her willingness to acknowledge that as a white child cared for by black women she remem- bered overhearing them expressing negative feelings about white women. She was shocked by their expressions of rage, enmity, and contempt. We both remembered a common dec- laration of black women: "l've never met a white woman over the age of twelve that I can respect." In contrast to her memo- ri es, Tucker's contemporary discussion paints a much more positive picture of the subject. Studies of black and white women's relationships must cease to focus solely on whether interaction between black servants and white female employ- ers was "positive." If we are to understand our contemporary relations, we must explore the impact of those encounters on blaçk women's perceptions ofwhite women as a whole. Many ofus who have never been white women's servants have inher- ited ideas about them from relatives and kin, ideas which shape our expectations and interactions.

My memories and present day awareness (based on conver- sations with my mother, who works as a maid for white women

' and the comments and stories ofblack women in our commu-

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100 Teaching to Transgress

nities) indicate that in "safe" settings black women highlight

the negative aspects of working as servants for white women.

They express intense anger, hostility, bitterness, and envy-and

very little affection or care-even when they are speaking posi-

tively. Many of these women recognize the exploitative nature

of their jobs, identifying ways they are subjected to various

unnecessary humiliations and degrading encounters. This rec-

ognition may be the most salient feature in a situation where a

black woman may also have good feelings about her white

employer Qudith Rollins's book, Between Women, is a useful and insightful discussion of these relationships).

Whether talking with black domestics or nonprofessional

black women, I find that the overwhelming perceptions of

white women are negative. Many of the black women who have

worked as servants in white homes, particularly during the

times when white women were not gainfully employed, see

white women as maintaining childlike, self-centered postures of

innocence and irresponsibility at the expense of black women.

Again and again, it was pointed out that the degree to which

white women are able to turn away from domestic reality, from

the responsibilities of child care and housework, whether they

are turning away for careers or to have greater leisure, is deter- mined by the extent to which black women, or some other

underclass group, are bound to that labor, forced by economic

circumstance to pick up the slack, to assume responsibility. I found it ironic that black women often critiqued white

women from a nonfeminist standpoint, emphasizing the ways

in which white women were not worthy of being on pedestals

because they were shiftless, lazy, and irresponsible. Some black

women seemed to feel a particular rage that their work was

"overseen" by white women whom they saw as ineffectual and

incapable of performing the very tasks they were presiding over. Black women working as servants in white homes were in

posi tions similar to those assumed by cultural anthropologists

Holding My Sister's Hand IOl

seeking to understand a different culture. From this particular insider vantage paint, black women learned about white life-

styles. They observed all the details in white households, from

furnishings to personal encounters. Taking mental notes, they

make judgments about the quality of life they witnessed, com-

paring it to black experience. Within the confines of segregat-

ed black communities, they shared their perceptions of the

white "other." Often their accounts were most negative when

they described white women; they were able to study them

much more consistently than white men, who were not always

present. If the racist white world represented black women as

sl uts, then black women examined the actions o f white women to see if their sexual mores were different. Their observations

often contradicted stereotypes. Overall, black women have

corne away from encounters with white women in the servant-

served relationship feeling confident that the two groups are

radically different and share no commou language. It is this legacy of attitudes and reflections about white women that is

shared from generation to generation, keeping alive the sense of distance and separation, feelings of suspicion and mistrust.

Now that interracial relationships between whites and blacks

are more common, black women see white women as sexual

competitors-irrespective of sexual preference-often advocat-

ing continued separation in the private sphere despite proxim- ity and closeness in work settings.

Contemporary discussions of relationships between black

women and white women (whether scholarly or personal) rarely take place in integrated settings. White women writing about their impressions in schola.rly and confessional work

often ignore the depth of enmity between the two groups, or

see it as solely a black female problem. Many times in feminist

circles I have heard white women talk about a particular black woman's hostility toward white females as though such feelings

are not rooted in historical relations and contemporary in ter-

102 T eaching to Transgress

actions. Instead of exploring the reasons such hostility exists,

or giving it any legitimacy as an appropriate response to domi-

nation or exploitation, they see the black woman as being

difficult, problematic, irrational, and "insane." Unti! white

women can confront their fear and hatred of black women

(and viceversa), unti! we can acknowledge the negative history

which shapes and informs our contemporary interaction,

there can be no honest, meaningful dialogue between the two

groups. The contemporary feminist call for sisterhood, the

radical white woman's appeal to black women and all women

of color to join the feminist movement, is seen by many black

women as yet another expression of white fem al e denial of the

reality of racist domination, of their complicity in the exploita-

tion and oppression of black women and black people.

Though the call for sisterhood was often motivated by a sincere

longing to transform the present, expressing white female

desire to create a new context for bonding, there was no at-

tempt to acknowledge history, or the barriers that might make

such bonding difficult, if not impossible. When black women

responded to the evocation of sisterhood based on shared

experience by calling attention to both the past o f racial domi- nation and its present manifestations in the structure of femi-

nist theory and the feminist movement, white women initially

resisted the analysis. They assumed a pasture of innocence and

de nial (a response that evoked memories in black women of

negative encounters, the servant-served relationship). Despite

flaws and contradictions in her analysis, Adrienne Rich's essay

"'Disloyal to Civilization': Feminism, Racism, and Gynepho-

bia" was groundbreaking in that it ruptured that wall of denial,

addressing the issue of race and accountability. White women were more willing to "hear" another white woman talk about

racism, yet it is their inability to listen to black women that

impedes feminist progress.

Ironically, many of the black women who were actively en-

Holding My Sister's Hand 103

gaged with feminist movement were talking about racism in a

sincere attempt to create an inclusive movement, one that

would bring white and black women together. We believed that

true sisterhood would not emerge without radical confron-

tation, without feminist exploration and discussion of white

female racism and black female response. Our desire for an

honorable sisterhood, on e that would emerge from the willing-

ness of all women to face o ur histories, was often ignored. Most

white women dismissed us as "too angry," refusing to reflect

critically on the issues raised. By the tim e white women active in

the feminist movement were willing to acknowledge racism,

accountability, and its impact on the relationships between

white women and women of color, many black women were

devastated and worn out. We felt betrayed; white women had

not fulfilled the promise of sisterhood. That sense of betrayal

continues and is intensified by the apparent abdication of interest in forging sisterhood, even though white women now

show interest in racial issues. It seems at times as though white

feminists working in the academy have appropriated discus-

sions of race and racism, while abandoning the effort to con-

struct a space for sisterhood, a space where they could examine

and change attitudes and behavior towards black women and all women of color.

With the increasing institutionalization and professionaliza-

tion of feminist work focused on the construction of feminist

theory and the dissemination of feminist knowledge, white

women bave assumed positions of power that enable them to

repr.oduce the servant-served paradigm in a radically different context. Now black women are placed in the position of serv-

ing white fema! e desire to know more about race and racism, to

"mas ter" the subject. Curiously, most white women writing fem-

inist theory that looks at "difference" and "diversity" do not

make white women's !ives, works, and experiences the subject of their analysis of "race," but rather focus on black women or

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104 Teaching to Transgress

women of color. White women who have yet to get a critica! han die on the meaning of "whiteness" in their !ives, the repre-

sentation ofwhiteness in their literature, or the white suprema-

cy that shapes their social status are now explicating blackness

without critically questioning whether their work emerges

from an aware antiracist standpoint. Drawing on the work of

black women, work that they once dismissed as irrelevant, they

now reproduce the servant-served paradigms in their scholar-

ship. Armed with their new knowledge of race, their willing-

ness to say that their work is coming from a white perspective

(usually without explaining what that me ans), they forget that

the very focus on race and racism emerged from the concrete political effort to forge meaningful ties between women of dif-

ferent race and class groups. This struggle is often completely

ignored. Content with the appearance of greater receptivity

( the production of texts where white women discuss race is

given as evidence that there has been a radical shift in direc-

tion), white women ignore the relative absence of black

women's voices, either in the construction ofnew feminist the- ory or at feminist gatherings.

Talking with groups ofwomen about whether they thought

feminist movement has had a transformative impact on reia-

tions between white and black women, I heard radically differ- ent responses. Most white women felt there had been a change,

that they were more aware of race and racism, more willing to

assume accountability and engage in antiracist work. Black

women and women of color were aclamant that little had

changed, that despite recent white female focus on race, racist

domination is still a factor in personal encounters. They felt

that the m~ority of white women still assert power even as they address issues of race. As on e black woman put it, "It burns me

up to be treated like shit by white women who are busy getting their academic recognition, promotions, more money, et cet-

era, doing 'great' work on the to pic of race." Som e black

Holding My Sister's Hand 105

women I spoke with suggested that it was fear that their re-

sources would be appropriated by white women that led them

to avoid participating in feminist movement. Fear and anger a bo ut appropriation, as well as con cern that

we not be complicit in reproducing servant-served relation-

ships, have led black women to withdraw from feminist settings

where we must have extensive contact with white women. With-

drawal exacerbates the problem: it makes us complicit in a differ-

ent way. If a jo urna! is doing a special issne on Black Women's

Studies and only white women submit work, then black women

cannot effectively challenge their hegemonic hold on feminist

theory. This is only one example of many. Without our voices in written work and in oral presentations there will be no artic-

ulation of our concerns. Where are our books on race and feminism and other aspects of feminist theory, works which

offer new approaches and understanding? What do we do to further the development of a more inclusive feminist theory

and practice? What do we presume our role to be in the map-

ping of future direction for feminist movement? Withdrawal is

not the answer. Even though practically every black woman active in any

aspect of feminist movement has a long record of horror sto- ries documenting the insensitivity and racist aggression of indi-

vidual white women, we can testify as well to those encounters

that are positive, that enrich rather than diminish. Granted,

such encounters are rare. They tend to take place with white women who are not in positions where they can assert power

(which may be why these are seen as exceptional rather than as

positive signs indicating the overall potential for growth and

change, for greater togetherness). Perhaps we need to exam-

ine the degree to which white women (and all women) who

assume powerful posi tions rely on conventional paradigms of domination to reinforce and maintain that power.

Talking with black women and women of color I wanted to

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106 Teaching to Transgress

know what factors distinguish these relationships we have with white feminists which we do not see as exploitative or oppres- sive. A commou response was that these relationships had two

important factors: honest confrontation, and dialogue about race, and reciproca! interaction. Within the servant-served par-

adigm, it is usually white women who are seeking to receive something from black women, even if that something is knowl- edge about racism. When I asked individual white women who have friendships and positive work relations with black women in feminist settings what were the conditions enabling reci-

procity, they responded by emphasizing that they had not relied on black women to force them to confront their racism. Somehow, assuming responsibility for examining their own re- sponses to race was a precondition for relations on an equal footing. These women felt they approach women of color with knowledge about racism, not with guilt, shame, or fear. One white woman said that she starts from the standpoint of accept- ing and acknowledging that ''white people always have racist assumptions that we have to dea! with." Readiness to dea! with these assumptions certainly makes forming ties with nonwhite women easier. She suggests that the degree to which a white woman can accept the truth of racist oppression-of white female complicity, of the privileges white women receive in a racist structure-determines the extent to which they can be empathic with women of color. In conversations I found that feminist white women from nonmaterially privileged back- grounds often felt their understanding of class difference made it easier for them to hear women of color talk about the impact of race, of domination, without feeling threatened. Personally, I find many of my deepest friendships and feminist bonds are formed with white women who corne from working class backgrounds or who are working class and understand the

impact of poverty and deprivation.

Holding My Sister's Hand 107

I talked about writing this essaywith a gro up ofwhite fe mal e colleagues-all of them English professors-and they empha- sized the fear many privileged white women have of black women. We all remembered Lillian Hellman's frank comments

about her relationship with the black woman servant who was in her employ for many years. Hellman felt that this woman really exercised enormous power over her, admitting that it made her fear all black women. We talked about the fact that what many white women fear is being unmasked by black women. One white woman, from a working-class background, pointed out that black women servants witnessed the gap between white women's words and their deeds, saw contradic- tions and inadequades. Perhaps contemporary generations of white women who do not have black servants, who never will, have inherited from their female ancestors the fear that black women have the power to see through their disguises, to see the parts of themselves they want no one to see. Though most of the white women presentat this discussion do not have close friendships with black women, they would welcome the oppor- tunity to have more intimate contact. Often black women do not respond to friendly overtures by white women for fear that they will be betrayed, that at some unpredictable moment the white woman will assert power. This fear of betrayal is linked with white female fear of exposure; clearly we need feminist psychoanalytic work that examines these feelings and the rela- tional dynamics they produce.

Often black female fear of betrayal is not present when an individual white woman indicates by her actions that she is committed to antiracist work. For example, I once applied for a job in the Women's Studies program ata white women's col- lege. The committee reviewing my application was all white. During the review process on e o f the reviewers felt that racism was shaping the nature and direction of the discussions, and

108 Teaching to Transgress

she intervened. One gesture of intervention she made was to

contact the black woman affirmative action officer so that

there would be nonwhite participation in the discussion. Her

commitment to feminist process and autiracist work informed

her actions. She extended herself even though there was no

personal gain. (Let's face it: opportunism has prevented mauy

academic feminists from taking action that would force them

togo against the status quo and take a stand.) Her actions con- firmed for me both the power of solidarity and sisterhood. S he

did not play it safe. To challenge, she had to separate herself

from the power and privilege of the group. One of the most revealing insights she shared was her initial disbelief that white

feminists could be so blatantly racist, assuming that everyone in

the gro up shared a commou bo nd in "whiteness," the commou

acceptance that in an all-white group it was fine to talk about

black people in stereotypical racist ways. When this process

ended (I was offered the job), we talked about her sense that

what she witnessed was white female fear that in the presence

of black female power, their authority would be diminished.

We talked about ways feelings allow mauy white women to feel

more comfortable with black women who appear victimized or

needy. We focused on ways white feminists sometimes patron-

ize black women by assuming that it is understandable if we are not "radical," if our work on gender does not bave a feminist

standpoint. This condescension further estrauges black and

white women. It is an expression of racism.

Now that many white women engaged in feminist thinking and practice no longer deny the impact of race on the con-

struction of gender identity, the oppressive aspects of racial

domination, and white female complicity, it is time to move on

to an exploration of the particular fears that inhibit meauing-

ful bon ding with black women. It is time for us to create new models for interaction that take us beyond the servaut-served

encoun ter, ways of being that promote respect and reconcilia-

Holding My Sister's Hand 109

tion. Concurrently, black women need to explore our collec-

tive attachment to rage and hostility towards white women. It

may be necessary for us to bave spaces where some of that

repressed anger and hostility can be openly expressed so that we can trace its roots, understand it, aud examine possibilities

for transforming internalized auger into constructive, self-

affirming energy we can use effectively to resist white female

domination and forge meaningful ties with white fe mal e allies.

Only when o ur visi on is clear will we be a ble to distinguish sin-

cere gestures of solidarity from actions rooted in bad faith. It

may very well be that some black female rage towards white

women masks sorrow and pain, anguish that it has been so dif-

ficult to make contact, to impress upon their consciousness our

subjectivity. Letting go of some of the hurt may create a space

for courageous contact without fear or blame. If black women and white women continue to express fear

aud rage without a commitment to move on through these emotions in order to explore new grounds for contact, our

efforts to build au inclusive feminist movement will fai!. Much

depends on the strength of our commitment to feminist proc-

ess aud feminist movement. There have been so many feminist

occasions where differences surface, and with them expres-

sions of pain, rage, hostility. Rather thau coping with these

emotions and continuing to probe intellectually and search for

insight and strategies of confrontation, all avenues for discus-

sions become blocked and no dialogue occurs. I arn confident that women have the skills (developed in interpersonal reia-

tions where we confront gender difference) to make pro-

ductive space for critica! dissent dialogue even as we express

intense emotions. We need to examine why we suddenly lose

the capacity to exercise skill and care when we confront one auother across race and class differences. It may be that we give

up so easily with on e another be cause women ha ve internalized

the racist assumption that we can never overcome the barder

IlO T eaching to Transgress

separating white women and black women. If this is so then we are seriously complicit. To counter this complicity, we must have more written work and oral testimony documenting ways barriers are broken down, coalitions formed, and solidarity shared. It is this evidence that will renew our hope and provide strategies and direction for future feminist movement.

Producing this work is not the exclusive task of white or black women; it is collective work. The presence of racism in feminist settings does not exempt black women or women of

color from actively participating in the effort to find ways to communicate, to exchange ideas, to ha ve fierce debate. If revi- talized feminist movement is to have a transformative impact on women, then creating a context where we can engage in open critica! dialogue with one another, where we can debate and discuss without fear of emotional collapse, where we can hear and know one another in the difference and complexities of our experience, is essential. Collective feminist movement cannot go forward if this step is never taken. When we create this woman space where we can value difference and complex- ity, sisterhood based on political solidarity will emerge.

8

Feminist Thinking

In the Classroom Right Now

Teaching women's studies classes for more than ten years, l've seen exciting changes. Right now teachers and students face new challenges in the feminist classroom. Our students are no longer necessarily already committed to or interested in femi- nist politics (which means we are not just sharing the "good news" with the converted). They are no !on ger predominantly white or female. They are no longer solely citizens of the United States. When I was a young graduate student teaching feminist courses, I taught them in Black Studies. At that time, women's studies programs were not ready to accepta focus on race "and gender. Any curriculum focusing specifically on black women was seen as "suspect," and no o ne was yet using the catch-all phrase "women of color." In those days, the students in my feminist classrooms were almost all black. They were funda- mentally skeptical about the importance offeminist thinking or feminist movement to any discussion of race and racism, to any

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112 Teaching to Transgress

analysis of black experience and black liberation struggle. Over

tirne, that skepticisrn has deepened. Black students, fernale and

rnale, continually interrogate this issue. Whether in the class-

roorn or while giving a public lecture, I arn continually asked whether or not black concern with the struggle to end racisrn

precludes involvernent with ferninist rnovernent. "Don't you

think black wornen, as a race, are more oppressed than wornen?"

"Isn't the wornen's rnovernent really for white wornen?" or

"Ha ven 't black wornen always been liberated?" tend to be the

norrn. Striving to answer questions like these has led to shifts in

rny ways of thinking and writing. As a ferninist teacher, theorist,

and activist, I arn deeply cornrnitted to black liberation struggle

and want to play a major role in re-articulating the theoretical politics of this rnovernent so that the issue of gender will be

addressed, and ferninist struggle to end sexisrn will be consid-

ered a necessary component of our revolutionary agenda.

Cornrnitrnent to ferninist politics and black liberation strug- gle rneans that I rnust be able to confront issues ofrace and gen-

der in a black context, providing rneaningful answers to

problernatic questions as well as appropriate accessible ways to cornrnunicate thern. The ferninist classroorn and lecture hali

that I arn speaking in most often today is rarely all black.

