Racism and other everyday practices

Last week, I read Native American author Sherman Alexie's poem "On the Amtrak from Boston to New York City" with a small group of students. In the poem, Alexie describes an everyday experience--he's on a train, and a white woman across from him "points out the window past [him]" in order to identify all of the "history" in the landscape. Alexie means, of course, for the word "past" to carry particular salience. She fails to see him; she can only see past him. Hers is likely a scene she's played out with countless other social actors who've played this same scene, too, with others, and so on. Her intentions are at least benign, and maybe they are even good. That is why Alexie decides to buy her an orange juice from the snack car instead of telling her off.

In response to the poem, one student relayed a commonplace reaction to this kind of text -- "It doesn't sit well with me," he said, "when minorities act like all white people are racists. I am not a racist at all."

What does a racist look like? What does he sound like?

As the EWC authors demonstrate in their chapter on everyday racism, "racism" is a particularly hard-to-pin-down bit of ideology. It is insidious, amorphous--it is like the fog lingering and moving all over the place in T.S. Elliot's London. It stands in drains. It moves around a house somewhere only to curl up and fall asleep. It moves and stretches and changes density, but it does not necessarily ever dissolve. It is yellow and thick and dirty and unpleasant. It sits stagnant and it flares up in fits and starts. The world that makes it can't will it away by simply turning its back on it and failing to own up to it.

The student's response, in other words, (and let me say here that this is a particularly thoughtful and open student--the sort of student who regularly lights up with depth-filled epiphanies) has to do with an outdated way of thinking about racism and hate--one that considers "racism" a visitor in the world, something that's visited us and caught us unawares and one that we long ago voted off the island. This way of thinking does not allow for the possibility that well-intentioned, ordinary, and everyday men and women made this beast through everyday practices and that everyday practices might, therefore, be the channels through which it survives, or even thrives.

One might have thought, at one time, moreover, that a "racist" was a person who committed some kind of overtly hateful and ill-intentioned act (or series of actions). His lexicon would have included any number of head-turning obscenities. This was never really real, but it was a nice idea. This way of thinking was entirely practical, and it still is.

It is a way of containing a staining and relentless social problem under the protective cover of a bell jar. This way of thinking about racism, though, has allowed the everyday practices that give some folks a boost and others a hard push down to proliferate unquestioned. It makes sense--I like to hang on to lies that make me feel safe, even when I know they are lies through and through somewhere in my head. Some of them only harm me, though, so maybe I am alright with keeping these or letting them go as I please.

Fog. It lingers and it infects and you can't touch it because it is everywhere and it is nowhere.
The woman on Alexie's Amtrak train is reproducing a time-honored set of social niceties. She's ruminating to a captive audience -- the stranger on the train. She's stringing together any number of cliches that fall, generally, under the "things one says on a train to a stranger" rubric. What is the harm, really?

These exchanges, though, are practices produced and reproduced in the context of deeply racist institutions. And institutions are not born out of the ether by some evasive higher power, are they? Nor are they the result of some evildoers working all on their own.

While the writing center is an institutional entity, it is also a sort of bastard child of the academy. It can afford, maybe, more than other entities, to transgress in various ways. What does this mean?

We are all "implicated" in a "power structure" that socializes us into "raced identities," which "are used to determine, categorize, evaluate, sort, promote, or reject us," and are the result of "the vast array of systems and institutions through which our social, political, intellectual, and spiritual lives are conditioned" (95). This is not, in other words, an issue we can opt out of because we are complicit in its operations every day in the everyday ways we do being people.

This is not the kind of issue one can simply say one does not participate in...it's a real thing in the world in which we live. We can no more escape it than we can escape the universe. So, now what?

The authors of the EWC are mindful of this rather icky milieu. They know the world is not going to be able to go through the 12 steps to "recover." One cannot pluck the fibers from their being they'd rather not know about and toss them to the wreckage pile. So, in an artful weaving together of a possibility-- a community in which humility reigns supreme and where participants linger in tensions and in unknowns -- they present the writing center community with a particular challenge--one that I can't fit into a neat little quip to end this piece even if I wanted very badly to do so. It would be easier, it would make me feel pretty good about myself, and it would satisfy. Instead, I'll have to end with a hope--that you'll want to go soot-hunting with me.