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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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

lli

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-

1[.11′ ,’t’

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.