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Blinding Sight: A Question of Color by Gene-Tey Shin November 26th, 1996
I loved comic books as a kid. I still have hundreds of them, stored neatly in alphabetical order in individual plastic bags, in two large boxes in my closet, waiting for the next time I feel the urge to pull them out and relive the days when I would spend hours poring over them, totally absorbed in the endless battles between Good and Evil. My father came in one day--I must have been sixteen--and I could feel that he was anxious over the money I was spending on something he would consider a useless waste, and he asked me "Why you spend so much time on these comics, eh?² Telling him simply that I loved reading them would be no use, that they took me places I could not go otherwise, that when I read them, the world, for a time, made a simple, clear sense I found beautiful and stirring, that quickened my heart and made me smile. None of that would have made any sense to him, so I spoke instead of the investment these books represented. "Look," I said, pulling out one of my favorites from a series where mutants, people whose physical and psychokinetic abnormalities gave them great powers to fight tremendous battles against evil while struggling with the loneliness in their souls at being outcasts, shunned and feared by the very society they risked their lives to protect, "look, this one cost 75¢ when I bought it; now it¹s worth almost three dollars!" He was very receptive to this. "Really?'" he asked. Seizing the moment, I showed him several more that had appreciated similarly. I remember my delight with this moment of connection, of closeness with my father that had waned as I grew up. We didn¹t enjoy the same things: he was as married to his business as he was to my mother, and I detested the Store and the drudgery it represented to me, an endless, grey and gritty process of moving boxes and dealing with moron customers who were all slightly crazy. A continual tension grew out of his desire to have me come and be a part of something he saw as being built up for my brothers and me, but me especially because I am his oldest son, and my own intense dread of the moment I knew could come at any moment when he would ask me or order me, to come in and work at the Store, not just because he asked me too, but because he wanted me to want to. To have this tension relax, even for a moment, was to relax a breath I had held for so long, I forgot I was holding it at all. The moment faded, though, as I went from talking about the financial investment my comics could represent, to the qualities I loved most about the art and the stories, how the layouts had changed radically in recent months and years, breaking away from the straightforward sequencing of six or eight self-contained panels per page, to wildly organized, freely developing explosions of action, characters leaping out of their little boxes to extend across entire pages. Plot had enjoyed a similar liberation, with romantic relationships developing across previously uncrossable lines, and even character development had matured to the point that hugely important figures, central to major lines were being killed, bringing an element of tragedy to the stories they had never had before. But, my father was only mildly interested in these types of details, and he went back to his room to finish getting ready for work. It's funny, but now that I think of it, comics really contributed to my life in a couple of important ways. I remember being twelve and amazed when I found several very old comics in my mother's desk at the Store, pulling them out and asking in astonishment, "Mom! You read comics?" My mother always read voraciously, and encouraged an equally insatiable hunger in my brothers and me, taking us to the library regularly, and never refusing a request to buy a book, but I had only ever seen her with a novel in her hand, never a comic. She is a very serious woman, and I couldn't imagine her reading anything under two hundred pages. "Yes," she replied with a smile, "I've had those since I was a girl." She loved the art in them, she explained, and I studied them closely, trying to figure out what she saw, what it was about these comics which prompted her to keep them all these years. I never really figured it out, our tastes in such things have always been different, but that moment gave me both a sense of legitimacy in my comic book collecting, and feeling that, despite the difference in our tastes, we shared something I was previously unaware of. But comics were not the first stories I loved. I remember reading the Greek myths as a child in my grandparent's house; I was fascinated by Theseus, Icarus and Daedalus, Jason and the Golden Fleece, Arachne and her pride, Pandora and the box that could not be closed again, and Hercules, of course. But my favorite characters were the gods themselves. I couldn't get enough of Athene, Poseidon, Apollo, Hera, Hephaistos, but especially Zeus. From these characters with their fantastic adventures and superhuman powers, it was only a short step to comics, and as silly as it may sound, as silly as it sounds to me now, comics were not simply entertainment to me, they were a source of wisdom and virtue as profound and stirring as any story from ancient Greece. I remember reading one in particular, it