Though the politically progressive clamor is for "diversity,"

there is !itt! e re alis tic understanding of the ways ferninist schol-

ars rnust change ways o f seeing, talking, and thinking ifwe are to speak to the various audiences, the "different" subjects who rnay

be present in one location. How rnany ferninist scholars can respond effectively when faced with a racially and ethnically

diverse audience who rnay not share similar class backgrounds,

language, levels of understanding, cornrnunication skills, and

con cerns? As a black wornan professor in the ferninist classroorn

teaching wornen 's s tudi es classes, these issues surface daily for rne. My joint appointrnent in English, Mrican Arnerican Stud- ies, and Wornen's Studies as well as other disciplines usually

Feminist Thinking 113

rneans that I teach courses frorn a ferninist standpoint, but that

are not listed specifically as wornen's studies courses. Students

rnay take a course on black wornen writers without expecting

that the material will be approached frorn a ferninist perspec-

tive. This is why I rnake a distinction between the ferninist class-

roorn and a Wornen's Studies course. In a ferninist classroorn, especially a Wornen's Studies course,

the black student, who has had no previous background in fern-

inist studies, usually finds that she or he is in a class that is pre-

dorninantly white (often attended by a rnajority of outspoken

young, white, radical ferninists, rnany of whorn link this politic

to issues of gay rights). Unfarniliarity with the issues may lead

black students to feel at a disadvantage both acadernically and

culturally ( they rnay not be accustorned to pub li e discussions o f

sexual practice). If a black student acknowledges that she is not familiar with the work of Audre Lorde and the rest of the class

gasps as though this is unthinkable and reprehensible, that gasp evokes the sense that ferninisrn is really a private cuit whose

rnernbers are usually white. Such black students rnay feel

estranged and alienated in the class. Furtherrnore, their skepti-

cisrn about the relevance of ferninisrn rnay be regarded con-

ternptuously by fellow students. Their relentless efforts to link all

discussions of gender with race rnay be seen by white students as

deflecting attention away frorn ferninist concerns and thus con-

tested. Suddenly, the ferninist classroorn is no longer a safe haven, the way rnanywornen's studies students imagine itwill be,

but is instead a si te of conflict, tensions, and som e times ongoing

hostility. Confronting on e another across differences rneans that

we rnust change ideas about how we learn; rather than fearing

conflict we have to find ways to use it as a catalyst for new think-

ing, for growth. Black students often bring this positive sense of

challenge, of rigorous inquiry to ferninist studies. Teachers (rnany ofwhorn are white) who find it difficult t.o

address diverse responses rnay be as threatened by the perspec-

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114 Teaching to Transgress

tives o f black students as their classmates. Unfortunately, black students often leave such classes thinking they bave acquired concrete confirmation that feminism does not address issues from a standpoint that includes race or addresses black experi- ence in any meaningful way. Black women teachers committed

to feminist polítics may welcome the presence of a diverse stu- dent body in classrooms even as we recognize that it is difficult to teach Women's Studies to black students who approach the subject with grave doubt about its relevance. In recent years, I bave been teaching larger numbers of black male students, many of whom are not aware of the ways sexism informs how they speak and interact in a group setting. They face challenges to behavior patterns they may bave never before thought important to question. Towards the end of one semester, Mark, a black male student in my "Reading Fiction" English class, shared that while we focused on Mrican American literature, his deepest sense of "awakening" came from learning about gender, a bo ut feminist standpoints.

When I teach courses such as "Black Women Writers" or "Third World Literature," I usually bave more black students than those courses that are specifically designated as Women's Studies. I taught one Women's Studies senior seminar for a professor who was on lea ve. Too late, I realized that this course was really for Women's Studies majors and, as a consequence, would probably be all white. Described as a course that would approach feminist theory from a standpoint that included dis- cussions of race, gender, class, and sexual practice, the first class attracted more black students than any other Women's Studies course I bave taught. Talking individually with black students interested in the course, I found that the majority had little or no background in feminist studies. Only two students, one male and one female, were prepared to take the class. My suggestion to the other students was that they look at the assigned material to see if they were interested in it, if it was

Feminist Thinking liS

accessible. They decided for themselves that they were not pre- pared for the seminar and eagerly proposed another option, which was that I would allow them to explore feminist theory- particularly work by black women-in a priva te reading course

with ten black female students. When we first met, the students expressed the sense that

they were transgressing boundaries by choosing to explore feminist issues. Very much a militant advocate of feminist polí- tics befo re taking the course, Lo ri (on e of the few students who had a Women's Studies background) told the group that it was difficult to share with other black students, particularly male

peers, her interest in feminism: "I see how it is when I talk to one individual black man who does not want to bave anything to do with feminism and then Jets me know that nobody wants to hear i t." Challenging them to explore what makes the risk worth taking, I heard varied responses. Severa! students talked about witnessing mal e abuse of women in famílies and commu- nities and seeing the struggle to end sexism as the only orga- nized way to make changes. Maelinda, who is Mrocentric in her thinking and plans to spend a year in Zimbabwe, told the gro up that she considers it misguided for black women to act as though we bave the luxury to take feminism or leave it, espe- cially if it is rejected because peers respond negatively: "I don 't think we really bave that choice, that's like saying I don't want to bave race consciousness because the rest of society doesn't

want you to. I mean, !et' s get real." Throughout the semester, there was more laughter in our

discussions-as well as more concern about negative fall-out exploring feminist concerns-than in any feminist course I bave taught. There were also ongoing attempts to relate mater- ial to the concrete realities they face as young black women. All the students were heterosexual and particularly concerned about the possibility that choosing to support feminist politics would alter their relationships with black men. They were con-

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116 T eaching to Transgress

cerned about ways feminism might change how they relate to fathers, Jovers, friends. Most everyone agreed that the men

they knew who were grappling with feminist issues were either

gay or involved with women who were "pushing them." Brett, a

close partner of one of the women, was taking another class

with me. Since he was named by black women in the group as

on e of the black males who was concerned about gender issues,

I talked with him specifically about feminism. He responded by calling attention to the reasons it is difficult for black men to

dea! with sexism, the primary one being that they are accus-

tomed to thinking of themselves in terms of racism, being

exploited and oppressed. Speaking of his efforts to develop feminist awareness, he stressed limitations: "l've tried to under-

stand but then I'm a man. Sometimes I don't understand and it hurts, 'cause I think I'm the epitome of everything that's

oppressed." S in ce it is difficult for many black men to give

voice to the ways they are hurt and wounded by racism, it is also understandable that it is difficult for them to "own up to" sex- ism, to be accountable. More and more, individual black men

-particularly young black men-are facing the challenge of

daring to critique gender, be informed, and willingly resist and

oppose sexism. On college campuses, black male students are

increasingly compelled by black female peers to think about sexism. Recently, I gave a talk where Pat, a young black man,

was wearing a button that read "Sexism is a male disease: Let's salve it ourselves." Pat was in to rap and he gave me a tape ofrap that opposed rape.

During our !ast private reading session, I asked black women

students whether they felt empowered by the material, if they

had grown in their feminist consciousness, if they were more

aware. Severa! commented that the material suggested to them that b!ack women active in feminist movement "have more ene-

mies" than other groups, and were more frequent!y attacked. In

their own !ives they felt it was difficult to speak out and share

Feminist Thinking 117

feminist thinking. Lori posed the question, "What would hap-

pen to a black feminist woman if she spoke as militantly as a black man?'' She answered it herself: "People would freak out

and start rioting." We all laughed at this. I assured them that I

speak militantly about feminism in a black context and though

there is often protest, there is a!so growing affirmation. Everyone in the group expressed the fear that a commit-

ment to feminist politics would lead them to be isolated.

Carolyn, the student who organized the private reading, select-

ing much of the work that was studied, felt she was already more a!one, under attack: "We see the alienation that black

feminists experience by speaking o ut and ask ourselves, 'Are you strong enough to handle the isolation, the criticism?' You

know you're going to get it from men and even some women." Overall, the feeling of the group was that studying feminist

work, seeing an analysis of gender from a feminist standpoint

as a way to understand black experience, was necessary for the

collective development of black consciousness, for the future

of black liberation struggle. Rebecca, a Southerner, felt that

her upbringing made it easier to accept notions of gender

equality in the workplace but barder to apply it to personal

re!ationships. Individually, everyone spoke emphatically about

critically examining their standpoints and transforming their consciousness as a first stage in the process of feminist politi-

cization. Carolyn added to this comment her conviction that

"once you learn to look at yourself critically, you look at every-

thing around you with new eyes." Audre Lorde's essay "Eye to Eye" was one of the very first

readings on the list. It was the workeveryone called to mind in

our class as we spoke about how important it is for b!ack women to stand in feminist solidarity with one a.nother. Ten-

sions had emerged in the group between students who felt that

individuals would ·corne to class and "talk feminism" but not act

on their beliefs in other settings. There was silence when Tanya

/IS Teaching to Transgress

reminded the group of the importance of honesty, of facing oneself. Everyone agreed with Carolyn that black women wh ¡¡ • o get lt together," who dea! with sexism and racism devel

. . . . ' op important strateg1es for survJVal and resistance that need to b

~hared within black communities, especially since (as they pu: 1t) the black woman who gets past all this and discovers herself "holds the key to liberation."

9

Feminist Scholarship

Black Scholars

More than twenty years have passed since I wrote my first femi- nist book, A in 't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism. Like many precocious giris growing up in a male-dominated house- hold, I understood the significance of gender inequality at an early age. Our daily life was full of patriarchal drania-the use of coercion, violent punishment, verbal harassment, to main- tain male domination. As small children we understood that our father was more important than our mother because he was a man. This knowledge was reinforced by the reality that any decision our mother made could be overruled by our dad's authority. Since we were raised during racial segregation, we Iived in an all-black neighborhoo'd, went to black schools, attended a black church. Black males held more power and authority than black fema! es in all these institutions. It was only when I entered college that I learned that black males had sup- posedly be en "emasculated," that the trauma of slavery was pri-

119 :\11'\

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120 Teachíng to Transgress

marily that it had stripped black men oftheir right to male priv-

ilege and power, that it had prevented them fram fully actualiz-

ing "masculinity." Narratives o f castrated black men, hum ble

Stepin Fetchits who followed white men as though theywere lit-

tle pets, was to my mind the stuff ofwhite fantasy, of racist imag-

ination. In the real world of my grawing up I had seen black

males in positions of patriarchal authority, exercising forms of

male power, supporting institutionalized sexism.

Given this experiential reality, when I attended a predomi-

nau tly white university, I was shocked to read scholarly work on

black life fram vario us disciplines like sociology and psychology

written from a critica! standpoint which assumed no gender distinctions characterized black social relations. Engaged in my

undergraduate years with emergent feminist movement, I took

Women's Studies classes the moment they were offered. Yet, I

was again surprised by the overwhelming ignorance about black experience. I was disturbed that the white female profes-

sors and students were ignorant of gender differences in black

life-that they talked about the status and experiences of

"women" when they were only referring to white women. That

surprise changed to anger. I found my efforts ignored when I

attempted to share information and knowledge about how, de- spite racism, black gender relations were constructed to main-

tain black male authority even if they did not mirrar white

paradigms, or about the way white female identity and status was different fram that of black women.

In search of scholarly material to document theevidence of

my lived experience, I was stunned by either the complete lack

of any focus on gender difference in black life or the tacit

assumption that because many black females worked outside

the home, gender raies were inverted. Scholars usually talked

about black experience when they were really speaking solely about black male experience. Significantly, I found that when

"women" were talked about, the experience o f white women

Feminist Scholarship 121

was universalized to stand for all female experience and that

when "black people" were talked about, the experience ofblack

men was the point of reference. Frustrated, I begin to interra-

gate the ways in which racist and sexist biases shaped and

informed all scholarship dealing with black experience, with

female experience. It was clear that these biases had created a

circumstance where there was little or no information about

the distinct experiences of black women. It was this critica! gap

that motivated me to research and write A in 'tIa Woman. It was

published years later, after publishers of feminist work accept-

ed that "race" was both an appropriate and marketable subject

within the field of feminist scholarship. This acceptance came

only when white women began to show an interest in issues of

race and gender.

When contemporary feminist movement first began, femi-

nist writings and scholarship by black women was groundbreak-

ing. The writings of black women like Cellestine Ware, Toni

Cade Bambara, Michele Wallace, Barbara Smith, and Angela

Davis, to name a few, were all works that sought to articulate,

define, speak to and against the glaring omissions in feminist

work, the erasure ofblack female presence. During these early

years, white women were zealously encouraging the grawth and

development of feminist scholarship that specifically addressed

their reality, the recovery of buried white women's history, doc-

umentary evidence that would demonstrate the myriad ways

gender differences were socially constructed, the institutional-

ization of inequality. Yet there was no concurrent collective zeal to crea te a body of feminist scholarship that would address the

specific realities of black women. Again and again black fema! e

activists, scholars, and writers found ourselves isolated within

feminist movement and often the targets of misguided white

women who were threatened by all attempts to deconstruct the

category ''woman" or to bring a discourse on race in to feminist

scholarship. In those days, I imagined that my work and that of

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122 T eaching to T ransgress

other black women would serve as a catal st en . · .. engagement by black people, and certai'nlyg bl:c~~ng greater the production of feminist scholarship B t th emaies, in

F . u at Was case. or the most part, black folks al . h not the , ong Wlt mau h" women, were suspicions of black y w I te . women who were . to femmist politics. commltted

Black discourse on feminism was often confin de bates about whether or.not bl k ed to endless

ac women should · ¡ selves in ''white feminist" mvo ve our- first? The few black wom:~v::ednt. ~erehwe black or women

k . . emics w o were se k" ma e critica! interventions in th d I e mg to e eve opment of f, · · ory were compelled to first "prove" to whit f, . ~mimst the- w.ere on target when we called attention t: r:::~Is~s that we distorted feminist scholarship that f 1 d . biases that ties o f women who were not ~hi te :; ;ro to co~~Ider the reali- Though this strategy wa m pnvi!eged classes.

. s necessary for us to gain a h . audience, it meant that we w eanng, an

. ere not concentratin gies on creating a climat h g our ener-e w ere we could f, · . creating a body of scholarship that would Io:~u:ti~:e~IVely o~ ence from a feminist standpoint By "'oc . ac expen- . · " usmg so mu h 11on on racism w¡"th" r . . e atten-In j_erninJst move .

audiences that a s stem of . ment, or provmg to black Iife, we did not ayl d" gender mequality permeated black

ways Irect our e · other black folks to see feminist th. ~ergies towards inviting could illuminate and enh I~kmg as a standpoint that of black . ance our mtellectual understanding

expenence. It seemed that i d" "d active in feminist porti f n IVI ual black women a hard I es were o ten caught between a rock and corne !~ce. T~e v~st majority of white feminists did not wel-

questwmng of feminist d. seeking to institutio r . para Igms that they were

na Ize, so too, many black I . saw our involvement with f, . . . . peop e simply betrayal, and dismissed o ur w:~:mst po hacs as a gesture of

Despite the racism we confronted "th· f, . . . black women h WI m em1mst ordes,

w 0 eljlbraced feminist th · k" . m mg and pracnce

Feminist Scholarship 123

remained committed and engaged because we experienced ¡¡eW forms of self-improvement. We understood and under· staud now how much a critique of sexism and organized efforts to affirm feminist politics in black communities could be !iber· atory for women and men. Black women thinkers and writers Jike Michele Wallace and Ntozake Shange, who initially had huge black audiences respon ding to the emphasis in their work ou sexism, on gender differences in black life, faced hostile black audiences who were not willing to dialogue. Many black female writers witnessing the black public's response to their work were fearful that engagement with feminist thinking would forever alienate them from black communities. Re· sponding to the idea that black women should become in- volved with feminist movement, many black people insisted that we were already "free," that the sign of our freedom was that we worked outside the home. Of course, this line o f think-

ing completely ignores issues of sexism and male domination. Since the ruling rhetoric at the time insisted on the complete "victimization" of black men within white supremacist patri- archy, few black folks were willing to engage that dimension of feminist thought that insisted that sexism and institutionalized patriarchy indeed provi de black men with forros of power, how- .ever relative, that remained intact despite racist oppression. In such a cultural climate, black women interested in creating

feminist theory and scholarship wisely focused their attention on those progressive folks, white women among them, who were open to interrogating critically issues of gender in black

life from a feminist standpoint. Significantly, as feminist movement progressed, black women

and women of color who dared to challenge the universaliza- tion of the category ''woman" created a revolution in feminist scholarship. Many white women who had previously resisted rethinking the ways feminist scholars talked about the status of women now responded to critiques and worked to create a criti-

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124 Teaching to Transgress

cal clima te where we could talk a bo ut gender in a more complex

way, and where we could acknowledge differences in female sta-

tus that were overdetermined by race and class. Ironically, this

major intervention did not serve as a catalyst compelling more

black women to do feminist work. Currently, many more white

women than black women do scholarship from a feminist stand-

point that includes race. This is so because many academic black

women remain ambivalent about feminist politics and the femi-

nist standpoints. In her essay, 'Toward a Phenomenology of

Feminist Consciousness," Sandra Bartky makes the point that

"to be a feminist, on e has first to beco me o ne." She reminds

us that just thinking about gender or lamenting the female

condition "need not be an expression of feminist conscious-

ness." Indeed, many black women academics chose to focus

attention on gender even as they very deliberately disavowed

engagement with feminist thinking. Uncertain about whether

feminist movem en t would really change the !ives of black

females in a meaningful way, they were not willing to assume and assert a feminist standpoint.

Another factor that restricted black female participation in the production of feminist scholarship was and is the lack of

institutional rewards. While many academic white women ac-

tive in feminist movement becam e a part of a network of folks.

who shared resources, publications, jobs and so on, black fe-

males were often out of this loop. This was especially the case

for individual black women creating feminist scholarship that

was not well received. In the early stages of my work, white

women scholars were often threatened by its focus on race and

racism. Far from being rewarded orvalued (as is the case now),

in those days I was perceived as a threat to feminism. It was even more threatening when I dared to speak from a feminist

standpoint on issues other than race. Overall, black female

scholars, already seriously marginalized by the institutionalized

Feminist Scholarship 125

racism and sexism of the academy, have never been fully con-

vinced that it is advantageous for them to declare publicly a commitment to feminist polítics, either for reasons of career

mobility or personal well-being. Many of us have relied on net-

works with black male scholars to help further our careers.

