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and open student--the sort of student who regularly lights up with depth-filled epiphanies) has to do with an outdated way of thinking about racism and hate--one that considers "racism" a visitor in the world, something that's visited us and caught us unawares and one that we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.

The "D" Word or "Diversity"

As you all know, tomorrow is the meeting date we've chosen to dedicate to discussions on diversity. This is a particularly difficult topic for our community to discuss. In fact, it is an amorphous and messy thing for any group to take up.

One of the issues that "diversity" raises as a topic is, ironically, that it is far more than merely topic-al. It implies, in other words, that there are things that are to do with difference and other things that are exempt -- they do not fall in line under that particular topic.
We might even recall a related, pervasive, and rather peculiar assumption in a variety of academic and extracurricular or even private settings: diversity means raceclassgender in general and blackpoorgay specifically. I suppose we all recognize the conflation going on in these instances. Perhaps this sentiment is to blame for smart people with good intentions offering up ideas on diversity that are of the "how I will accept and help those others" variety.
However, can any one or any thing or any place or any time really opt out of diversity? Can any piece of the material world say that it is a starting point? Can we simply claim a neutral space where diversity is a non-issue because we do not, for example, have any people with visible marks of being other than mainstream? And how do we define mainstream, anyway?
A related matter: at times, one might hear something like, “I’m sensitive to issues of diversity,” or “issues of diversity interests me,” or “I’m interested in increasing the diversity of our staff.” These are loaded and highly problematic statements to be sure. And though it is difficult to admit, these are among the very best of the statements I’ve heard on diversity. They stand in due to a lack of a better something else.
I want to suggest here that diversity is the term we ought to use to draw attention to heterogeneity over and against originality. We are not all the same, and this is not very profound or surprising. However, living in a late capitalist age in which narcissistic expressionism appear to be the dominant mode, I suppose we feel the need to devote meetings to diversity in order to offer space to reflect on the ways we are different and not ways in which we are better. We are special, maybe, but not all that remarkable. There are things we owe to each other and yet nothing is really owed to any one of us. There is no clean line that separates me from you from they, but there is difference nonetheless. Our work as tutors should linger in the tension of this impossibility – in a space where it becomes possible to live differently. I think the McIntosh reading is, therefore, appropriate not because it brings up issues of race and racism. This ought not to be the meeting where we only admit or deny our privileges, though that could be nice. Instead, I find value in McIntosh’s implicit call for more humility, more understanding, more thoughtfulness, and more love – these things all require less ego and more responsibility.
I tend to believe that we are highly diverse from day-to-day; our identities, I’d say, are complicated and inconsistent performances. If we are giving our attention to diversity, we are honoring the ways in which we cannot entirely know ourselves or others; we are allowing for ellipses that go un-interpreted; we are giving our selves and others space to perform without judgment…