was a Superman, a special, double-sized issue where he had to go to a planet which revolved around a red sun which, as everyone knows, being the same type as the one which warmed his native Krypton, would rob him of the powers he gains from living on Earth, in the light of our yellow sun. There the Man of Steel would have to face their champion, a huge, fearsome warrior, greatest of a warrior race, with the outcome of the battle deciding the fate of the planet Earth. Fortunately, being the challenged race, humans could choose the contest; we selected boxing, (I don't really recall how). To prepare, Superman had to train under the greatest boxer of all time, Muhammad Ali. I can still picture the scene where Superman is walking down the street of a big city ghetto, resplendent in his brilliant blue tights and flowing red cape, a shining figure in a neighborhood darkened by poverty and filth. But he stood out for another reason too. Perhaps for the first and only time in the thousands of comics I have read, everyone on the page was anything but White, except for Superman, and it was for this as much as for his clothes that he was noticed. Two unsavory Black men watched him as he walked by, and one remarked on how Superman was lucky to be the Man of Steel, being White in their neighborhood. His friend admonishes him and says that, among all the White men he knew, Superman was the only one who was "cool," because despite his ability to see through walls, he was blind in a very important way: "there's one cat who's blind my way--colorblind." Of course Superman, with Ali's help, went on to win the day and the Earth went on uninvaded, and everything went on as before, and that line has stayed with me through the years, not only because of the comic book, but because being colorblind was an extremely important facet of my life. I remember my mother teaching me that color was incidental to who I was, that the real worth of a person was inside, and that was everything that mattered was kept, his thoughts, his feelings, his character. Color is only skin deep, after all. From this I inferred that to be colorblind was the way to really see a person, and this made enormous sense to me, because I knew many people who used horrible words like nigger, chink, and kike, people who would also beat me up an a fairly regular basis, making it fairly easy to associate such words with very bad people. Of course I wanted to be nothing like them, so being colorblind became a firmly established part of my view of the world, and of everyone around me. This fit in perfectly with school of course, facilitating the idea that we were getting the best possible education, that the people we were studying, Lincoln, Washington, Franklin, Dickens, Hawthorn, Shakespeare, Avogadro, Planck and Euclid, all of these men through their brilliance, courage and heroism exemplified the best of human knowledge and experience. To bring up race in regards to these men was simply unthinkable. It would be in the worst possible taste to focus on something so superficial and petty. It would totally obscure what could be learned from men such as these. Truly, race and color were utterly irrelevant concerns. I certainly never thought about it, being colorblind. Until the day I called Kevin a nigger. It was during wrestling practice, and Kevin was one of only two Black kids on the team. He wasn't very good, and I used to ride him really hard, shouting at him to work harder, scorning him when he lost. By this time, I was one of the major powers on the team, and I felt it was my responsibility to push everyone to do their best. I remember now, though, that I was always harder on Kevin than I was on the others, always more angry with him, and ready to be disgusted with his failure. I poured all this out in my voice as I helped him work harder. "GET UP! You're holding us all back! C'mon, youŠ" and I would trail off, my eloquence exhausted. One day, our positions were reversed. I was having one of those days all athletes know, when nothing works, and the world is an awkward and disjointed place. All my reactions were totally off, and I couldn't hit a single move. Guys I normally tied in knots were holding me down as though I were a baby, or a girl. And Kevin was ecstatic. Using precisely the words I had always lashed him with, he drove into me, taking every chance to give back what I had given him for weeks. Finally, my mind broke open and I turned to him in rage and hate, knowing that something horrible was coming up out of my mouth, out of my eyes, out of a place deep in my belly, and I couldn't stop, couldn't hold back but could only throw up at him with every drop of red anger in my body: "SHUT UP YOU NIGGER!" And even now, more than fifteen years later, my shout pounds at the walls of my skull, a hammering wave of shame and guilt, throwing me off balance and I sit dizzily, trying to blink away my sorrow. My coach did exactly the right thing; he grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and threw me out of the room, shouting that he didn't care how good I was, if I ever said anything like that again I was off the team. I could only nod, horrified by what I'd said, agreeing with him even as I wanted to die right there. But I didn't die. And I didn't die when I apologized to Kevin as fast and as strongly as I could. He just brushed it