Som e of us have felt and still fe el that claiming a feminist stand-

point will alienate these allies. Despite many factors that have discouraged black women

from producing feminist scholarship, the system of rewards for

such work has recently expanded. Work in feminist theory is

seen as academically legitimate. More black women scholars

than ever before are doing work that looks at gender. Grad-

ually, more of us are doing feminist scholarship. Literary criti- cism has been the location that has most allowed black female

academics to claim a feminist voice. Much feminist literary crit-

icism responded to the work of black women fiction writers

which exposed forms of gender exploitation and oppression in

black life; this literature was receiving unprecedented atten-

tion, and speaking critically about it was not a risky act. These

works spoke to feminist concerns. Black women writing about such concerns could address them, often without having to

claim a feminist standpoint. More than any nonfiction feminist

writing by black women, fiction by writers like Alice Walker and

Ntozake Shange served as a catalyst; stimulating fierce critica!

debate in diverse black communities about gender, about fem-

inism. At that time, nonfiction feminist writing was most often ignored by black audiences. (Michele Wallace's Black Macho

and the Myth o f the Superwoman was a unique exception.) White women academics were usually aecepting of black females

doing literary criticism that focused on gender or made refer-

ence to feminism, but they still saw the realm o f feminist theo-

ry as their critica! domain. Not surprisingly, work by black

literary crítics received attention and at times acclaim. Black

126 T eaching to T ransgress

women scholars like Hazel Carby, Hortense Spillers, Bever!y

Guy-Sheftall, Valerie Smith, and Mae Henderson used a femi- nist standpoint in the production ofliterary scholarship.

Despite a burgeoning body of literary criticism by black

women from a feminist standpoint, more often than not black

women academics focused attention on issues of gender with-

out specifically placing their work within a feminist context.

Historians like Rosalyn Terborg Penn, Deborah White, and

Paula Giddings chose critica! projects that were aimed at resto r-

ing buried knowledge of black female experience. Their work

-and that of many other black female historians-has expand-

ed and continues to expand our understanding of the gen-

dered nature of black experience, even though it does not

overtly insist on a relationship to feminist thinking. A similar

pattern developed in other disciplines. What this means is that

we have an incredible work built around the issue of gender-

enhancing feminist scholarship without explicitly naming itself as feminist.

Clearly, contemporary feminist movement created the nec-

essary cultural framework for an academic legitimation of gen-

der-based scholarship: the ho pe was that this work would always

emerge from a feminist standpoin t. Conversely, work on gen-

der that does not emerge from such a standpoint situates itself in an ambivalent, even problematic, relationship to feminism.

A good example of such a work is Deborah White's Ar'n 'tIa

Woman. Published after Ain 't I a Woman, this work, whether

intentionally or not, mirrored mywork's concern with re-think-

ing the position of black women in slavery. (White makes no

reference to mywork-a fact which is only important beca use it

coincides with the absence of any mention offeminist politics.)

Indeed, one can read White's work as a corrective to interdisci- plinary nontraditional academic work that frames the study of

women within a feminist context. She presents her work as

politically neutral scholarship. Yet, the absence of feminist

Feminist Scholarship 127

standpoint or references pointedly acts to de-legitimize and

invalidate such work even as it appropriates the issues and the

audience feminist movement and feminist scholarship creates.

Given that so little solid academic factual work is done to docu-

ment our history, White's work is a crucial contribution even

though it exposes the ambiguous relationship many black

women scholars bave to feminist thought. When that ambiguity converged with the blatant antifemi-

nism characteristic of many black mal e thinkers, there was no

positive climate for black scholars collectively to embrace and

support sustained production of feminist work. Even though

individual black scholars still choose to do this work, and more

recent graduate students dare to place their work in a feminist

context, the lack of collective support has resulted in a failure

to create the very education for critica\ consciousness that

would teach unknowing black folks why it is important to exam-

ine black life from a feminist standpoint. The current antifem-

inist backlash in the culture as a whole undermines support

for feminist scholarship. Since black feminist scholarship has

always been marginalized in the academy, marginal to the exist-

ing academic hegemony as well as to the feminist mainstream,

those of us who believe such work is crucial to any unbiased dis-

cussion of black experience must intensify our efforts to edu-

cate for critica\ consciousness. Those black women scholars who began working on gender issues while still ambivalent

about feminist politics and who have now grown in both their awareness and commitment must be willing to discuss publicly

the shifts in their thinking.

lO

Building a Teaching Community

A Dialogue

In their introduction to the essay collection Between Borders: Pedagogy and the Polítics of Cultural Studies, editors Henry Giroux and Peter McLaren emphasize that those critica! think- ers working with issues of pedagogy who are committed to cul- tural studies must combine "theory and practice in order to affirm and demonstrate pedagogical practices engaged in cre- ating a new language, rupturing disciplinary boundaries, decentering authority, and rewriting the institutional and dis- cursive borderlands in which politics becomes a condition for reasserting the relationship between agency, power, and strug- gle." Given this agenda, it is crucial that critica! thinkers who want to change our teaching practices talk to one another, col- laborate in a discussion that crosses boundaries and creates a space for intervention. It is fashionable these days, when "dif-

ference" is a hot to pic in progressive circles, to talk about "hy- bridity" and "border crossing," but we often have no concrete

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130 T eaching to Transgress

examples o f individuals who actually occupy different locations

within structures, sharing ideas with one another, mapping out

terrains of commonality, connection, and shared concern with teaching practices.

To engage in dialogue is one of the simplest ways we can

begin as teachers, scholars, and critica! thinkers to cross bound-

aries, the barriers that may or may not be erected by race,

gender, class, professional standing, and a host of other differ-

ences. My first collaborative dialogue was with philosopher

Corne! West, published in Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intel- lectual Life. Then I participated in a really exciting critica!

exchange with feminist literary critic Mary Childers, published

in Conflicts inFeminism. The first dialogue was meant to serve as

a model for critica! exchange between male and female, and

among black scholars. The second was meant to shaw that sol-

idarity can and does exist between individual progressive white and black feminist thinkers. In both cases there seemed

to be much more public representation of the divisions be-

tween these groups than description or highlighting of those powerful moments when boundaries are crossed, differences

confronted, discussion happens, and solidarity emerges. We

needed concrete counter-examples that would disrupt the

seemingly fixed (yet often unstated) assumptions that it was

really unlikely such individuals could meet across boundaries.

Without these counter-examples I felt we were all in danger of

losing contact, of creating conditions that would make contact

impossible. Hence, I formed my conviction that public dia- logues could serve as useful interventions.

When I began this collection of essays, I was particularly interested in challenging the assumption that there could be

no points of connection and camaraderie between white male

scholars ( often se en, rightly or wrongly, as representing the

embodiment of power and privilege or oppressive hierarchy)

and marginalized groups (women of all races or ethnicities,

Bui1ding a T eaching Community 131

and men of color). In recent years, many white male scholars

bave become critically engaged with my writing. It troubles me

that this engagement has been viewed suspiciously or seen

merely as an act of appropriation meant to enhance oppor-

tunistic agendas. If we rcally want to create a cultural climate

where biases can be challenged and changed, all border cross-

ings must bc seen as valid and legitimate. This does not mean

that they are not subjected to critique or critical interrogation, or that there will not be many occasions when the crossings of

the powerful in to the terrains of the powerless will not perpet-

uate existing structures. This risk is ultimately less threatening than a continued attachment to and support of existing sys-

tems of domination, particularly as they affect teaching, how

we teach, and what we teach. To provi de a model o f possibility, I chose to engage in a dia-

logue with Ron Scapp, a white male philosopher, comrade, and

friend. Unti! recently he taught in the philosophy department at Queens College, and worked as the Director of the College

Preparatory Program in the School of Education, and the

author of a manuscript entitled A Qyestion ofVoice: The Search for

Legitimacy. Currently, he is Director of the Graduate Programin

Urban Multi-Cultural Education at the College of Mount St.

Vincent. I first met Ron when I came to Queens College in the

company of twelve students who were taking the Toni Morrison seminar I taught at O berlin College. We went to a conference

on Morrison where she spoke, and where I gave a talk as well.

My critical perspective on her work, especially Beloved, was not

well received. As I was leaving the conference, surrounded by

students, Ron approached me and.shared his responses to my

ideas. This was the beginning of an intense critica! exchange

about teaching, writing, ideas, and life. I wanted to include this dialogue because we inhabit different locations. Even though

Ron is white and mal e ( two locations that bestow specific pow-

crs and privileges), I have taught primarily at private institu-

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132 Teaching to Transgress

tions ( deemed more prestigi ous than the s ta te institutions where we both now teach) and have higher rank, and more

prestige. We both corne from working-class backgrounds, His roots are in the city, mine in rural America. Understanding and

appreciating o ur different locations has be en a necessary frame-

work for the building of professional and political solidarity

between us, as well as for creating a space of emotional trust where intimacy and regard for one another can be nourished.

Over the years, Ron and I have had many discussions about o ur rol e as critica! thinkers, professors in the academy. Just as I

have had to confront critics who se e my work as "not scholariy,

or not scholarly enough," Ron has had to deal with critics pos-

ing the question of whether he is doing "real philosophy," espe-

cially when he draws on my work and that of other thinkers

who have not had traditional training in philosophy. Both ofus are passionately committed to teaching. Our shared concern

that the role ofthe teacher not be devalued was a starting paint for this discussion. It is our hope that it willlead to many such discussions, that it will show that white males can and do

change how they think and teach, and that interaction across and with our differences can be meaningful and enrich our

teaching practices, scholarly work, and habits of being within and outside the academy.

bell hooks: Rou, !et' s start with talking about how we see om-

selves as teachers. One of the ways that this book has

made me think about my teaching process is that I feel

that the way I teach has been fundamentally structured

by the fact that I never wanted to be an academic, so that

I never had a fantasy of myself as a professor already worked out in my imagination before I entered the class-

room. I think that's been meaningful, because it's freed

me up to feel that the professor is something I become as

Building a Teaching Community 133

opposed to a kind of identity that's already structured

and that I carry with me in to the classroom.

Ron Scapp: And in a similar but perhaps slightly different mode, i t's not so much that I never wanted to be a profes-

sor-I never thought about i t. All my life was very much

outside the classroom. Many of my friends never went on to finish college-some of them didn 't finish high school

-so there was not the thing about school as a profession-

al track, and I think your not wanting to be a professor

was not wanting that professional identification as such. I

never even thought about it. bh: But like you said, I didn't either. I mean, as a young, black

woman in the segregated South, I thought-and my par-

ents thought-that I would return to that world and be a

teacher in the public school. But there was never any idea

that I could be a university professor because, truth be told,

we didn't know of any black women university professors.

RS: In a different but similar way, my parents, working class, saw education as really a means to an end, not the end

paint, so that as one got a university education, one went on to be a lawyer or a doctor. For them it was a means to

enhance your economic status. Not that they look down

at university professors, it just wasn't what one did. One

got educated to earn money, a living, and start a family.

bh: How long have you been teaching? RS: I started at LaGuardia Community College when I grad-

uated Queens College in 1979. I was in the remedial ba- sic skills department. We taught remedial reading and

English. bh: And then you went on to get your Ph.D. in philosophy? RS: Yes, so I was teaching during graduate school. Since 1979

l've been involved teaching part-time or full-time. So,

what's that, fourteen years?

134 Teaching to Transgress

bh: l've been teaching since I was 21. As a graduate student I taught my own courses using Mrican American Litera-

ture and Mrican American women's stuff just because I was interested in doing that and there was a student body willing to take those courses. But I was a late bloomer in terms of getting my Ph.D., even though I was already in

the classroom. I see myself having been in the college classroom for 20 years. !t's interesting that you and I would me et when I brought my O berlin students to Queens for a conference. I think that part ofwhat we connected to was a concern, evidenced by the paper I gave, with notjust the academic work we were doing in the classroom, but how that academic work affects us beyond the classroom. We 've spen t the years since our meeting talking about pedagogy and teaching; one of the things that has con- nected us is that we both bave a real concern with educa- tion as liberatory practice and with pedagogical strategies that may be not just for o ur students but for ourselves.

RS: Absolutely. That's also a nice way of understanding or describing how I, in fact, came to feel more and more comfortable a bo ut the rol e of professor.

bh: I want to return to the idea that somehow it was my disin- vestment in the notion of the professor or academic as my identity that I think has made me more willing to question and interrogate this role. If perhaps we look at where I really do see my identity, which is more often as a writer, maybe I'm much less flexible in imagining that practice than I am in seeing myself as a professor. I feel l've benefited a lot from not being attached to myself as an academic or professor. I t's made me willing to be criti- ca! of my own pedagogy and to accept criticism from my students and other people without feeling that to ques- tion how I teach is somehow to question my right to exist on the planet. I f ee! that on e o f the things blocking a lot

Building a Teaching Community 135

of professors from interrogating their own pedagogical practices is that fear that "this is my identity and I can 't ques- tion that identity. "

RS: We were talking about professional direction-that's may- be an awkward expression-an attempt to get at a sense

of calling. We talked about the difference between seeing the title of professor or university teacher or even just teacher itself as a mere professional bridge like lawyer or doctor, a term that within our own working-class commu- nities brought prestige or significance to who we already were. But as teachers I think our emphasis has, over the years, been to affirm who we are through the transaction of being with other people in the classroom and achiev- ing something there. Not just relaying information or stating things, but working with people.

We were talking a little bit earlier about the way in which we are physically in that space, coming in to it from the community.

bh: One of the things I was saying is that, as a black woman, I bave always been acutely aware of the presence of my body in those settings that, in fact, invite us to invest so

deeply in a mind/body split so that, in a sense, you're almost always at odds with the existing structure, whether you are a black woman student or professor. But if you want to remain, you've got, in a sense, to remember your- self-because to remember yourself is to see yourself always as a body in a system that has not become accus- tomed to your presence or to your physicality.

RS: Similarly, as a white university teacher in his thirties, I'm profoundly aware of my presence in the classroom as well, given the history of the mal e body, and of the mal e teacher. I need to be sensitive to and critica! of my pres- ence in the history that has led me there. Yet it's compli- cated by the fact that you and I are both sensitive to-and

136

bh:

RS:

bh:

Teaching to Transgress

maybe even suspicious of-those who seem to be . retreat- mg a":ay from a real, maybe radical consciousness of the

body mto a very conservative mind/body split. Some

mal~ colleagues are hiding behind this, repressing their bodzes noto ut o f deference but o ut of fear.

And it's interesting that it is in those private spaces where

sexual harassment goes on-in offices or other kinds of spaces-one has to experience the revenge of th e re~ pressed. We talked about Michel Foucault as an example

of someone who in theory seemed to challenge those

~im~listic binary oppositions and mind/body splits. But 1~ hzs hfe practice as a teacher, he clearly made a separa- tlon between that space where he saw himself as a prac- ticing intellectual-where he not only saw himself as a

critica! thinker but was seen as a critica! thinker-and

that space where he was body. It really is clear that the

space of high culture was where he was in mind, and the

s pac e of the street and street culture ( and popular cul-

turc, marginalized culture) was where he felt he could be most expressive of himself within the body.

He's quoted as saying that he felt most free in the baths in

San Francisco. In bis writing maybe there isn't so much of that division and dualism, but as far as I know-never

having been in a classroom with him-he took the pose

of the tradicional French intellectual very seriously.

As a traditional white mal e French intellectual. I t's impor- tant that you add that because we can't even name any

black male French intellectuals off the bat. Even though

we know that they must exist; like the rest of Europe, France is no longer white.

I think that one of the unspoken discomforts sur- rounding the way a discourse of race and gender, class

and sexual practice has disrupted the academy is precise-

ly the challenge to that mind/body split. Once we start

RS:

bh:

Building a T eaching Community 137

talking in the classroom about the body and about how we li ve in o ur badies, we 're automatically challenging the

way power has orchestrated itself in that particular institu-

tionalized space. The person who is most powerful has

the privilege of denying their body. I remember as an

undergraduate I had white mal e professors who wore the

sam e tweed jacket and rumpled shirt or something, but

we all knew that we had to pretend. You would never com-

ment on his dress, because to do so would be a sign of

your own intellectual lack. The paint was we should all

respect that he's there to be a mind and nota body. Certain feminist thinkers--and the two people who

corne to my mind in t.his way are, interestingly, Lacan

scholars, Jane Gallop and Shoshana Felman-have tried to write about the presence of the teacher as a body in the

classroom, the presence of the teacher as someone who

has a total effect on the development of the student, not

just an intellectual effect but an effect on how that stu-

dent perceives reality beyond the classroom. These are all things that weigh heavily on anyone who's

taking seriously the history of the body of knowledge that

is personified in the teacher. We were talking about how, in a way, our work brings our selves, our badies in to the

classroom. The tradicional notion of being in the class-

room is a teacher behind a desk or standing at the front,

immobilized. In a weird way that recalis the firm, immo-

bilized body of knowledge as part of the immutability of

truth itself. So what if one's clothing is soiled, if one's

pants are not adjusted propeFly, or your shirt's sloppy. As ]ong as the mind is still working elegantly and eloquently,

that's what is supposed to be appreciated. Our roman tic notion of the professor is so tied to a sense

of the transitive mind, a mind that, in a sense, is always at

odds with the body. I think part of why everyone in the

138 Teaching to Transgress

culture, and stndents in general, bave a tendency to see

professors as people who don't work is totally tied to that

sense of the immobile body. Part of the class separation

between what we do and what the majority of people in

this culture can do (service, work, labor) is that they move

their bodies. Liberatory pedagogy really demands that

one work in the classroom, and that one work with the

limits of the body, work both with and through and

against those limits: teachers may insist that it doesn't

matter whether you stand behind the podium or the desk,

but it does. I remember in my early teaching days that when I first tried to move out beyond the desk, I felt real-

ly nervous. I remember thinking, "This really is about

power. I really do feel more 'in control' when I'm behind

the podium or behind the desk than when I'm walking

towards my students, standing close to them, maybe even

touching them." Acknowledging that we are bodies in the

classroom has been important for me, especially in my efforts to disrupt the noti on of professor as omnipotent, all-knowing mind.

RS: When you leave the podium and walk around, suddenly

the way you smell, the way you move become very appar-

ent to your students. Aiso, you bring with you a certain

kind of potential, though not guaranteed, for a certain

kind of face-to-face relationship and respect for "what I

say" and ''what you say." Student and professor are lo o king

at each other. And as we corne physically close, suddenly

what I bave to say is not coming from behind this invisible

line, this wall of demarcation that implies anything that from this side of the desk is gold, is truth, or that every-

thing said out there is merely for my consideration, that

the only possible way I can res po nd is by saying "good,"

"right," and so on. As people move around it becomes more evident that we work in the classroom. For some

Building a T eaching Community 139

teachers, and especially older faculty, there is a desire to

enjoy the privilege of appearing not to work in the class-

room. I t's odd in and of itself, but it's particularly ironic

since faculty members congregate outside the classroom

and talk endlessly about how bard they're working.

bh: The arrangement of the body we are talking about de-

emphasizes the reality that professors are in the class-

room to offer something of our selves to the students.

The erasure of the body encourages us to think that we are listening to neutral, objective facts, facts that are not

particular to who is sharing the information. We are invit-

ed to teach information as though it does not emerge

from bodies. Significantly, those of us who are trying to

critique biases in the classroom have been compelled to

return to the body to speak about ourselves as subjects in

history. We are all subjects in history. We must return o ur-

selves to a state of embodiment in order to deconstruct

the way power has been traditionally orchestrated in the

classroom, denying subjectivity to some groups and ac-

cording it to others. By recognizing subjectivity and the limits of identity, we disrupt that objectification that is so

necessary in a culture of domination. That is why the

efforts to acknowledge our subjectivity and that of our

students has generated both a fierce critique and back-

lash. Even though Dinesh D'Souza and Allau Bloom pre-

sent this critique as fundamentally a critique of ideas, it is also a critique of how those ideas get subverted, disrupt-

ed, taken apart in the classroom.

