What We Can't Talk About

In my grad class last night, we discussed African American's "racial uplift" approach to challenging discrimination in the early twentieth century. One of my grad students caught me in the hall during break to ask, "Do you feel comfortable talking about race with black students in the class?"

I was taken aback. This white student is older than me by 15 years or so and a veteran high school history teacher.

"Of course," I say and then I ask, "Are all your students white?"

"Yes, and I don't think I could talk about race if they weren't."

Once I recognized her hesitancy, I started to see several others who were holding themselves back. A wave of inspiration would pass over their faces, their mouths might open, they would sit up a little taller, only to slump back down. I finally had to stop them and remind them that intellectual exploration and debate was the whole point of the course. And then I still had to pull ideas out of several of them, white and black alike, so hesitant were they to criticize African American leaders from a century ago -- lest they look racist (white students' fear) or reveal that a form of racism might have been at work in the black community (black students' fear).

So it fell to me to stir the pot... to ask outrageously provocative questions, to take ideas to extreme ends until the students felt compelled to jump in and wrestle their ideas away from me lest I do them more harm.

I do this all the time on all sorts of issues in my undergrad classes. What was striking about last night was that I felt I had to do it in my grad class. This is a class (of eleven women and one man who says nothing) that is happy to tell you how awful women are to each other, what crimes "all men" (yes, yes, I challenge them on this) have committed against women... but they apparently seize up on the issue of race and the possibility that they might say something "wrong" about (insert whispery voice here) black people.

Theorizing Social Space (week 4)

This week's grad class on "Women and Public Spaces" was pretty cool. The students struggled to get through Hiller and Hansons' The Social Logic of Space (2003), but with a whole lot of prompting/leading/interpreting on my part, they finally got it:

“The global form has not been conceived of or designed by any individual: it has arisen from the independent dynamics of a process that is distributed among a collection of individuals, ” (i.e. a “local rule”). (p. 36) So basically societal rules (etiquette, manners, tradition, custom) followed by discrete entities (individuals) ultimately create the structure of space because those rules are acted out in space.

The example that made it finally work for the students was the cloud of midges.... midges don't have some overarching entity that creates the cloud, rather it is created by each individual in their little space following shared rules (specifically to always keep another midge about so close). But that the midges on the other sides of the cloud are following the same rule creates the physical shape/space of the cloud. That means that the midge on one side is in a spatially concrete and socially bounded relationship with the midge on the other side, even though the two may never meet face to face. The model suggests that there is some coherent whole to social space… a knowable pattern (H & H call this a "morphic language"), a system in which all are connected.

I'm pretty sure our discussions for the next ten weeks are going to include the behavior of little bugs. Time to get out my fly swatter, lest the students wed themselves to this relatively simple and orderly model. Time for them to get good with multiple social systems, transpatial elements, conflicting categories, and other sources of messiness!

Time to revisit Elizabeth Grosz, methinks. Grosz suggests the connection of intersection or space and society is "a fundamentally disunified series of systems and interconnections, a series of disparate flows, energies, events or entities, and spaces, brought together or drawn apart in more or less temporary alignments." ("Bodies-Cities," in Sexuality and Space, Beatriz Colomina, ed., p. 248)

Reflection

Writing about teaching is an odd thing to me. I did it once a while back -- a co-authored piece with a good friend and colleague -- and it was nice because I was leaving the campus where we had taught together and it was our last project together, a way to process the three classes we had shared on Wednesday evenings in winter terms. This time, I did it on my own as a way to process a course that was very much unlike any others I had taught. And thanks to the popularity of civic engagement in higher education these days, an on-line journal dedicated to such topics was happy to publish it.