off, and gratefully, I let him, and I buried that incident quick and deep. colorblind colorblind colorblind colorblind colorblind colorblind colorblind Originally, my heuristic question asked: How have mainstream cultural traditions and definitions of literacy, while seeming to put White, heterosexual men at the center, interacted to actually prescribe their consciousness of themselves? Of their own thoughts? Of the idea of White men? To define words and concepts, including: education, learning, strength, power, competition, race, racism, gender, literacy, and sexuality? But in the process of wrestling with this question, I have come to see that it is too large for me to deal with fully as it is stated in the time I have for this project. What's more, it is premature for me to even try. I am coming to see that the defining of words like identity, virtue, manliness, colorblind, race and White is not limited to any one place, any one educational setting, but is developed in many situations and through many processes simultaneously, which constantly inform each other, even as they operate independently. Therefore, as I begin to hypothesize why White men in general seem unable to affectively apprehend the privilege of their position, I must also examine how my own consciousness has been prescribed. I don't know if I can describe how many ways, and how profoundly the incident with Kevin shocked me. I could not understand how, despite all I had learned about seeing humanity, I could have said such a horrible thing, and yet somehow I had developed an entirely unconscious attitude which could only express itself in this way. For some reason, something within me was racist. Looking back, I can see now how many subtle influences guided me to such words, but first I want to point out that I never experienced a similar incident with any of my friends or acquaintances who were White. Looking back on this writing, it is very interesting to observe how seemingly disparate concerns are interconnected: my relationships with my father and mother, and the differences between them; what comic books represented for me, not just as an escape, but a sense of order and rational for my own feelings of alienation; the connection between comic book ideals of manhood, racial equity, Greek myth, and my internalized racism. It's a lot to investigate. This piece began as a freewrite and, with only a little polishing of conventions, was composed pretty much as it stands now. I began it with two purposes in mind: 1. I wanted to write about my experience of being colorblind, and how I learned it, and the first time I came face to face with what it had really taught me. At first, all I had in mind was the line from the Superman comic, but as I wrote, I found memories of my father and mother welling up, and they naturally worked their way into the piece. This is important, I believe because of the second purpose I had in mind. 2. I wanted to communicate not only what I was thinking as I learned how to think of race, and, as it turns out, manhood, but I also wanted to revisit how I was thinking as I learned these lessons. That's why I don't mention mine or my parents' racial makeup. One thing this clearly shows me, is how the question of race was not consciously defined as an internal one for me, it was an exterior concern being played out by cultural icons of White masculine ideal, although from my attraction to the mutant comics and my reading that Superman comic book and thinking "that is really cool," I had clearly internalized issues about race to an unconscious level beyond my ability to examine at the time. So it did not occur to me to consider race in the context of my own family, which is biracial and therefore ought to be a perfect example of colorblindness, and compare quite favorably with what the comic book said. This lack of comparison is a perfect illustration of what I now identify as the flaw of believing in colorblindness as a virtue: it discourages thoughtful self-reflection and an awareness of environment and relationships. I never mention the fact that my father came from Korea, or that my mother was white, or that I am therefore biracial, because, being colorblind, none of those things mattered, the question of race did not apply to us, it only arose in regards to other people, all of whom happened to be Black. None of it mattered to me personally, and yet I was drawn to stories of people whose "abnormalities gave them great powers to fight tremendous battles against evil while struggling with the loneliness in their souls at being outcasts, shunned and feared by the very society they risked their lives to protect." In all the years I worked and struggled to believe in colorblindness, the only people I met whose color I never gave a thought to, never considered, never even occurred to me to consider, were White. If I did take notice of a person's physiology who "happened" to be White, it was to appreciate height, or beauty, or eye color or ugliness or hands. I never saw that a person was White. What's more, even though I would notice all of these things in people of color, it was always in conjunction with their color. I can remember thinking to myself, "what a beautiful Black woman," but never "what a beautiful White woman." Many feminists and people of color criticize educational systems in the US as oppressive, arguing