RS: If professors take seriously, respectfully, the student body, we are compelled to acknowledge that we are addressing

folks who are part o f history. And som e o f them are com-

ing from histories that might be threatening to the estab-

lished ways of knowing if acknowledged. This is especially

the case for professors and teachers who, in the class-

140 T eaching to Transgress

room, corne face to face with individuals they do not see in their own neighborhoods. For example, in the urban university settings, on my own campus, a good number of the professors don't live in New York City; some don't live

in New ~ork state. They live in Connecticut or New Jersey or they hve on Long Island. Many of their communities are very isolated, not reflecting the racial mixture of peo-

ple that are on their campus. I think that this is why so many of these professors see themselves as liberal, even as they maintain conservative positions in the classroom. This seems especially so with issues of race. Many of us want to act as though race doesn'tmatter, that we are here for what's interesting in the mind, that history doesn't matter even if you 've been screwed over, or your parents were immigrants or the children of immigrants who have labored for forty years and have nothing to show for it. Recognition of that must be suspended; and the rationale for this erasure is that logic which says, "What we do here is seien ce, what we do here is objective history."

bh: It is fascinating to see the ways erasure of the body con- nects to the e rasure of class differences, and more impor-

tantly, the erasure of the role of university settings as sites for the reproduction of a privileged class ofvalues, of elit- ism. All these issues are exposed when Western civiliza- tion and canon formation are challenged and rigorously interrogated. That's exactly what's threatening to conser- vative academics-the possibility that such critiques will dismantle the bourgeois idea of a "professor" and that, as a consequence, the sense of our significance and our role as teachers in the classroom would need to be fundamen- tally changed. While writing the essays in this book, I con- tinuously thought about the fact that I know so many professors who are progressive in their polítics, who have been willing to change their currículum, but who in fact

Building a T eaching Community 141

ha ve resolutely refused to change the nature of their ped-

agogical practice. RS: Many of these professors have no awareness o f how they

conduct themselves in the classroom. For example, a teacher mig ht introduce works by you, or by intellectuals from other groups underrepresented in the academy, yet

they will work with these texts, work with the ideas they share, in ways that suggest there is ultimately no differ- ence between this work and more conservative work emerging from folks privileged by class, race, or gender.

bh: I t's also really important to acknowledge that professors may attempt to deconstruct traditional biases while shar- ing that information through body pasture, tone, word choice, and so on that perpetuate those very hierarchies

and biases they are critiquing. RS: Exactly. That's the problem. On the one hand, you have

the repetition of that whole tradition; and on the other hand, what does it do to the text being presented? It

seems safer to present very radical texts as just so many other books to be added to the traditional lists-the

already-existing canon. bh: The example that comes to my mind is that of a white

female English professor who is more than happy to in- clude Toni Morrison on her syllabus but who does not want to discuss race when talking about the book. For she sees this as a much more threatening interrogation of what it means to be a professor than the call to cbange the currículum. And she is right to see the call to change pedagogical strategies as risky. Certainly teachers who are trying to institutionalize progressive pedagogical prac- tices risk being subjected to discrediting critiques.

RS: That's right. Professors who in fact do evoke the necessity of tradition could talk about it differently. Tradition should be such a wonderful word, a rich word. Yet it is

142 Teaching to Transgress

often used in a negative sense to repeat the trad't• (: 1 Ion of the power of status quo. We could celebrate the t d' · ra ltion of teachers who have created a curriculurn th t · . a Is pro- gressive. But such a tradition is never narned or ¡ va ued· even when reading radical texts there is a need to d . '

' O so In a ~ay that validate,s the scholarship that they've been nused on. They can t !et go of i t. Even when they read cer- tain things in class, it has to be ultirnately presented in a

fashion that is not inconsistent with everything else that has corne before it. But it devalues the significance, the 1rnpact, o f a work by Toni Morrison, or by yourself, if it is not taught in a rnanner that goes against the grain. In philosophy classes today, work on race, ethnicity, and gender is used, but not in a subversive way. It is sirnply used to update the curriculurn superficially. This clinging to the past is rnandated by the profound belief in the legitirnacy of all that has corne befo re. Teachers who have these beliefs really have trouble experirnenting and risk- ing their bodies-the social order. They want the class- roorn to be the way it has always been.

bh: I want to reiterate that rnany teachers who do not have difficulty releasing oid ideas, ernbracing new ways of thinking, rnay still be as resolutely attached to oid ways of practicing teaching as their more conservative colleagues. That's a crucial issue. Even those of us who are experi- rnenting with progressive pedagogical practices are afraid to change. Aware o f rnyself as a subjectin history, arnem- ber o f a marginalized and oppressed gro up, victimized by institutionalized racisrn, sexisrn, and class elitism, I had tremendous fear that I would teach in a rnanner that would reinforce those hierarchies. Yet I had absolutely no model, no exarnple o f what it would rnean to enter a class- room and teach in a different way. The urge to experi- ment with pedagogical practices rnay not be welcomed by

Building a Teaching Community 143

students who often expect us to teach in the manner they are accustomed to. My point is that it takes a fierce com- mitment, a will to struggle, to Jet our work as teachers

reflect progressive pedagogies. There is a critique of pro- gressi ve pedagogical practices that comes at us not just from the inside but from the outside as well. Bloom and D'Souza reached a mass audience and were able to give a distorted impression of progressive pedagogy. I t's fright- ening to me that the mass media has not only offered the

public a sense that there really has been som e kind of rev- olution in education where conservative white men are

just completely discredited when we know that very little has changed, that only a tiny group of professors advo-

cate progressive pedagogy. We inhabit real institutions where very little seems to be changed, where there are

very few changes in the curriculum, almost no paradigm shifts, and where knowledge and information continue to be presented in the conventionally accepted manner.

RS: As you were saying earlier, conservative thinkers have managed to make their argument outside the university and even persuade students that the quality of their edu- cation will diminish if changes are made. For exarnple, I think many students confuse a Jack of recognizable tradi-

tional formality with a Jack of seriousness. bh: What' s really scary is that the negative critique of pro-

gressive pedagogy affects us-makes teachers afraid to change-to try new strategies. Many feminist professors, for example, begin their careers working to institutional- ize more radical pedagogical practices, but when stu- dents did not appear to "respect their authority" they felt these practices were faulty, unreliable, and returned to traditional practices. Of course, they should have expect- ed that students who have had a more conventional edu- cation would be threatened by and even resist teaching

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144 Teaching to Transgress

practices which insist that students participate in educa- tion and not be passive consumers.

RS: That's very difficult to cornrnunicate to students because rnany of thern are already convinced that they cannot re-

spond to appeals that they be engaged in the classroorn, because they've already been trained to view thernselves as not the ones in authority, not the ones with legitirnacy. To acknowledge student responsibility for the learning process is to place it where i t's least legitirnate in their own eyes. When we try to change the classroorn so that there is a sense of mutual responsibility for learning, stu- dents get scared that you are now not the captain working with thern, but that you are after all just another crew rnernber-and nota reliable one at that.

bh: To educate for freedorn, then, we have to challenge and

change the way everyone thinks about pedagogical proc- ess. This is especially true for students. Before we try to engage thern in a dialectical discussion of ideas that is mutual, we have to teach about process. I teach rnany white students and they hold diverse political stances. Yet they corne in to a class on Mrican Arnerican wornen's lit- erature expecting to hear no discussion of the po li tics of race, class, and gender. Often these students will corn-

plain, "Well I thought this was a literature class." What they're really saying to rne is, "I thought this class was going to be taught like any other literature class I would take, only we would now substitute black fernale writers for white rnale writers." They accept the shift in the locus of representation but resist shifting ways they think about ideas. That is threatening. That' s why the critique of rnul- ticulturalisrn seeks to shut the classroorn down again-to halt this revolution in how we know what we know. I t's as though rnany people know that the focus on difference has the potential to revolutionize the classroorn and they

Building a Teaching Community 145

do not want the revolution to take place. There is a major backlash that seeks to delegitirnize progressive pedagogy by saying, "This keeps us frorn having serious thoughts and serio us education." That critique returns us to the

issue surrounding teaching differently. How do we cope with how we are perceived by our colleagues? l've actual- ly had colleagues say to rne, "Students seern to really enjoy your class. What are you doing wrong?"

RS: Colleagues say to rne, "Your students seern to be enjoying thernselves, they seern to be laughing whenever I walk by, you seern to be having a good tirne." And the irnplication is that you're a good joke-teller, you're a good perforrner, but no serious teaching is happening. Pleasure in the classroorn is feared. If there is laughter, a reciproca! ex- change rnay be taking place. You're laughing, the students are laughing, and sorneone walks by, looks in and says, "OK, you're able to rnake thern laugh. But so what? Any- one can entertain." They can take this attitude because the idea of reciprocity, of respect, is not ever assurned. It is not assurned that your ideas can be entertaining, rnoving. To prove your acadernic seriousness, students should be alrnost dead, quiet, asleep, not up, excited, and buzzing, lingering around the classroorn.

bh: It is as though we are to imagine that knowledge is this rich crearny pudding students should consume and be nourished by, but not that the process of gestation should also be pleasurable. As a teacher working to develop liber- atory pedagogy I arn discouraged when I encounter stu- dents who believe if there 's '! different practice they can be less cornrnitted, !e ss disciplined. I think o ur fear of los- ing students' respect has discouraged rnany professors frorn trying new teaching practices. Instead, sorne of us think, "I rnust return to the traditional way of doing it, otherwise I don't get the respect, and the students don't

'li

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146 T eaching to T ransgress

get the education they deserve because they don't listen."

When I was a student, I embraced any professor who want-

ed to creatc more progressive teaching practices. I still

remember the excitement I felt when I took my first class

where the teacher wanted to change how we sat, where we

moved from sitting in rows to a circle where we could look

at one another. That change forced us to recognize one

another's presence. We couldn't sleepwalk our way to

knowledge. Nowadays, there are times when students

resist sitting in a circle. They devalue that shift, because

fundamentally, they don't want to be participants.

RS: They see this practice as an empty gesture, not as an

important pedagogical shift. bh: They may think, "Why should I bave to do this in your

class, but notin all my other classes?" !t's been amazing and discouraging to encounter the resisting student, who

is not open to liberatory practice, even as I simultaneous-

ly see so many students craving liberatory practice.

RS: Even students who long for liberatory education, who

appreciate it, find themselves resisting because they bave to go to other classes where the class begins at a certain

time, ends at a certain time, where all these regulations

are in place as modes of expressi on of power, rather than

what needs to be done to bave some sense of possibility

for sustained conversation. As we said earlier, we can

intervene and change resistance by sharing our under-

standing of practice. I tell students not to confuse infor-

mality with a Jack of seriousness, to respect the process.

Because I teach in an informal way, students often feel

like they can just get up, walk o ut, and com e back. They are not comfortable. And I remind them that in their

other classes where the teacher says if you miss on e class

you're out of the class, they are docile, willing to comply

with arbitrary rules about behavior.

Building a T eaching Communlty 147

bh: I had an interesting experience !ast semester teaching at City College. I couldn't corne to class one day and I had a

substitute corne, a person who was much more a tradition- al thinker, a traditional authoritarian, and the students

conformed for the most part to those pedagogical prac-

tices. When I returned and I asked, "Well, what happened

in class?" the students shared their perception that she

had really humiliated a student, used her power forcibly

to silence. ''Well, what did you all say?" I asked. They

admitted that they had sat there silently. These revelations

made me see how deeply ingrained is the student percep-

tion that professors can be and should be dictators. To

some extent, they saw me as "dictating" that they engage

in liberatory practice, so they complied. l-lence when

another teacher entered the classroom and was more

authoritarian they simply fell in to line. But.the triumph of

liberatory pedagogy was that we had the space to interro-

gate their actions. They could look at themselves and say,

''Why didn't we stand up for what we believe? Why didn't

we maintain the value of our class? Do we see ourselves

simply acting in complicity with her vision of liberatory

practice, or are we committed to this practice ourselves?"

RS: Weren't their responses probably influenced by habit? bh: It's very important to emphasize habit. !t's so difficult to

change existing structures because the habit of repres- sion is the norm. Education as the practice of freedom is

notjust about liberatory knowledge, i t's about a liberato-

ry practice in the classroom. So many of us bave critiqued

the individual white male schplars who push critica! ped-

agogy yet who do not alter their classroom practices, who

assert race, class, and gender privilege without interro-

gating their conduct.

RS: In the way that they talk to students, call upon students, the control that they try to maintain, the comments they

148 Teaching to Transgress

make, they reinforce the status quo. This confuses stu- dents. It reinforces the impression that, despite what we read, despite what this guy says, ifwe really just look care-

fully at the way he's saying it, who he rewards, how he approaches people, there is no real difference. These

actions undermine liberatory pedagogy. bh: Once again, we are referring to a discussion of whether

or nat we subvert the classroom's politics of domination simply by using different material, or by having a differ-

ent, more radical standpoint. Again and again, you and I are saying that different, more radical subject matter

does nat crea te a liberatory pedagogy, that a simple prac- tice like including personal experience may be more constructively challenging than simply changing the cur- rículum. That is why there has been such critique of the place of experience-of confessional narrative-in the classroom. On e of the ways you can be written o ff quickly as a professor by colleagues who are suspicions of pro-

gressive pedagogy is to allow your students, or yourself, to talk about experience; sharing personal narratives yet linking that knowledge with academic information really

enhances our capacity to know. RS: When one speaks from the perspective of one's immedi-

ate experiences, something's created in the classroom for students, sometimes for the very first time. Focusing on experience allows students to claim a knowledge base

from which they can speak. bh: On e of the most misunderstood aspects of my writing on

pedagogy is the emphasis on voice. Coming to voice is nat just the act of telling one's experience. It is using that telling strategically-to corne to voice so that you can also speak freely about other subjects. What many professors are frightened of is precisely that. I had a difficult mo- ment last semester at City College in my seminar on Black

Building a T eaching Community 149

Women Writers. At the last class I talked with students about what they had brought individually to the class- room; but when they spoke, they showed me that o ur class had made them fear taking other classes. They confessed, ''You've taught us how to think critically, to challenge, and to confront, and you've encouraged us to have a voice.

But how can we go to other classrooms? No one wants us to have a va ice in those classrooms!" This is the tragedy of education that does not promote freedom. And repressive education practices are more acceptable at state institu- tions than at places like Oberlin or Yale. In the privileged liberal arts colleges, it is acceptable for professors to respect the "voice" of any student who wants to make a paint. Many students in those institutions feel they are entitled-that their voices deserve to be heard. But stu-

dents in public institutions, mostly from working-class backgrounds, corne to college assuming that professors see them as having nothing of value to say, no valuable contribution to make to a dialectical exchange of i de as.

RS: Sometimes professors may even act as though personal recognition is important, but they do so in a superficial way. Professors, even those who view themselves as liberal, may think that it's good for students to speak, only to pro- ceed in a manner that devalues what the students say.

bh: We're willing to hear Suzie speak even as we then imme- diately turn away from her words, erasing them. This undermines a pedagogy that seeks constandy to affirm the value of student voices. It suggests a democratic proc- ess by which we erase words, .and their capacity to influ- ence and affirm. With that erasure Suzie is nat able to se e herself as a speaking subject worthy of voice. I don't mean only in terms o f how she names her personal expe- rience, but how she interrogates both the experiences of others, and how she responds to knowledge presented.

ISO T eaching to T ransgress

RS: In many classes this comes full circle. In the end it's the

teacher's voice that everyone knew all along was the only

one to listen to. And now that we've gone around in a ci!' cle-an exaggerated thing-we all know that the democ-

ratic voice, an expression of that voice, leads to a rather

conservative conclusion. Even though students are speak-

ing they don 't really know how to lis ten to other students. bh: In regards to pedagogical practices we must intervene to

alter the existing pedagogical structure and to teach stu- dents how to listen, how to hear one another.

RS: So on e of the responsibilities of the teacher is to help cre-

a te an environment where students learn that, in addi-

tion to speaking, it is important to listen respectfully to

others. This doesn't mean we listen uncritically or that

classrooms can be open so that anything someone else

says is taken as true, but it means really taking seriously what someone says. In principie, the classroom ought to

be a place where things are said seriously-not without

pleasure, not without joy-but seriously, and for serio us

consideration. I notice many students have difficulty tak-

ing seriously what they themselves have to say because

they are convinced that the only person who says any- thing of note is the teacher. Even if another student does

say something that the teacher says is good, helpful, smart, whatever, it's only through the act of the teacher's

validating that the other students take note. If the

teacher doesn't seem to indicate that this is something

worth noting, few students will. I see it as a fundamental

responsibility of the teacher to shaw by example the abil-

ity to listen to others seriously. Our focus on student voice raises a whole range of questions about silencing. At what

paint does on e say what someone else is saying ought not

to be pursued in the classroom?

Building a T eaching Community ISI

bh: One of the reasons I appreciate people linking the per- sonal to the academic is that I think that the more stu-

dents recognize their own uniqueness and particularity,

the more they listen. So, one of my teaching strategies is

to redirect their attention away from my voice to one

another's voices. I often find that this happens most

quickly when students share experiences in conjunction

with academic subject matter, because then people re-

member each other.

Earlier I raised the dilemma that professors who can-

nat communicate well cannot teach students how to com-

municate. Many professors who are critica! of the

indusion of confessional narrative in the classroom or of

digressive discussions, where students are doing a lot of

the talking, are critica! because they lack the skill needed

to facilitate dialogue. Once the space for dialogue is open

in the dassroom, that moment must be orchestrated so

that you don't get bogged clown with people who just like

to hear themselves talk, or with people who are unable to

relate experience to the academic subject matter. At times

I need to interrupt students and say, "That's interesting,

but how does that relate to the navei we're reading?"

