A Whiter Shade of Pale: Teaching Race in the Midwest
2008; Pittsburg State University; Volume: 49; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0026-3451
Autores Tópico(s)American Constitutional Law and Politics
ResumoI TEACH CLASSES IN composition, literature, and cultural studies at Nebraska Wesleyan University, a small liberal arts college in the Midwest. My students are polite, earnest, and reasonably hard-working. They are also very white. In the fall of 2004, over 95% of Wesleyan's 1535 fulltime undergraduate students identified themselves as meaning that the percentage of students who identified themselves as Asian, African American, Latino, and American Indian combined was less than 5%. African American students comprise barely 1% of the total student population, Hispanic students not quite 1.5%. 93% of the student body comes from Nebraska, and well over half of these students from towns with fewer than 20,000 inhabitants. Lest readers conclude that Nebraska Wesleyan's racial homogeneity is anomalous even for the heart of Wonder Bread, fly-over country, I should point out that, according to the 2000 census, 90% of the state's population identifies itself as white. Nationally, that figure averages 75%. In class discussions on issues of race, my students are reticent to speak because, from their perspective, race remains foreign to their Nebraskan experience. Their collective assumption that race and racism are someone else's problem-how could it be a problem in white-bread Nebraska where everyone is the same?--leads them to conclude that have virtually nothing to say on the topic of race. What invariably will say is that themselves are assuredly not racist. My students assume that racism is most noxious when it is most visible. Mention racism and many students' heads immediately conjure up visions of lynchings and Klan rallies. For me as a professor to suggest that race and racism are legitimate issues to analyze and discuss on our campus strikes many of them as genuinely odd. In fact, I sense in many of my students a conviction that to acknowledge race and racial difference is itself racist. Within this logic, race and racism somehow get conflated--to make race visible, to talk about it, is de facto to participate in racism. They equate racial self-consciousness with racism itself. Indeed, my students sometimes accuse me of imposing race where it does not belong in my analyses of cultural and literary texts. They claim color-blindness when listening to music to an extent that strikes me as disingenuous. For instance, a few years ago I taught a cultural studies-inspired course on popular music. In a class discussion of the Mississippi bluesman Robert Johnson, I grew frustrated that my students saw Johnson's music as quirkily individualistic (they called it depressing) and not at all tied to Southern traditions of African American culture and experience. For them, Johnson was simply something of a weirdo, a guy strangely and unaccountably obsessed with dread. A week or so later, I returned to the theme of individual expression being tied to group identity by invoking James Baldwin's argument that just about every incarnation of white hipness in the twentieth century comes straight from African American culture. As an example, I mentioned white suburban teens utterly immersed in what take to be hip hop style and culture. I suggested polemically that such white teens gravitate toward blackness because are embarrassed by their whiteness. One incensed student couldn't believe I'd say something so ridiculous. They're not embarrassed to be white, he countered in what was for the class a rare passionate outburst; they just like hip hop music! Most of my students insist that all their own actions--indeed, all the actions of writers we read and literary characters we read about--are fiercely individual, occurring in something like a cultural vacuum. For them, human actions, preferences, and attitudes are strictly sui generis. They insist on this even as I look around the room and try my best to distinguish one tall, blond, pale guy in a baseball cap from all the other tall, blond, pale guys in baseball caps. …
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