Blue Eyed
There was a discussion of Whiteness as a study field, so I tracked down a brief explanation that seems pretty satisfactory.
It's always tough for me to hear about white privelege, as when I'm under stress (as for the last few weeks) I tend to put the blinders on to how other people's suffering is worse than mine. And yet I can begin to recognize how many cultural advantages I'm granted because of my whiteness (and maleness).
Anyway, the suggestions on teaching whiteness include watching the film "Blue Eyed" which is a sort of documentary. It's been put onto YouTube in installments (with Spanish subtitles, so I guess it was on TV somewhere Spanish speaking when it was ripped) starting with Part 1, and I watched all twelve parts today.
It's totally interesting. I still don't know how I feel about it. The facilitator reflects on her past work as an elementary school teacher and goes around teaching a particular brand of diversity training. The training involves devaluing people with blue eyes for a day. It was tough to watch at first, as her reasons for going after blue eyed folk seem to come out of spite, but her rhetoric is hypnotizing and her empathy eventually comes out. I would highly recommend watching it, and I think as a classroom teaching tool it could be productive (maybe if you warn students beforehand).
Comments
what started out as a short post became a racial diatribe
I think this area of study is never easy to work with. Recognizing privilege...welll....sucks and it is difficult to help students through that process as well. Lisa Nakamura's clarification of privileging whiteness in her articles on "identity tourism" and "menu driven identities" really helped me recognize how racial reductions/stereotypes and defaults can normalize a white perspective. Stuart Hall's piece entitled "The whites of their eyes" also really got me thinking about how whiteness is an invisible ideology. Both of these pieces have helped my chpt 2 "whiteness ideology" section develop as well as helped me become a better teacher. In my Com204 recitation sections (it is a large lecture class where a professor teaches the main lecture), I had a black female student who expressed in her rhetorical criticism paper that the classical and contemporary rhetorical theories in class didn't quite fit Malcolm X's "Ballot or the Bullet" speech. Her and I met and chatted about what she saw going on in the piece and other theories of minority rhetorics that might fit better. Without my research in whiteness studies, my own whiteness is easily invisibilized into what is "normative" rather than contemplating what influence/power my white skin enables me.
In a related area of Critical Race Theory, as I've been reading Derrick Bell's "Faces at the bottom of the Well" I find myself depressed by his arguments about the inevitability of racism. I like messages of hope and agency found within hooks and Freire because I need purpose in addition to dissent (aka become a thorn in the side).
Well, now that I have gone on for a while, what do others think?
;p