RS: Many people, both students and professors, believe that

when they hear people like ourselves talking about

encouraging a student's opinion in class we're merely

endorsing the stereotypical rap session: everyone says anything they want; there's no real direction or purpose

to the class other than making each other feel good; that

anything can be said. Yet one can be critica! and be re-

spectful at the same time. One can interrupt someone,

and still have a serious, respectful dialogue. All too often

it is assumed that ifyou "give students the freedom"-and

it's a mistake to think we're talking about giving students

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152 T eaching to Transgress

freedom rather than seeing it is a project that teachers

and students are working on together-there will be

chaos, that no serious discussion will ensue.

bh: That' s the difference education as the practice of frec-

dom makes. The bottom-line assumption has to be that

everyone in the classroom is able to act responsibly. That

has to be the starting point-that we are able to act re-

sponsibly together to create a learning environment. All

too often we have been trained as professors to assume

students are not capable of acting responsibly, that ifwe

don't exert control over them, then there'sjust going to

be mayhem. RS: Or excess. There is such a fear of letting go in the class-

room, o f taking risks. When professors Jet go it is not only the s tuden t voice that must speak freely but also the pro-

fessor' s voice. Teachers need to practice freedom, to

speak,just as much as students do.

bh: Absolutely; That's a point I keep making in my pedagogy essays over and over again. In much feminist scholarship

criticizing critical pedagogy, there is an attack on the no-

tion of the classroom as a space where students are

empowered. Yet the classroom should be a space where we're all in power in different ways. That means we pro-

fessors should be empowered by our interactions with

s tu dents. In my books I try to show how much my work is

influenced by what students say in the classroom, what

they do, what they express to me. Along with them I grow

intellectually, developing sharper understandings of how

to share knowledge and what to do in my participatory rol e with students. This is on e of the primary differences

between education as a practice of freedom and the con-

servative banking system which encourages professors to

believe deep clown in the core of their being that they

have nothing to learn from their students.

Building a Teachlng Community 153

And that goes back to your emphasis on engaged peda-

gogy, on commitment. Intellectuals, even radical intellec-

tuals, have to be careful not to reinscribe the very modes

of domination in our practice with students. Using libera-

tory discourse is not enough ifwe ultimately fall back on

the banking system. bh: When I enter the classroom at the beginning of the

semester the weight is on me to establish that our pur-

pose is to be, for however brief a time, a community of

!carners togethcr. It posi tions me as a learner. But I'm also not suggesting that I don't have more power. And I'm not

trying to say we're all equal he re. I'm trying to say that we

are all equal here to the extent that we are equally com-

mitted to creating a learning context. RS: That's right. That returns us to the issue of res pec t. Sure,

it's bad faith to pretend that we're all the same because

the teacher's the one who ultimately is going to grade. In

traditional terms that is the source of power, and judging

is something we all do as students and as teachers. That's

nat really the source of power in the successful class-

room. The power of the liberatory classroom is in fact

the power of the learning process, the work we do to

establish a community. bh: Another difficulty I had to work through early on as a

professor was evaluating whether or nat our experience

in the classroom had been rewarding. In the classes I

teach, students are often presented with new paradigms

and are being asked to shift their ways of thinking to con-

sider new perspectives. In the past I have often felt that

this type of learning process is very hard; it's painful and troubling. It may be six months or a year, even twa years

later, that they realize the importance of what they have

learned. That was really hard for me, because I think part

o f what the banking system does for professors is crea te

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154

RS:

bh:

T eaching to T ransgress

the system where we want to feel that by the end of the

semester every student will be sitting there filling out

their evaluations testirying that I'm a "good teacher." I t's

all about feeling good, feeling good about me, and feel-

ing good about the class. But in reconceptualizing en-

gaged pedagogy I had to realize that our purpose here

isn 't really to f ee! good. Maybe we enjoy certain classes,

but it will usually be difficult. We have to learn how to

appreciate difficulty, too, as a stage in intellectual devel-

opment. Or accept that that cozy, good feeling may at

times block the possibility of giving students space to feel

that there is integrity to be found in grappling with diffi-

cult material, whether that material comes from confes-

sional narratives, books, or discussions.

Genuinely radical critica! teachers are conscious of this

even though their peers and some students don't fully

appreciate it. Sometimes it's important to remind stu-

dents that joy can be present along with hard work. Not

every moment in the classroom will necessarily be one

that brings you immediate pleasure, but that doesn't pre-

clude the possibility of joy. Nor does it deny the reality that learning can be painful. And sometimes it's neces-

sary to remind students and colleagues that pain and

painful situations don't necessarily translate inta harm.

We make that very fundam en tal mistake all the tim e. Not

all pain is harm, and not all pleasure is good. Many col-

leagues walk by a class that's engaged and see students

working, see them either in tears, or smiling and la~gh­

ing, and assume ifs mere emotion. Or if it's emotional that i t's a kind of gro up therapy. Few

professors talk about the place of emotions in the class-

room. In the introductory chapter of this book I talk

about my longing that the classroom be an exciting

place. Ifwe are all emotionally shut clown, how can there

RS:

bh:

Building a Teaching Community 155

be any excitement about ideas? When we bring our pas-

siau to the classroom our collective passions corne to-

gether, and there is often an emotional response, one

that can overwhelm. The restrictive, repressive classroom

ritual insists that emotional responses bave no place.

Whenever emotional res panses erupt, many of us believe

our academic purpose has been diminished. To me this

is really a distorted notion of intellectual practice, since

the underlying assumption is that to be truly intellectual

we must be cut off from o ur emotions.

Or, as you pointed out, it's another practice of denial,

wherein the full body and sou! of a person is not allowed

in the classroom. If we focus not just on whether the emotions produce

pleasure or pain, but on how they keep us aware or alert,

we are reminded that they enhance classrooms. There

are times when I walk in to my class and the students seem

absolutely bored out of their minds. And I say to them,

''What's up? Everybody seems to be really bored today.

There seems to be a Jack of energy. What should we do? What can we do?" I might say, "Ciearly the direction we're

moving in doesn't seem to be awakening your senses,

your passions right now." My intent is to engage them

more fully. Often students want to deny that they are col-

lectively bored. They want to please me. Or they don't

want to be critica!. At such times I must stress that, ''I'm

not taking this personally. I t's not just my job to make this

class work. It's everyone's responsibility." They might reply, ''Well it's exam time," or "I t's this kind of time," or

"!t's the beginning of spring," or "We just don't want to be sitting here." And then I try to say, "Well, then, what

can we do? How can we approach our subject to make it

more interesting?" One of the most intense aspects oflib-

eratory pedagogical practice is the challenge on the part

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156 Teaching to Transgress

o f tbe professor to cbange tbe set agenda. We alllearn to

make lesson plans, and want to stick to them. When I

began teacbing, I would feel panic, a sense of crisis, if

tbere was a deviation from my set agenda. I tbink tbe cri-

sis we all feel about cbanging agendas is tbe fear tbat we

will not cover enougb material. And in tbinking tbis

througb I bave to undermine my own "I"; maybe tbe

material I most want tbem to know on a given day is not

necessarily wbat learning is a bo ut. Professors can disb out

all the rigbt material, but if people are not in a mind to

receive it, tbey leave classrooms empty of tbat informa-

tion, even tbougb we may feel we've really done our jobs.

RS: To focus on covering material precisely is one way to slip

back into a banking system. Tbat often bappens wben

teacbers ignore the mood of the class, tbe mood of the

season, even tbe mood of tbe building. Tbe simple act of

recognizing a mood and asking "What's tbis about?" can

awaken an exciting learning process.

bh: Rigbt. And bow we work witb tbat mood or bow we cope

ifwe can't work witb i t.

RS: Rigbt. I remember a very poignant moment for me

bappened during one class. Tbere bad been severa! dis-

ruptions tbat bappened beca use of problems witb scbed-

uling; classes were ending and beginning at odd times.

Students were forced to leave one class, go to anotber.

Tbis disruption involved about fifty people. At one point

tbere was a steady stream of people coming in to tbe class,

and tbere were jets flying over tbe Queens College cam- pus. I looked up and said, "Enougb, today. Tbis isn't

going to bappen unless you guys want to go somewbere else. I can't do anytbing more. !t's not working for me;

I'm failing." I asked wbetber anyone in tbe class would

want to take over, to lead tbe discussion, but everyone

agreed it wasn't working ou t. Mterwards, people ran after

Building a T eaching Community 157

me asking, "Are you upset? Are you mad at us?" I said, "Nat at all; tbis was like a bad ballgame. You know, it's

twelve-notbing in tbe first inning, and it's raining. Let's

call it a day." bh: Tbat brings us back to grades. Many professors arc afraid

of allowing nondirected tbougbt in tbe classroom for fear

that deviation from a set agenda will interfere witb tbe

grading process. A more flexible grading process must go

band in band witb a transformed classroom. Standards

must always be big b. Excellence must be valued, but stan-

dards cannot be absolute and fixed.

RS: In most of tbe courses I teacb, I take tbe position tbat I

arn observing. I arn there to observe and evaluate tbe

work tbat's being done.

bh: When you acknowledge that we are observers, it means

tbat we are workers in the classroom. To do tbat work well

we can't be simply standing in front of the class reading. If

I'm to know wbetber a student is participating I bave to be

listening, I bave to be recording, and I bave to be tbinking

beyond tbat moment. I want tbem to think, 'What I'm

bere for is to work witb material, and to work with it tbe

best way tbat I can. And in doing tbat I don't bave to be

fearful about my grade, because ifl arn working the best I can witb tbis material, I know i t's going to be reflected in

my grade." I try to communicate tbat tbe grade is some-

thing tbey can control by their labor in tbe classroom.

RS: I think that's a really important point. Many students feel they could never presum e to evaluate their own work posi-

tively. Someone else will decide bow bard or bow well they

are working. And so there is already a devaluation of their

own effort. Our task is to empower students so tbat they

bave the skills to assess their academic growth properly.

bh: The obsession with good grades has so much to do with fear of failure. Progressive teaching tries to eradicate that

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Teaching to Transgress

fear, both in students and in professors. There are mo- ments when I worry that I arn not being a "good" teacher

' and then I find myself struggling to break with a good/ bad binary. I t's more useful for me to think of myself as a progressive teacherwho's willing to own both my success- es and failures in the classroom. We often speak of the "good" teacher when we really

mean a professor who is engaged fully, deeply with the art of teaching. That makes me think immediately of engaged Buddhism, which can be juxtaposed with more orthodox Buddhism. Engaged Buddhism emphasizes participation and in- volvement, particularly involvement with a world beyond yourself. "Engaged" is a greal way to talk about liberatory classroom practice. It invites us always to be in the pre- sent, to remember that the classroom is never the same, Traditional ways of thinking about the classroom stress the opposite paradigm-that the classroom is always the same even when students are different. Sitting around with colleagues at the beginning of the school year, they often complain about this sameness, as though the class- room is inherently a static place. To me, the engaged classroom is always changing. Yet this notion of engage- ment threatens the institutionalized practices of domina- tion. When the classroom is truly engaged, i t's dynamic. I t's fluid. It's always changing. Last semester, I had a class where when I finished I was walking on air. It had been a great class. The students left realizing that they didn't have to think like me, that I wasn't there to reproduce myself. They left with a sense of engagement, with a sense of themselves as critica! thinkers, excited about intellec- tual activity. The semester befo re that, I had this class that I just hated. I hated it so badI didn't want to get up in the morning and go to it. I couldn't even sleep at night,

RS:

bh:

Building a Teaching Community 159

because I hated it so much I feared that I would sleep through i t. And it was an 8:00A.M. class. It didn't work. One of the things that fascinated me about that experi- ence is that we failed to create a learning community in the classroom, That did not mean that individual students

didn't learn a greal deal, but in terms of creating a com- munal context for learning, it was a failure. That failure was heartbreaking for me. It was bard to accept that I was notable to control the direction our classroom was mov- ing in. I would think, ''What can I do? And what could I have done?" And I kept reminding myself that I couldn't do it alone, that forty other people were also in there. Much ofwhat we have been saying speaks to our sense of time and temporality in the classroom. When new semes- ters begin I'm very aware that this is one of the most important moments. No matter that it's a ritual for stu- dents-there is also a genuine excitement. At the very beginning of each semester I try to use that excitement to deepen and enrich the classroom experience. I want to tap into that excitement about learning to sustain it, to keep it moving throughout the semester. Engaged teach- ers know that even in the worst circumstances, people tend to learn. People do tend to learn, but we want more than just learning; i t's sort o f like saying even under the worst circumstances, people survive; we're not interested

in simply surviving here. Absolutely. That's why "education as the practice of free- dom" is a phrase that has always wowed me. Students leave any classroom with information whether the peda- gogy has been engaging or not. I remember a class that I took from a professor who was a serio us alcoholic. He was a tragic figure, who often came late to the classroom and rambled on, but there was still something to be had from the material. But it was a horrible experience. We became

160 Teaching to Transgress

complicit in his substance abuse each class when we didn't see it. This example makes me think again about ways we see the body, the "self' of the professor. Even though he was stumbling around drunk, giving the same lecture he gave !ast week, we didn't tell him because we didn't want to disrupt his authority, his image of himself. We didn't

break through that de nial: we were simply complicit. RS: Complicity often happens because professors and students

alike are afraid to challenge, because that would mean

more work. Engaged pedagogy is physically exhausting! bh: And that's partly about numbers. Even the best, most

engaged classroom can fai! under the weight o f too many people. That's really been a problem for me in my teach- ing career. As l've become more and more committed to liberatory pedagogical practices, my classrooms have be- corne just too large. So those practices are undermined by sheer numbers. Rebelling against that has meant insisting on limits to classroom size. Overcrowded classes are like overcrowded buildings-the structure can collapse.

RS: Taking up your metaphor of a building, Jet' s say you have someone in the building who's in charge of maintaining it. The person's a great worker and does everything that should be done, meticulously and responsibly. But the owner of the building is simply overcrowding the building to a point where every system in the building-from the sewers to toilets, to the garbage, everything-is just over- burdened. This person eventually will be exhausted; and even though an incredible job is being done, the result will be a building that still looks dirty, that looks ill-kept, etc. In terms of the institution, we have to realize that ifwe are working on ourselves to become more fully engaged, there's only so much that we can do. Ultimately, the insti- tution will exhaust us simply beca use there is no sustained institutional support for liberatory pedagogical practices.

Building a Teaching Community 161

bh: !t's been really troubling to me. The more the engaged classroom becomes overcrowded, the more it is in danger

ofbeing a spectacle, a place of entertainment. When that happens, the potentially transformative power of that classroom is undermined, and my commitment to teach-

ing is undermined. RS: We have to resist being turned into spectacles. That

means resisting "star" status, resisting playing the role of performer. One of the disadvantages, l'd say, to your own

celebrity might be the attraction of certain people to the classroom to watch, rather than to be engaged. That's a problem in our culture with celebrity itself, but one can

refuse to be simply watched. bh: When we have star status, iconic status as professors,

people stop coming to classes solely because they desire participatory education. So me com e to see bell hooks per- forro. Students who corne for the "star" that they take to be bell hooks often engage in a sort of self censorship because theywant to please me. Or they corne to confront me. Ideally, students who want to be "devotees" would corne to be transformed by active participation. But the project of creating a learning community as a teacher is difficult enough without this added complication! The classroom is not for s tars; i t's a place for learning. For me, star status can be diffused by my willingness to inhabit locations where that status does not exist. Let's talk about ways we would alter our profession. I think it would enhance o ur teaching practices if professors didn 't always teach at the sam e type of institution. E ven though I have a radical commitrnent to teaching, I was very frightened about changing my teaching location. I feared that after teaching in wealthy private schools for so long, and teach- ing students who've had privileged educational support structures before coming in to college, I wouldn't be able

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162 T eaching to T ransgress

to work as an engaged teacher in a different kind of set-

ting. Corning to teach at Cit:y College, a public institution

with rnany students frorn nonprivileged backgrounds, was

and is a constant challenge. In the beginning I felt afraid.

That fear rerninded rne of the need to be able to shift rny

thinking, rny sense ofwhat I do as a professor. That sense can be altered by context.

Fixed notions about teaching as a process are continu-

any challenged in a learning context where students are

really diverse, where they do not share the sarne assurnp-

tions about learning. Last sernester at Cit:y College, I had

fifteen black students in rny literature class. Only one of

thern was Africau Arnerican. The others were Afro-

Caribbean frorn rnany diverse locations. So I had to

change certain assurnptions that I rnight bave had about

black experience. The fact that most o f these students had

a sense of a home outside the United States that they

could return to-cultures, other places of origin-really

inforrned their way of reading texts. A factory model of

educational process would not have encouraged a shift in teaching practices.

RS: We were talking about the disadvantages of celebrit:y. But

one of the benefits of having a certain kind of recogni-

tion, celebrit:y, within your profession is that you can

rnove frorn institution to institution whereas most profes- sors are stuck.

bh: That's why I was suggesting that it would be exciting to

create a structure for education where everybody could

rnove. I see the abilit:y ofprofessors to rnove as essential to rnaintaining exciternent about their work.

RS: Oh, absolutely. Most people aren't celebrities. Most ofus

teach in virtual obscurit:y. But there are still ways we can

rnove. We sirnply have to work at it differently. For exarn-

ple, ifyou are a tenured professor, you can take a leave of

Building a T eaching Community 163

absence, and while you rnay not rnake the sam e rnoney,

you could choose different work, different settings.

bh: Other kinds of work in diverse settings rnight well en- hance our capacit:y to teach. And if I were refashioning

our educational system, that would be possible.

RS: E ven within the context of a universit:y setting, a person- a teacher, a professor-can say, "What else can I do?" A

place like Queens, where I teach, a cornrnunit:y of 17,000

people, that's bigger than a lot of towns in Ameri ca.

bh: Twice the size of O berlin! RS: I t's 17,000 people, frorn diverse locations, speaking sixt:y-

six languages. That's a lot of people living different !ives.

Yet rnany professors say, "Well, if I were able to do sorne-

thing else I mig ht do i t." It raises the question o f what it

rneans to be in service. There are other ways in which

teachers can be working outside the classroorn, yet within

the universit:y setting: get a course release, or rnaybe a

total course reduction, and do different prograrns. Uni-

versities have to start recognizing that there's more to the

education of a student than rnerely classroorn tim e.

Most of our s tuden ts work, and work twenty to fort:y

hours a week. They're not just getting supplementary

in corne for clothing or a trip. So the classroorn is just on e tirne frarne and one location for teachers to be engaged

with students. But there's the whole campus, and there's

the cornrnunit:y beyond the campus that these students

belong to. A teacher could do rnany different things, be

engaged in different ways. bh: Absolutely. I think of the support groups l've created for

students outside the classroorn. RS: There are so rnany ways we can help establish a learning

cornrnunit:y. For exarnple, it was very awkward at Queens around the tirne of the Bensonhurst and Howard Beach

incidents, both cases where Africau Americans were killed

164 Teaching to Transgress

by whites. We have students at Queens from Howard

Beach and Bensonhurst. It seemed appropriate that some

dialogue should begin. What happened was a bunch of students, som e of whom were not in my classes but were

friends of people in my classes, sat around a cafeteria table

and started a discussion. It just grew to a paint where we

had a yearlong roundtable about race at Queens College;

it was about violence, it was about respect, it was about

issues o f how men treat women-all the issues that were important. I think this helped create learning communi-

ties in the classroom in a way that was different than if

this dialogue had emerged from a traditional institution-

al framework. I didn't get a course release for doing this.

The students didn't originally get any recognition from

the institution. I did ask my department, "Can we have an

Independent Study?" And we called it "Philosophy of

Race" and that was the Independent Study, so the first

semester was no grade, no nothing; the second semes ter

was done very much as the first semester, but this time the

students were getting institutional recognition for their

thoughtfulness about this issue. And this wasn't just another "classroom moved to the cafeteria"! I'm not talk-

ing about the lazy person's notion of what it means to

transgress; you know, "It's a nice day. Let's go outside."

There's something else going on when we create spaces

outside the classroom for serious discussions. So a

teacher need not be a celebrity or a superstar to do dif-

ferent things right where they work. There's more to

their work than just being in the classroom, and every

teacher will tell you, ''Yes, grading, going to faculty meet-

ings," and so on. But there are other things. bh: I wish institutions would understand that teachers need

time away from teaching, and that time away from teach-

ing is not always a year sabbatical where you're busting

Building a Teaching Community 165

your ass to write a book, but that time away fi:om teaching

might be two years, or three. With the kind of job crisis

we're in, and I think if somebody can afford to take a

leave without pay for two years or three years, and some-

body else can have thatjob who doesn't have ajob-why

isn't that encouraged? Many professors are not interested

in engaged pedagogy be cause they fear "burn-out." l've

been teaching for almost twenty years and I arn right now

in my first year leave-an unpaid leave-but it's my first real tim e off. And I feel the Jack o f tim e off has been dam-

aging to my teaching. There has to be a recognition ofthe

way the failing economy is taking jobs. There has to be

more of an emphasis on job-sharing and job-switching in

the interest of creating an environment where engaged teaching can be sustained.

RS: This idea frightens a lot of teachers. They're worried it

willlead to more work, and not different work, and not

more excitement and more engagement for them. En-

gaged teachers are conscious of their own individual !ives

but also of their involvement with others, but I think tra-

dicional teachers take that sarne sort of recognition and

turn it inta a right to privacy, so that once tenure is grant-

ed there's a real withdrawal. Tenure affords many of us

the opportunity to hide.

bh: Which takes us back, finally, to self-actualization. If pro-

fessors are wounded, darnaged individuals, people who

are not self-actualized, then they will seek asylum in the

academy rather than seek to make the academy a place of

challenge, dialectical interchange, and growth.

RS: This is on e of the tragedies in education today. We have a

lot of people who don't recognize that being a teacher is

being with people.

I I

Language

Teaching New Worlds/New Words

Like desire, language disrupts, refuses to be contained within boundaries. It speaks itself against our will, in words and thougbts that intrude, even violate the most private spaces of mind and body. It was in my first year of college that I read Adrienne Rich's poem, "The Burning ofPaper Instead ofChil-

dren." That poem, speaking against domination, against racism and class oppression, attempts to illustrate graphically

that stopping the political persecution and torture of living beings is a more vital issue than censorship, than burning books. On e !in e of this poem that moved and disturbed some- thing within me: "This is the oppressor's language yet I need it to talk to you." l've never forgotten i t. Perhaps I could nat have forgotten it even if I tried to e rase it from memory. Words impose themselves, take root in our memory against our will. The words o f this poem begat a life in my memory that I could

nat abort or change.

167

168 Teaching to Transgress

When I find myself thinking about language now, these

words are there, as if they were always waiting to cballenge and

assist me. I find myself silently speaking them over and over

again with the intensity of a chant. Tbey startle me, shaking me

in to an awareness of the link between languages and domina-

tion. Initially, I resist the idea o f the "oppressor's language," cer-

tain that this construct has the potential to disempower those of

us who are just learning to speak, who are just learning to claim

language as a place where we make ourselves subject. "This is the oppressor's languages yet I need it to tal.k to you. "Adrienne Rich's

words. Then, when I first read these words, and now, they make

me think of s tan dard English, oflearning to speak against black

vernacular, against the ruptured and broken speech of a dis-

possessed and displaced people. Standard English is not the

speech of exile. It is the language of conquest and domination;

in the United States, it is the mask which hides the loss of so

many tangues, all those sounds of diverse, native communities

we will never hear, the speech of the Gullah, Yiddish, and so

many other unremembered tangues.

Reflecting on Adrienne Rich's words, I know that it is not

the English language that hurts me, but what the oppressors do

with it, how they shape it to become a territory that limits and

defines, how they make it a weapon that can shame, humiliate,

colonize. Gloria Anzaldúa reminds us of this pain in Border-

Zands/La Frontera when she asserts, "So, if you want to really

hurt me, talk badly about my language." We have so little knowledge of how displaced, enslaved, or free Mricans who

came or were brought against their will to the United S ta tes felt

about the loss of language, about learning English. Only as a

woman did I begin to think about these black people in rela-

tion to language, to think about their trauma as they were com-

pelled to witness their language rendered meaningless with a

colonizing European culture, where voices deemed foreign

could not be spoken, were outlawed tangues, renegade speech.

Language 169

When I realize how lang it has taken for white Americans to

acknowledge diverse languages of Native Americans, to accept

that the speech their ancestral colonizers declared was merely

grunts or gibberish was indeed language, it is difficult not to

hear in standard English always the sound of siaughter and

conquest. I think now of the grief of displaced "homeless"

Mricans, forced to inhabit a world where they saw folks like

themselves, inhabiting the same skin, the same condition, but

who had no shared language to talk with one another, who

needed "the oppressor's language." "This is the oppressor's lan-

guage yet I need it to tal.k to you. "When I imagine the terror of Mricans on board slave ships, on auction blocks, inhabiting the

unfamiliar architecture of plantations, I consider that this ter-

ror extended beyond fear of punishment, that it resided also in

the anguish ofhearing a language they could not comprehend.

The very sound of English had to terrifY. I think of black peo- ple meeting one another in a space away from the diverse cul-

tures and languages that distinguished them from on e another,

compelled by circumstance to find ways to speak with one

another in a "new world" where blackness or the darkness of

one's skin and not language would become the space ofbond-

ing. How to remember, to reinvoke this terror. How to describe

what it must have been like for Mricans whose deepest bonds

were historically forged in the place of shared speech to be

transported abruptly to a world where the very sound of one's mother tongue had no meaning.

I imagine them hearing spoken English as the oppressor's language, yet I imagine them also realizing that this language

would need to be possessed, taken, élaimed as a sp ace of resis-

tan ce. I imagine that the moment they realized the oppressor's

language, seized and spoken by the tangues of the colonized,

could be a space ofbonding was joyous. For in that recognition was the understanding that intimacy could be restored, that a

culture of resis tan ce could be formed that would make recov-

170 T eaching to T ransgress

ery from the trauma of enslavement possible. I imagine, then, Mricans first hearing English as "the oppressor's language" and then re-hearing it as a potential site ofresistance. Learning English, learning to speak the alien tongue, was one way en-

slaved Mricans began to reclaim their personal power within a context of domination. Possessing a shared language, black folks could find again a way to make community, and a means to create the political solidarity necessary to resist.

Needing the oppressor's language to speak with one anoth- er they nevertheless also reinvented, remade that language so that it would speak beyond the boundaries of conquest and domination. In the mouths of black Mricans in the so-called "New World," English was altered, transformed, and became a different speech. Enslaved black people took broken bits of English and made of them a counter-language. They put togeth- er their words in such a way that the colonizer had to rethink the meaning of English language. Though it has become com- mon in contemporary culture to talk about the messages of resistance that emerged in the music created by slaves, particu- larly spirituals, less is said about the grammatical construction of senten ces in these songs. Often, the English used in the song reflected the broken, ruptured world of the slave. When the slaves sang "nobody knows de trouble I see-" their use of the word "no body" adds a richer meaning than if they had used the phrase "no one," for it was the slave's body that was the concrete

si te of suffering. And even as emancipated black people sang spirituals, they did not change the language, the sentence struc- ture, of our ancestors. For in the incorrect usage of words, in the incorrect placement of words, was a spirit of rebellion that claimed language as a site of resistance. Using English in a way that ruptured standard usage and meaning, so that white folks could often not understand black speech, made English into more than the oppressor's language.

Language 171

An unbroken connection exists between the broken English of the displaced, enslaved Mrican and the diverse black vernac- ular speech black folks use today. In both cases, the rupture of standard English enabled and enables rebellion and resistance. By transforming the oppressor's language, making a culture of resistance, black people created an intimate speech that could say far more than was permissible within the bo un daries o f s tan-

dard English. The power of this speech is not simply that it enables resistance to white supremacy, but that it also forges a space for alternative cultural production and alternative epis- temologies-different ways of thinking and knowing that were crucial to creating a counter-hegemonic worldview. It is abso- lutely essential that the revolutionary power of black vernacular speech not be lost in contemporary culture. That power resides in the capacity of black vernacular to intervene on the bound- aries and limitations of standard English.

In contemporary black popular culture, rap music has be- corne on e of the spaces where black vernacular speech is used in a manner that invites dominant mainstream culture to lis- ten-to hear-and, to some extent, be transformed. However, one of the risks of this attempt at cultural translation is that it will trivialize black vernacular speech. When young white kids

imitate this speech in ways that suggest it is the speech of those who are stupid or who are only interested in entertaining or being funny, then the subversive power of this speech is under- mined. In academic circles, both in the sphere of teaching and that ofwriting, there has been little effort made to utilize black vernacular-or, for that matter, any language other than stan- dard English. When I asked an ethnically diverse group of s tu- dents in a course I was teaching on black women writers why we only heard standard English spoken in the classroom, they were momentarily rendered speechless. Though many of them were individuals for whom standard English was a second or

172 T eachíng to T ransgress

third language, it had simply never occurred to them that it was

possible to say something in another language, in another way.

No wonder, then, that we continue to think, "This is the op-

pressor's language yet I need it to talk to you."

I ha ve realized that I was in danger of losing my relationship

to black vernacular speech beca use I too rarely use it in the pre-

dominantly white settings that I arn most often in, both profes-

sionally and socially. And so I have begun to work at integrating

in to a variety of settings the particular Southern black vernacu-

lar speech I grew up hearing and speaking. It has been hardest

to integrate black vernacular in writing, particularly for acade-

mic journals. When I first began to incorporate black vernacu- lar in critica! essays, editors would send the work back to me in

standard English. Using the vernacular means that translation

inta standard Euglish may be needed if one wishes to reach a

more inclusive audience. In the classroom setting, I encourage students to use their first language and translate it so they do

not feel that seeking higher education will necessarily estrange

them from that language and culture they know most intimate- ly. Nat surprisingly, when students in my Black Women Writers

class began to speak using diverse language and speech, white students often complained. This seemed to be particularly the

case with black vernacular. It was particularly disturbing to the

white students because they could hear the words that were

said but could nat comprehend their meaning. Pedagogically, I

encouraged them to think of the moment of nat understand-

ing what someone says as a space to learn. Such a space pro-

vides nat only the opportunity to listen without "mastery,"

without owning or possessing speech through interpretation,

but also the experience of hearing non-English words. These lessons seem particularly crucial in a multicultural society that

remains white supremacist, that uses standard English as a

weapon to silence and censor.June Jordan reminds us of this in On Call when she declares:

Language

I arn talking about majority problems of language in a democratic state, problems of a currency that someone has stolen and hidden away and then homogenized into an official "English" language that can only express non- events involving no body responsible, or lies. If we lived in a democratic state our language would have to hurtle, fly, curse, and sing, in all the commou American names, all the undeniable and representative participating voic- es of everybody here. We would not tolerate the language of the powerful and, thereby, lose all respect for words, per se. We would make our language conform to the truth of our many selves and we would make our lan- guage lead us in to the equality ofpower that a democrat- ic state must represent.

173

That the students in the course on black women writers

were repressing alllonging to speak in tangues other than s tan-

dard English without seeing this repression as political was an

indication of the way we act unconsciously, in complicity with a

culture of domination. Recent discussions of diversity and multiculturalism tend to

downplay or ignore the question of language. Critica! feminist

writings focused on issues of difference and voice have made important theoretical interventions, calling for a recognition

of the primacy of voices that are often silenced, censored, or

marginalized. This call for the acknowledgment and celebra,-

tion of diverse voices, and consequently of diverse language

and speech, necessarily disrupts the primacy of standard Eng-

lish. When advocates of feminism first spoke about the desire

for diverse participation in women's movement, there was no

discussion of language. It was simply assumed that standard English would remain the primary vehicle for the transmission

offeminist thought. Now that the audience for feminist writing

and speaking has become more diverse, it is evident that we

must change conventional ways of thinking about language,

creating spaces where diverse voices can speak in words other

!' I

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: 11

'

174 Teaching to Transgress

than English or in broken, vernacular speech. This means that

ata lecture or even in a written work there will be fragments of

speech that may or may not be accessible to every individual.

Shifting how we think a bo ut language and how we use it neces-

sarily alters how we know what we know. At a lecture where I

might use Southern black vernacular, the particular patois of

my region, or where I might use very abstract thought in con-

junction with plain speech, responding to a diverse audience, I

suggest that we do not necessarily need to hear and know what

is stated in its entirety, that we do not need to "master" or con-

quer the narrative as a whole, that we may know in fragments. I

suggest that we may learn from spaces of silence as well as

sp ace s of speech, that in the patient act of listening to another

tongue we may subvert that culture o f capitalist frenzy and con- sumption that demands all desire must be satisfied immediate-

ly, or we may disrupt that cultural imperialism that suggests on e is worthy of being heard only if on e speaks in s tan dard English.

Adrienne Rich concludes her poem with this statement:

I arn composing on the typewriter late at night, think- ing of today. How well we all spoke. A language is a map of our failures. Frederick Douglass wrote an English purer than Milton's. People suffer highly in poverty. There are methods but we do not use them. Joan, who could not read, spoke some peasant form of French. So me of the suffering are: it is bard to tell the truth; this is America; I cannot touch you now. In America we bave only the present tense. I arn in clan- ger. You are in danger. The burning of a book aro uses no sensation in me. I know it hurts to burn. There are flames of napalm in Cantonsville, Maryland. I know it hurts to bum. The typewriter is overheated, my mouth is burning, I cannot touch you and this is the oppres- sor's language.

To recognize that we touch one another in language seems

particularly difficult in a society that would bave us believe that

Language 175

there is no dignity in the experience of passion, that to feel deeply is to be inferior, for within the dualism of Western

metaphysical thought, ideas are always more important than

language. To heal the splitting of mind and body, we margin-

alized and oppressed people attempt to recover ourselves and our experiences in language. We seek to make a place for inti-

macy. Unable to find such a place in standard English, we cre- ate the ruptured, broken, unruly speech of the vernacular.

When I need to say words that do more than simply mirror or

address the dominant reality, I speak black vernacular. There,

in that location, we make English do what we want it to do. We take the oppressor's language and turn it against itself. We

make our words a counter-hegemonic speech, liberating our-

selves in language.

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12

Confronting Class in the Classroom

Class is rarely talked about in the United States; nowhere is

there a more intense si!ence about the reality of class differ-

ences than in educational settings. Significantly, class differ- ences are particularly ignored in classrooms. From grade

school on, we are all encouraged to cross the threshold o f the

classroom believing we are entering a democratic space-a free

zone where the desire to study and learn makes us all equal.

And even if we enter accepting the reality of class differences,

most of us still believe knowledge will be meted o ut in fair and

equal proportions. In those rare cases where it is acknowledged

that students and professors do not share the same class back-

grounds, the underlying assumption is still that we are all

equally committed to getting ahead, to moving up the ladder of success to the top. And even though many of us will not

make it to the top, the unspoken understanding is that we will

land somewhere in the middle, between top and bottom.

Coming from a nonmaterially privileged background, from

the working poor, I entered college acutely aware of class.

177

178 Teaching to Transgress

When I received notice of my acceptance at Stanford Uni-

versity, the first question that was raised in my household was

how I would pay for i t. My parents understood that I had been

awarded scholarships, and allowed to take out loans, but they

wanted to know where the money would corne from for trans-

portation, clothes, books. Given these concerns, I went to Stan-

ford thinking that class was mainly about materiality. It only

took me a short while to understand that class was more than

just a question of money, that it shaped values, attitudes, social

relations, and the biases that informed the way knowledge would be given and received. These same realizations about

class in the academy are expressed again and again by acade- mics from working-class backgrounds in the collection of essays

Strangers in Paradiseedited by Jake Ryan and Charles Sackrey. During my college years it was tacitly assumed that we all

agreed that class should not be talked about, that there would

be no critique of the bourgeois class biases shaping and

informing pedagogical process (as well as social etiquette) in

the classroom. Although no one ever directly stated the rules

that would govern our conduct, it was taught by example and

reinforced by a system of rewards. As silence and obedience to

authority were most rewarded, students learned that this was

the appropriate demeanor in the classroom. Loudness, anger, emotional outbursts, and even something as seemingly inno-

cent as unrestrained laughter were deemed unacceptable, vul-

gar disruptions of classroom social order. These traits were also

associated with being a member of the lower classes. If on e was

not from a privileged class gro up, adopting a demeanor similar

to that of the group could help one to advance. It is still neces-

sary for students to assimilate bourgeois values in order to be

deemed acceptable. Bourgeois values in the classroom create a barrier, blocking

the possibility of confrontation and conflict, warding off dis-

sent. Students are often silenced by means of their acceptance

Confronting Class 179

of class values that teach them to maintain order at all costs.

When the obsession with maintaining order is coupled with the

fear of "losing face," ofnot being thought well ofby one's pro-

fessor and peers, all possibility of constructive dialogue is

undermined. Even though students enter the "democratic"

classroom believing they have the right to "free speech," most

students are not comfortable exercising this right to "free

speech." Most students are not comfortable exercising this

right-especially if it means they must give voice to thoughts,

ideas, feelings that go against the grain, that are unpopular.

This censo ring process is only on e way bourgeois values overde-

termine social behavior in the classroom and undermine the

democratic exchange of ideas. Writing about his experience in the section of Strangers in Paradise entitled "Outsiders," Karl

Anderson confessed:

Power and hierarchy, and not teaching and learning, dominated the graduate school I found myself in. "Knowledge" wao;; one-upmanship, and no o ne disguised the fac t .... The o ne thing llearned absolutely was the inseparability of free speech and free thought. I, as well as some of my peers, were refused the opportunity to speak and sometimes to ask questions deemed "irrele- vant" when the instructors didn 't wish to discuss or respond to them.

Students who enter the academy unwilling to accept without

question the assumptions and values held by privileged classes tend to be silenced, deemed troublemakers.

Conservative discussions of censorship in contemporary

university settings often suggest that the absence of construc-

tive dialogue, enforced silencing, takes place as a i:>y-product of

progressive efforts to question canonical knowledge, critique relations of domination, or subvert bourgeois class biases.

There is !itt! e or no discussion of the way in which the attitudes

180 Teaching to Transgress

and values of those from materially privileged classes are im-

posed upon everyone via hiased pedagogical strategies. Re-

flected in choice of subject matter and the manner in which

ideas are shared, these biases need never be overtly stated. In

his essay Karl Anderson states that silencing is "the most op-

pressive aspect o f middle-class life." He maintains:

It thrives upon people keeping their mouths shut, unless they are actually endorsing whatever powers exist. The free marketplace of "ideas" that is so be- loved of liberals is as much a fantasy as a free market- place in oil or automobiles; a more harmful fantasy, because it breeds even more hypocrisy and cynicism. Just as teachers can control what is said in their class- rooms, most also have ultra-sensitive antennae as to what will be rewarded or punished that is said outside them. And these antennae control them.

Silencing enforced by bourgeois values is sanctioned in the

classroom by everyone.

Even those professors who embrace the tenets of critica!

pedagogy (many of whom are white and mal e) still conduct their classrooms in a manner that only reinforces bourgeois

models of decorum. At the same time, the subject matter

taught in such classes might reflect professaria! awareness of

intellectual perspectives that critique domination, that empha-

size an understanding of the politics of difference, of race,

class, gender, even though classroom dynamics remain conven-

tional, business as usual. When contemporary feminist move-

ment made its initial presence felt in the academy there was

both an ongoing critique of conventional classroom dynamics and an attempt to create alternative pedagogical strategies.

However, as feminist scholars endeavored to make Women's

Studies a discipline administrators and peers would respect,

there was a shift in perspective.

Confronting Class 181

Significantly, feminist classrooms were the first spaces in the

university where I encountered any attempt to acknowledge

class difference. The focus was usually on the way class differ-

ences are structured in the larger society, not on our class posi-

tion. Yet the focus on gender privilege in patriarchal society

often meant that there was a recognition of the ways women

were economically disenfranchised and therefore more likely

to be poor or working class. Often, the feminist classroom was

the oníy place where students (mostly female) from materially

disadvantaged circumstances would speak from that class posi-

tionality, acknowledging both the impact of class on our social

status as well as critiquing the class biases offeminist thought.

When I first entered university settings I felt estranged from

this new environment. Like most of my peers and professors, I initially believed those feelings were there because of differ-

ences in racial and cultural background. However, as time

passed it was more evident that this estrangement was in part a

reflection of class difference. At Stanford, I was often asked by

peers and professors ifl was there on a scholarship. Underlying

this question was the implication that receiving financial aid

"diminished" on e in som e way. It was not just this experience

that intensified my awareness of class difference, it was the con-

stant evocation of materially privileged class experience (usual- ly that o f the middle class) as a universal norm that not only set

those of us from working-class backgrounds apart but effective-

ly excluded those who were not privileged from discussions,

from social activities. To avoid feelings of estrangement, stu-

dents from working-class backgrounds could assimila te in to the

mainstream, change speech patterns, points ofreference, drop any habit that might reveal them to be from a nonmaterially privileged background.

Of course I entered college hoping that a university degree

would enhance my class mobility. Yet I thought of this solely in

182 Teaching to Transgress

economic terms. Early on I did not realize that class was much more than one's economic standing, that it determined values, standpoint, and interests. lt was assumed that any student com- ing from a poor or working-class background would willingly surrender all values and habits of being associated with this

background. Those of us from diverse ethnic/racial back- grounds learned that no aspect of o ur vernacular culture could be voiced in elite settings. This was especially the case with ver- nacular language or a first language that was nat English. To insist on speaking in any manner that did not conform to privi- leged class ideals and mannerisms placed one always in the position o f interloper.

Demands that individuals from class backgrounds deemed undesirable surrender all vestiges of their past create psychic turmoil. We were encouraged, as many students are today, to betray our class origins. Rewarded if we chose to assimilate

' estranged ifwe chose to maintain those aspects ofwho we were, some were all too often seen as outsiders. Some ofus rebelled by clinging to exaggerated manners and behavior clearly marked as outside the accepted bourgeois norm. During my student years, and now as a professor, I see many students from "unde- sirable" class backgrounds become unable to complete their studies because the contradictions between the behavior neces- sary to "make i t" in the academy and those that allowed them to be comfortable at home, with their families and friends, are just too great.

Often, Mrican Americans are among those students I teach from poor and working-class backgrounds who are most vocal about issues of class. They express frustration, anger, and sad- ness about the tensions and stress they experience trying to conform to acceptable white, middle-class behaviors in uni- versity settings while retaining the ability to "dea]" at home. Sharing strategies for coping from my own experience, I encourage students to reject the notion that they must choose

Confronting Class 183

between experiences. They must believe they can inhabit com- fortably twa different worlds, but they must make each space one of comfort. They must creatively invent ways to cross bor- ders. They must believe in their capacity to alter the bourgeois settings they enter. All too often, students from nonmaterially privileged backgrounds assume a position o f passivity-they be- bave as victims, as though they can only be acted upon against their will. Ultimately, they end up feeling they can only reject or accept the norms imposed upon them. This either/or often

sets them ·up for disappointment and failure. Those of us in the academy from working-class backgrounds

are empowered when we recognize our own agency, our capac- ity to be active participants in the pedagogical process. This process is nat simple or easy: it takes courage to embrace a vision of wholeness of being that does nat reinforce the capital-

ist versi on that suggests that on e must always give something up to gain another. In the introduction to the section of their book titled "Class Mobility and Internalized Conflict," Ryan and Sackrey remind readers that "the academic work process is essentially antagonistic to the working class, and academics for the most part Jive in a different world of culture, different ways thatmake it, too, antagonistic toworking class life."Yet those of us from working-class backgrounds cannot allow class antago- nism to prevent us from gaining knowledge, degrees and enjoy- ing the aspects of higher education that are fulfilling. Class antagonism can be constructively used, not made to reinforce the notion that students and professors from working-class backgrounds are "outsiders" and "interlopers," but to subvert

and challenge the existing structure. When I entered my first Women's Studies classes at Stan-

ford, white professors talked about "women" when they were making the experience of materially privileged white women a norm. 1t was both a matter of personal and intellectual integri- ty for me to challenge this biased assumption. By challenging, I

184 Teaching to Transgress

refused to be complicit in the erasure ofblack and/orworking-

class women of all ethnicities. Personally, that meant I was not

able just to sit in class, grooving on the good feminist vibes---

that was a loss. The gain was that I was honoring the experience

of poor and working-class women in my own family, in that very

community that had encouraged and supported me in my

efforts to be better educated. Even though my intervention was

not wholeheartedly welcomed, it created a context for critica!

thinking, for dialectical exchange.

Any attempt on the part of individual students to critique

the bourgeois biases that shape pedagogical process, particular-

ly as they relate to epistemological perspectives ( the points from which information is shared) will, in most cases, no doubt, be

viewed as negative and disruptive. Given the presumed radical

or liberal nature of early feminist classrooms, it was shocking to

me to find those settings were also often closed to different ways

of thinking. While it was acceptable to critique patriarchy in

that context, it was not acceptable to confront issues of class,

especially in ways that were not simply about the evocation of

guilt. In general, despite their participation in different disci-

plines and the diversity of class backgrounds, Mrican American

scholars and other nonwhite professors bave been no more will- ing to confront issues of class. Even when it became more

acceptable to give at least lip servi ce to the recognition of race,

gender, and class, most professors and students just did not feel

they were able to address class in anything more than a simplis-

tic way. Certainly, the primary area where there was the possibil-

ity of meaningful critique and change was in relation to biased

scholarship, work that used the experiences and thoughts of

materially privileged people as normative.

In recent years, growing awareness of class differences in progressive academic circles has meant that students and pro-

fessors committed to critica! and feminist pedagogy bave the

opportunity to make spaces in the academy where class can

~-

Confronting Class 185

receive attention. Yet there can be no intervention that chal-

lenges the status quo ifwe are not willing to interrogate the way

our presentation of self as well as our pedagogical process is often shaped by middle-class norms. My awareness of class has

been continually reinforced by my efforts to remain close to

loved ones who remain in materially underprivileged class posi-

tions. This has helped me to employ pedagogical strategies that

create ruptures in the established order, that promote modes

oflearning which challenge bourgeois hegemony.

One such strategy has been the emphasis on creating in

classrooms learning communities where everyone's voice can

be heard, their presence recognized and valued. In the section of Strangers in Paradise entitled "Balancing Class Locations,"

Jane Ellen Wilson shares the way an emphasis on personal voice strengthened her.

Only by coming to terms with my own past, my own background, and seeing that in the context of the world at large, have I begun to find my true voice and to understand that, since it is my own voice, that no pre-cut niche exists for it; that part of the work to be done is making a place, with others, where my and our voices, can stand clear of the background noise and voice o ur con cerns as part of a larger song.

When those of us in the academy who are working class or from

working-class backgrounds share our perspectives, we subvert

the tendency to focus only on the thoughts, attitudes, and

experiences of those who are materially privileged. Feminist

and critica! pedagogy are two alter!'ative paradigms for teach-

ing which bave really emphasized the issue of coming to voice. That focus emerged as central, precisely because it was so

evident that race, sex, and class privilege empower some stu-

dents more than others, granting "authority" to some voices more than others.

186 Teaching to Transgress

A distinction must be made between a shallow emphasis on

coming to voice, which wrongly suggests there can be some

democratization of voice wherein everyone's words will be giv-

en equal tim e and be se en as equally valuable ( often the model

applied in feminist classrooms), and the more complex recog-

nition o f the uniqueness of each voice and a willingness to create

spaces in the classroom where all voices can be heard because

all students are free to speak, knowing their presence will be

recognized and valued. This does not mean that anything can

be said, no matter how irrelevant to classroom subject matter, and receive attention-or that something meaningful takes

place if everyone has equal time to voice an opinion. In the

classes I teach, I bave students write short paragraphs that they

re ad aloud so that we all bave a chance to hear unique perspec-

tives and we are all given an opportunity to pause and listen to one another. Just the physical experience of hearing, of listen-

ing intently, to each particular voice strengthens our capacity to learn together. Even though a student may not speak again after

this moment, that student's presence has been acknowledged.

Hearing each other's voices, individual thoughts, and some-

times associating theses voices with personal experience makes

us more acutely aware of each other. That moment of collective

participation and dialogue means that students and professor

respect-and here I invoke the root meaning of the word, "to

look at"-each other, engage in acts of recognition with on e an-

other, and do not just talk to the professor. Sharing experiences

and confessional narratives in the classroom helps establish communal commitment to learning. These narrative moments

usually are the space where the assumption that we share a com-

mon class background and perspective is disrupted. While stu-

dents may be open to the idea that they do not all corne from a

commou class background, they may still expect that the values

of materially privileged gro u ps will be the class's norm. Some students may feel threatened if awareness of class dif-

Confronting Class 187

ference leads to changes in the classroom. Today's students all

dress alike, wearing clothes from s tores such as the Gap and Benetton; this acts to erase the markers of class difference that

older generations of students experienced. Young students are

more eager to deny t..'le impact of class and class differences in

our society. I bave found that students from upper- and middle-

class backgrounds are disturbed if heated exchange takes place

in the classroom. Many of them equate loud talk or interrup-

tions with rude and threatening behavior. Yet those of us from

working-class backgrounds may feel that discussion is deeper

and richer if it arouses intense responses. In class, students are

often dist.urbed if anyone is interrupted while speaking, even

though outside class most ofthem are not threatened. Few ofus

are taught to facilitate heated discussions that may include use-

ful interruptions and digressions, but it is often the professor

who is most invested in maintaining order in the classroom.

Professors cannot empower students to embrace diversities of

experience, standpoint, behavior, or style if our training has dis-

empowered us, socialized us to cope effectively only with a sin-

gle mode of interaction based on middle-class val u es. Most progressive professors are more comfortable striving

to challenge class biases through the material studied than they

are with interrogating how class biases shape conduct in the

classroom and transforming their pedagogical process. When I

entered my first classroom as a college professor and a feminist,

I was deeply afraid of using authority in a way that would per- petuate class elitism and other forms of domination. Fearful

that I mig ht abuse power, I falsely pretended that no power dif-

ference existed between students and myself. That was a mis-

take. Yet it was only as I began to interroga te my fear of "power"

-the way that fear was related to my own class. background

where I had so often seen those with class power coerce, abuse, and dominate those without-that I began to understand that

power was not itself negative. It depended what o ne did with it.

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188 Teaching to Transgress

It was up to me to create ways within my professional power constructively, precisely because I was teaching in institutional structures that affirm it is fine to use power to reinforce and maintain coercive hierarchies.

Fear of losing control in the classroom often leads indi- vidual professors to fall into a conventional teaching pattern wherein power is used destructively. It is this fear that leads to collective professaria! investment in bourgeois decorum as a means o f maintaining a fixed notion of order, of ensuring that

the teacher will have absolute authority. Unfortunately, this fear oflosing control shapes and informs the professaria! ped- agogical process to the extent that it acts a barrier preventing any constructive grappling with issues of class.

Sometimes students who want professors to grapple with class differences often simply desire that individuals from less materially privileged backgrounds be given center stage so that an inversion of hierarchical structures takes place, not a dis- ruption. One semester, a number of black female students from working-class backgrounds attended a course I taught on Mrican American women writers. They arrived hoping I would use my professaria! power to decenter the voices of privileged white students in nonconstructive ways so that those students would experience what it is like to be an outsider. Some of these black students rigidly resisted attempts to involve the others in an engaged pedagogy where space is created for everyone. Many of the black students feared that learning new terminology or new perspectives would alienate them from familiar social relations. Since these fears are rarely addressed as part of progressive pedagogical process, students caught in the grip of such anxiety often sit in classes feeling hostile, es- tranged, refusing to participate. I often face students who think that in my classes they will "naturally" not feel estranged and that part of this feeling of comfort, or being "at home," is that

they will not bave to work as hard as they do in other classes.

Confronting Class 189

These students are not expecting to find alternative pedagogy in my classes but merely "rest" from the negative tensions they may feel in the majority of other courses. It is my job to address

these tensions. If we can trust the demographics, we must assume that the

academy will be full of students from diverse classes, and that

more of our students than ever before wi!l be from poor and working-class backgrounds. This change will not be reflected in the class background of professors. In my own experience, I encounter fewer and fewer academics from working-class back- grounds. Our absence is no doubt related to the way class pali- tics and class struggle shapes who will receive graduate degrees in our society. However, constructively confronting issues of class is not simply a task for those ofus who came from working- class and poor backgrounds; it is a challenge for all professors. Critiquing the way academic settings are structured to repro- duce class hierarchy,Jake Ryan and Charles Sackrey emphasize "that no matter what the politics or ideological stripe of the individual professor, ofwhat the content ofhis or her teaching, Marxist, anarchist, or nihilist, he or she nonetheless participa tes in the reproduction ofthe cultural and class relations of capital- ism." Despite this bleak assertion they are willing to acknowl- edge that "nonconformist intellectuals can, through research

and publication, chip away with som e success at the convention- al orthodoxies, nurture students with comparable ideas and intentions, or find ways to bring som e fraction of the resources of the university to the service of the ... class interests of the workers and others below." Any professor who commits to engaged pedagogy recognizes the importance of constructively confronting issues of class. That means welcoming the opportu- nity to alter our classroom practices creatively so that the demo- cratic ideal of education for everyone can be realized.

13

Eros, Eroticism, and the Pedagogical Process

Professors rarely speak of the place of eros or the erotic in our

classrooms. Trained in the philosophical context of Western

metaphysical dualism, many of us have accepted the notion

that there is a split between the body and the mind. Believing this, individuals enter the classroom to teach as though only

the mind is present, and not the body. To call attention to the

body is to betray the legacy of repression and denial that has

been handed down to us by our professaria! elders, who have

been usually white and mal e. But o ur nonwhite elders were just

as eager to deny the body. The predominantly black college has

always be en a basti on of repression. The public world o f insti-

tutionallearning was a si te where tl:¡e body had to be erased, go unnoticed. When I first became a teacher and needed to use

the restroom in the middle of class, I had no clue as to what my

elders did in such situations. No one talked about the body in

relation to teaching. What did one do with the body in the

191

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192 Teaching to Transgress

classroom? Trying to remember the bodies of my professors, I

find myself unable to recali them. I hear voices, remember

fragmented details, but very few whole badies.

Entering the classroom determined to erase the body and

give ourselves over more fully to the mind, we shaw by our

beings how deeply we have accepted the assumption that pas-

sion has no place in the classroom. Repression and denial

make it possible for us to forget and then desperately seek to

recover ourselves, our feelings, our passions in some private place-after class. I remember reading an article in Psychology

Today years ago when I was still an undergraduate, reporting a study which revealed that every so many seconds while giving

lectures many male professors were thinking about sexuality

-were even having lustful thoughts about students. I was

amazed. Mter reading this article, which as I recali was shared

and talked about endlessly in the dormitory, I watched male

professors differently, trying to connect the fantasies I imag-

ined them having in their minds with lectures, with their bad-

ies that I had so faithfully learned to pretend I did not see.

During my first semester of college teaching, there was a male

s tu dent in my class whom I always seemed to se e and not se e at the same time. At one paint in the middle of the semester, I

received a call from a school therapist who wanted to speak

witb me about the way I treated this student in the class. The

therapist told me that the students had said I was unusually

gruff, rude, and downright mean when I related to him. I did

not know exactly who the student was, could not put a face or

body with his name, but later when he identified himself in

class, I realized that I was erotically drawn to this student. And that my naive way of coping with feelings in the classroom that

I had been taught never to have was to deflect (hence my harsh

treatment of him), repress, and deny. Overly conscious then

about ways such repression and denial could lead to the

Eros, Erotidsm, and the Pedagogical Process 193

''wounding" of students, I was determined to face whatever pas-

sions were aroused in the classroom setting and dea! with them. Writing about Adrienne Rich's work, connecting it to the

work of men who thought critically a bo ut the body, in her intro-

duction to Thinking Through the Body,]ane Gallop comments:

Men who do find themselves in some way thinking through the body are more likely to be recognized as serious thinkers and heard. Women bave first to prove that we are thinkers, which is easier when we conform to the protocol that deems serious thought separate from an embodied subject in history. Rich is asking women to enter the realms of critica! thought and knowledge without becoming disembodied spirit, uni- versal man.

Beyond the realm of critica! thought, it is equally crucial that we learn to enter the classroom ''whole" and not as "disembod-

ied spirit." In the heady early days ofWomen's Studies classes at

Stanford University, I learned by the example of daring, coura- geous woman professors (particularly Diane Middlebrook) that

there was a place for passion in the classroom, that eros and the

erotic did not need to be denied for learning to take place. On e

of the central ten ets of feminist critica! pedagogy has been the

insistence on not engaging the mind/body split. This is one of

the underlying beliefs that has made Women's Studies a subver-

sive location in the academy. While women's studies over the

years has had to light to be taken seriously by academics in tra- ditional disciplines, those of us who have been intimately en-

gaged as students or teachers with feminist thinking have always

recognized the legitimacy of a pedagogy that dares to subvert

the mind/body split and allow us to be whole in the classroom '

and as a consequence wholehearted.

Recently, Susan B., a colleague andfriend, whom I taughtin

194 Teaching to Transgress

a Women's Studies class when she was an undergraduate, stat-

ed in conversation that she felt she WdS having so much trouble

with her graduate courses because she has to corne to expecta

quality of passionate teaching that is not present where she is

studying. Her comments made me think anew about the place

of passion, of erotic recognition in the classroom setting be-

cause I believe that the energy she felt in o ur Women 's S tudi es

classes was there be cause o f the extent to which women profes-

sors teaching those courses dared to give fully of ourselves,

going beyond the mere transmission of information in lec-

tures, Feminist education for critica! consciousness is rooted in

the assumption that knowledge and critica! thought done in

the classroom should inform our habits of being and ways of

living outside the classroom. Since so many of our early classes

were taken almost exclusively by female students, it was easier

for us to not be disembodied spirits in the classroom. Con-

currently, it was expected that we would bring a quality of care

and even "Jove" to our students. Eros was present in our class-

rooms, as a motivating force. As critica! pedagogues we were

teaching students ways to think differently about gender,

understanding fully that this knowledge would also lead them

to live differently. To understand the place of eros and eroticism in the class-

room, we must move beyond thinking of those forces solely in

terms of the sexual, though that dimension need not be denied.

Sam Keen, in bis book The Passionate Life, urges readers to

remember that in its earliest conception "erotic potencywas not

confined to sexual power but included the moving force that

propelled every life-form from a state of mere potentiality to

actuality." Gi ven that critica! pedagogy seeks to transform con- sciousness, to provide students with ways ofknowing that enable

them to know t11emselves better and live in the world more fully,

to some extent it must rely on the presence of the erotic in the

classroom to aid the learning process. Keen continues:

Eros, Erotidsm, and the Pedagogical Process

When we límit "erotic" to its sexual meaning, we betray our alienation from the rest of nature. We confess that we are not motivated by anything like the mysterious force that moves birds to migrate or dandelions to spring. Furtbermore, we imply that the fulfillment or potential toward which we strive is sexual-the roman- tic-genital connection between two persons.

195

Understanding that eros is a force that enhances our overall

effort to be self-actualizing, that it can provide an epistemolog-

ical gro un ding informing how we know what we know, enables

both professors and students to use such energy in a classroom

setting in ways that invigorate discussion and excite the critical

imagination. Suggesting that this culture Jacks a "vision or science of hy-

geology" (health and well-being) Keen asks: "What forms of

passi on mig ht make us whole? To what passions may we surren- der with the assurance that we will expand rather than dimin-

ish the promise of our !ives?" The quest for knowledge that

enables us to unite theory and practice is one such passion. To

the extent that professors bring this passion, which has to be

fundamentally rooted in a Jove for ideas we are able to inspire,

the classroom becomes a dynamic place where transformations

in social relations are concretely actualized and the false di-

chotomy between the world outside and the inside world of the

academy disappears. In many ways this is frightening. Nothing

about the way I was trained as a teacher really prepared me to

witness my students transforming themselves.

It was during the years that I taught in the Mrican American Studies department at Yale (a course on black women writers)

that I witnessed the way education for critica! consciousness

can fundamentally alter our perceptions of reality and our

actions. During one course we collectively explored in fiction

the power of internalized racism, seeing how it was described

in the literature as well as critically interrogating our experi-

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196 Teaching to Transgress

enees. However, one of the black female students who had

always straightened her hair because she felt deep down that

she would not look good if it were not processed-were worn

"natural"-changed. She came to class after a break and told

everyone that this class had deeply affected her, so much so

that when she went to get her usual "perm" some force within

said no. I still remember the fear I felt when she testified that

the class had changed her. Though I believed deeply in the phi-

losophy of education for critica! consciousness that empowers,

I had not yet comfortably united theory with practice. Some

small part of me still wanted us to remain disembodied spirits.

And her body, her presence, her changed look was a direct

challenge that I had to face and affirm. She was teaching me.

Now, years later, I read again her final words to the class and

recognize the passion and beautyofherwill to know and to act:

I arn a black woman. I grew up in Shaker Heights, Ohio. I cannot go back and cbange years of believing that I could never be quite as pretty or intelligent as many of my white friends-but I can go forward learn- ing pride in who I am .... I cannot go back and change years of believing that the most wonderful thing in the world would be to be Martin Luther King, Jr.'s wife- but I can go on and find the strength I need to be the revolutionary for myself rather than the companion and help for someone else. So no, I don't believe that we change what has already been done but we can change the future and so I arn reclaiming and learning more ofwho I arn so that I can be whole.

Attempting to gather my thoughts on eroticism and pedagogy,

I bave reread student journals covering a span of ten years.

Again and again, I read notes that could easily be considered

"romantic" as students express their Jove for me, our class.

Here an Asian student offers her thoughts about a class:

.

T Eros, Eroticism, and the Pedagogical Process White people have never understood the beauty of silence, of connection and reflection. You teach us to speak, and to listen for the signs of the wind. Like a guide, you walk silently through the forestahead ofus. In the forest everything has sound, speaks ... You too teach us to talk, where alllife speaks in the forest, not just the white man's. Isn't that part offeeling whole- the ability to be able to talk, to nat have to be silent or performing all the time, to be able to be critica! and honest-openly? This is the truth you bave taught us: all people deserve to speak.

197

Or a black male student writing that he will "Jove me now

and always" because our class has been a dance, and he Joves to

dance:

I love to dance. When I was a child, I danced every- where. Why walk there when you can shuffle-ball- change all the way. When I danced my soul ran free. I was poetry. On my Saturday grocery excursions with my mother, I would flap, flap, flap, ball change the shopping cart through the aisles. Mama would turn to me and say, ''Boy, stop that dancing. White people think that's all we can do anyway." I would stop but when she wasn't looking I would do a quick high bell kick or tow. I didn't care what white people thought, I just loved to dance-dance-dance. I still dance and I still don't care what people think white or black. When I dance my soul is free. It is sad to read about men who stop dancing, who stop being foolish, who stop letting their souls fly free .... I guess for me, surviving whole means never to stop dancing.

These words were written by O'Neal LaRon Clark in 1987. We

had a passionate teacher / student relationship. He was taller

than six feet; I remember the day he came to class late and came

right up to the front, picked me up and whirled me around.

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198 Teaching to Transgress

The class laughed. I called him "fool" and laughed. It was by way

of apologizing for being late, for missing any moment of class-

room passion. And so he brought his own moment. I, too, Jove

to dance. And so we danced o ur way in to the future as comrades

and friends bound by all we had learned in class together.

Those who knew him remember the times he came to class early

to do funny imitations of the teacher. He died unexpectedly !ast

year-still dancing, stillloving me now and always.

When eros is present in the classroom setting, then Jove is bound to flourish. Well-learned distinctions between public

and private make us believe that Jove has no place in the class-

room. Even though many viewers could applaud a movie like

The Dead Poets Society, possibly identitying with the passion of the professor and his students, rarely is such passion institu-

tionally affirmed. Professors are expected to publish, but no

one really expects or demands of us that we really care about

teaching in uniquely passionate and differen t ways. Teachers

who Jove students and are loved by them are still "suspect" in

the academy. Som e of the suspicion is that the presence of feel-

ing·s, of passions, may not allow for objective consideration of

each student's merit. But this very notion is based on the false

assumption that education is neutral, that there is some "even"

emotional ground we stand on that enables us to treat every-

one equally, dispassionately. In reality, special bonds between professors and students have always existed, but traditionally

they have been exclusive rather than inclusive. To allow one's

feeling of care and will to nurture particular individuals in the

classroom-to expand and embrace everyone-goes against

the notion of privatized passion. In student journals from vari-

ous classes I have taught there have always been complaints

about the perceived special bonding between myself and par- ticular students. Realizing that my students were uncertain

about expresssions of care and Jove in the classroom, I found it

necessary to teach on the subject. I asked students once: "Why

Eros, Eroticism, and the Pedagogical Process 199

do you feel that the regard I extend to a particular student can-

nat also be extended to each of you? Why do you think there is

not enough Jove or care to go around?" To answer these ques-

tions they had to think deeply about the society we live in, how

we are taught to compete with one another. They had to think

about capitalism and how it informs the way we think about

Jove and care, the way we live in our bodies, the way we try to

separate mind from body.

There is not much passionate teaching or learning taking

place in higher education today. Even when students are des-

perately yearning to be touched by knowledge, professors still

fear the challenge, allow their worries about losing control to

override their desires to teach. Concurrently, those of us who

teach the same oid stubjects in the same oid ways are often

inwardly bored-unable to rekindle passions we may ha ve once

felt. If, as Thomas Merton suggests in his essay on pedagogy

"Learning to Live," the purpose of education is to show stu-

dents how to define themselves "authentically and spontane-

. ously in relati on" to the world, then professors can best teach if we are self-actualized. Merton reminds us that "the original and

authentic 'paradise' idea, both in the monastery and in the

university, implied not simply a celestial store of theoretic i de as

to which the Magistri and Doctores held the key, but the inner

self of the student" who would discover the ground of their

being in relation to themselves, to higher powers, to communi-

ty. That the "fruit of education ... was in the activation of that

utmost center." To restore passi on to the classroom or to excite it in classrooms where it has never been, professors must find

again the place of eros within ourselves and together allow the mind and body to feel and know desire.

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14

Ecstasy

Teaching and Learning Without Limits

On a gorgeous Maine summer day, I fell clown a bill and broke my wrist severely. As I was sitting in the dirt, experiencing the most excruciating pain, more intense than any I had ever felt in my life, an image flashed across the screen o f my mind. It was one of me as a young giri falling clown another hil!. In both cases, my falling was related to challenging myself to move beyond limits. As a child it was the limits of fear. As a grown woman, it was the limits of being tired-what I call "bone weary." I had came to Skowhegan to give a lecture at a summer art program. A number of nonwhite students had shared with me that they rarely bave any critique o f their work from schol- ars and artists of color. Even though I felt tired and very sick, I wanted to affirm their work and their needs, so I awakened early in the morning to climb the bill to do studio visits.

Skowhegan was once a working farm. Oid barns had been converted into studios. The studio I was leaving, after having

201

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202 Teaching to Transgress

had an intense discussion with severa! young black artists,

female and male, led in to a cow pasture. Sitting in pain at the

bottom of the hill, staring in the face of tbe black female artist

whose studio door I had been trying to reach, I saw such disap-

pointment. When she came to help me, she expressed con-

cern, yet what I heard was another feeling entirely. She really

needed to talk about her work with someone she could trust,

who would not approach it with racist, sexist, or classist preju-

dice, someone whose intellect and vision she could respect.

That someone did not need to be me. It could have been any

teacher. When I think about my life as a student, I can remem-

ber vividly the faces, gestures, habits of being o f all the individ-

ual teachers who nurtured and guided me, who offered me an

opportunity to experience joy in learning, who made the class-

room a space of critica! thinking, who made the exchange of

information and ideas a kind of ecstasy.

Recently, I worked on a programat CBS on Arnerican femi-

nism. I and other black women present were asked to name

what we felt helps enable feminist thinking and feminist move-

ment. I answered that to me "critica! thinking" was the primary

element allowing the possibility of change. Passionately insist- ing that no matter what one's class, race, gender, or social

standing, I shared my beliefs that without the capacity to think

critically about our selves and our !ives, none of us would be

able to move forward, to change, to grow. In our society, which

is so fundamentally anti-intellectual, critica! thinking is not

encouraged. Engaged pedagogy has been essential to my devel-

opment as an intellectual, as a teacher /professor because the

heart of this approach to learning is critica! thinking. Candi-

tions of radical openness exist in any learning situation where students and teachers celebrate their abilities to think critically,

to engage in pedagogical praxis. Profound commitment to engaged pedagogy is taxing to

the spirit. Mter twenty years of teaching, I have begun to need

Ecstasy 203

time away from the classroom. Somehow, moving around to

teach at different institutions has always prevented me from

having that marvelous paid sabbatical that is on e of the materi-

al rewards of academic life. This factor, coupled with commit-

ment to teaching, has meant that even when I take a job that

places me on a part-tirne schedule, instead of taking time away

from teaching, I lecture elsewhere. I do this because I sense

such desperate need in students-their fear that no one really

cares whether they learn or develop intellectually.

My commitment to engaged pedagogy is an expression of

political activism. Given that our educational institutions are so

deeply invested in a banking system, teachers are more reward-

ed when we do not teach against the grain. The choice to work

against the grain, to challenge the status quo, often has nega-

tive consequences. And that is part of what makes that choice

one that is not politically neutral. In colleges and universities,

teaching is often the least valued of our many professional

tasks. It saddens rne that colleagues are often suspicions of teachers whom students long to study with. And there is a ten-

dency to undermine the professaria! commitment of engaged

pedagogues by suggesting that what we do is not as rigorously acadernic as it should be. Ideally, education should be a place

where the need for diverse teaching rnethods and styles would

be valued, encouraged, seen as essential to learning. Occasion-

ally students feel concerned when a class departs from the

banking system. I remind them that they can have a lifetime of

classes that reflect con ven tional norms. Of course, I hope that more professors will seek to be

engaged. Although it is a reward of engaged pedagogy that stu- dents seek courses with those of us who have made a whole-

hearted commitment to education as the practice of freedom,

it is also true that we are often overworked, our classes often

overcrowded. For years, I envied those professors who taught more con ven tionally, be cause they frequently had srnall class-

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204 Teaching to Transgress

es. Throughout my teaching career my classes have been too

large to be as effective as they could be. Over time, l've begun

to see that departmental pressure on "popular" professors to

accept larger classes was also a way to undermine engaged ped-

agogy. If classes became so full that it is impossible to know stu-

dents' names, to spend quality time with each of them, then

the effort to build a learning community fails. Throughout my

teaching career, I have found it helpful to meet with each stu-

dent in my classes, if only briefly. Rather than sitting in my

office for hours waiting for individual students to choose to

meet or for problems to arise, I have preferred to schedule lunches with students. Sometimes, the whole class mig ht bring

lunch and have discussion in a space other than our usual

classroom. At O berlin, for instance, we might go as a class to

the Mrican Heritage House and have lunch, both to learn

about different places on campus and gather in a setting other than our classroom.

Many professors remain unwilling to be involved with any

pedagogical practices that emphasize mutual participation be-

tween teacher and student because more time and effort are

required to do this work. Yet some version of engaged peda-

gogy is really the only type of teaching that truly generates

excitement in the classroom, that enables students and profes- sors to feel the joy oflearning.

I was reminded of this during my trip to the emergency

room after falling down that hill. I talked so intensely about ideas with the two students who were rushing me to the hospi-

tal that I forgot my pain. It is this passion for ideas, for critica!

thinking and dialogical exchange that I want to celebrate in the classroom, to share with students.

Talking about pedagogy, thinking about it critically, is not the intellectual work that most folks think is hip and cool.

Cultural criticism and feminist theory are the areas of my

work that are most often deemed interesting by students and

Ecstasy 205

colleagues alike. Most of us are not inclined to see discussion

of pedagogy as central to our academic work and intellectual

growth, or the practice of teaching as work that enhances

and enriches scholarship. Yet it has been the mutual interplay of thinking, writing and sharing ideas as an intellectual and

teacher that crea tes whatever insights are in my work. My devo-

tion to that interplay keeps me teaching in academic settings,

despite their difficulties.

When I first read Strangers in Paradise: Academics from the

Working Class, I was stunned by the intense bitterness expressed

in the individual narratives. This bitterness was not unfamiliar

to me. I understood whatJane Ellen Wilson meant when she

declared, "The whole processo f becoming highly educated was

for me a process of losing faith." I have felt that bitterness most

keenly in relation to academic colleagues. It emerged from my

sense that so many of them willingly betrayed the promise of

intellectual fellowship and radical openness that I believe is the

heart and sou! of learning. When I moved beyond those feel-

ings to focus my attention on the classroom, the one place in

the academy where I could have the most impact, they becam e less intense. I became more passionate in my commitment to

the art of teaching.

Engaged pedagogy not only compels me to be constantly

creative in the classroom, it also sanctions involvement with s tu-

dents beyond that setting. I journey with students a~ they

progress in their !ives beyond our classroom experience. In

many ways, I continue to teach them, even as they become

more capable of teaching me. The important lesson that we

learn together, the lesson that allows us to move together with- in and beyond the classroom, is one ofmutual engagement.

I could never say that I have no idea of the way students

respond to my pedagogy; they give me constant feedback.

When I teach, I encourage them to critique, evaluate, make

suggestions and interventions as we go along. Evaluations at

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206 Teaching to Transgress

the end of a course rarely help us improve the learning experi-

ence we share together. When students see themselves as mutu-

ally responsible for the development of a learning community,

they offer constructive in put.

Students do not always enjoy studying with me. Often they

find my courses challenge them in ways that are deeply unset-

tling. This was particularly disturbing to meat the beginning of

my teaching career because I wanted to be like and admired. It

took time and experience for me to understand that the re-

wards of engaged pedagogy might not emerge during a course.

Luckily, I have taught many students who take time to recon-

nect and share the impact of our working together on their

!ives. Then the work I do as a teacher is affirmed again and

again, not only by the accolades extended to me but by the

career choices students make, their habits of being. When a

student tells me that she struggled with the decision to do cor-

porate law, joined such and such a firm, and then at the !ast

minute began to reconsider whether this was what she felt

called to do, sharing that her decision was influenced by the

courses she took with me, I arn reminded of the power we have as teachers as well as the awesome responsibility. Commitment

to engaged pedagogy cardes with it the willingness to be re- sponsible, not to pretend that professors do not have the power

to change the direction of our students' !ives.

I began this collection of essays confessing that I did not

want to be a teacher. Mter twenty years of teaching, I can con-

fess that I arn often most joyous in the classroom, brought clos-

er here to the ecstatic than by most of life's experiences. In a recent issue of Tricycle, a journal of Buddhist thought, Perna

Chodron talks about the ways teachers function as role models,

describing those teachers that most touched ber spirit:

My models were the people who stepped outside of the conventional mind and who could actually stop my

Ecstasy 207

mind and completely open it up and free it, even for a moment, from a conventional, habitual way of looking at things .... !f you are really preparing for ground- lessness, preparing for the reality of human existence, you are living on the razor's edge, and you must become used to the fact that things shift and change. Things are not certain and they do not !ast and you do not know what is going to happen. My teachers bave always pushed me over the cliff ....

Reading this passage, I felt deep kinship, for I have sought

teachers in all areas of my life who would challenge me beyond

what I might select for myself, and in and through that chal-

lenge allow me a space of radical openness where I arn truly

fre e to choose-able to !e arn and grow without limits.

The academy is not paradise. But learning is a place where

paradise can be created. The classroom, with all its limitations,

remains a location of possibility. In that field of possibility we

have the opportunity to labor for freedom, to demand of our-

selves and our comrades, an openness of mind and heart that

allows us to face reality even as we co!lectively imagine ways to

move beyond boundaries, to transgress. This is education as

the practice of freedom.

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