that schools are racist, sexist, and homophobic, reinforcing prejudice and stereotypes in their pedagogy and curricula, and that the syllabi are exclusive of any but White men to any meaningful degree. Bringing an impressive array of personal experience and statistical evidence as proof, they have convinced many White, heterosexual men of the validity of their position. Despite this, despite being able to see that many individuals and groups are disadvantaged and underprivileged, conversation about changing the curriculum becomes problematic because, as McIntosh points out in her essay, White Privilege and Male Privilege,: A personal Account of Coming to see Correspondences through Work in Women's Studies, White heterosexual male denial of over privilege takes many forms: Some claim that men must be central to the curriculum because they have done what is most important or distinctive in life or in civilization. Some recognize sexism in the curriculum, but deny that it makes male students seem unduly important in life. Others agree that certain individual thinkers are blindly male oriented, but deny there is any systemic tendency in disciplinary frameworks or epistemology to over-empower men as a group. Those men who do grant that male privilege takes institutionalized and embedded forms are still likely to deny that male hegemony has opened doors for them personally (3). The film The Color of Fear documents an intense conversation between nine men from diverse backgrounds and their conversation about race. For most of the film, David, one of two White men in the group, has great deal of difficulty accepting the assertions of the men of color, whose experiences of oppression he dismisses as "unfounded." Yet, even while he is coming to acknowledge them as valid, David says: "You say I am special because I am White. I have never felt special." Why do White, heterosexual men, find it so hard to believe they are so advantaged even when they accept the overwhelming evidence that pervasive systems of privilege exist? Why doesn't being the "standard" or the "model" of history, literature, culture and masculinity make them feel "special"? I believe, that while White men have been encouraged to think of themselves as individuals, they have been discouraged from truly developing individual patterns of thought. In other words, White, heterosexual men have not been taught to be individuals, but to pattern themselves on images of individuality, as though the two processes are the same thing. I believe that the educational systems which have so clearly disadvantaged women, homosexuals, and men of color for so long, have also not served the men by and for whom they have been maintained very well. Even while perpetuating their place in positions of political, economic, and social power, these educational and cultural systems have caged the internal lives of White heterosexual men to an extraordinary degree. At this point I find myself at a difficult juncture, because it is very clear that the patterns of identity are closely interconnected; what it means to be White is connected to gender is connected to class is connected to sexuality is connected to culture, to the extent that any discussion of any of these facets is going to be arbitrary and incomplete. Recognizing this, I can only do the best that I can, as I try to explain how specific words have come to be defined in my experience, and how I see that influencing my future as a person and as a teacher. So, I will focus on the words "White" and "man" as the central concern of my writing, although I will need to draw upon other concerns as I explore. To begin with, I will state positively that it is now clear to me that one of the root factors leading to the problematization of racial consciousness for White men is this concept of colorblindness. It is a false virtue because, far from creating a vision of equality, it guarantees that I would always identify African-Americans, Native Americans, Asian-Americans and others as color, while ignoring the Whiteness of White people. The illogical nature of the perspective and the privilege of advantage it confers on White people should be obvious; after all, to suppress the fact that a particular person is of a particular color, one first has to notice that color exists. Therefore, it is impossible to be colorblind in this fashion, because you need to see color in order to dismiss it as unimportant, and once you can decide that one facet of a person is unimportant, regardless of what that person may think, it is easy to disregard any other facet you choose as unimportant. But the thing is, it is not obvious to most White people, just as it was not obvious to me for most of my life. In White Privilege, Peggy McIntosh talks of how she thinks "that whites are carefully taught not recognized white privilege, as males are taught not to recognize male privilege" (1). She goes on to explain how, in observing how even the most fair-minded and thoughtful men seem unable to think beyond the idea that there is a natural, biologically driven cause behind the social domination of men over women, she began to see that these men were working "from a base of unacknowledged privilege," and that "much of their oppressiveness was unconscious" (4). This insight, in conjunction with conversations with women colleagues of color led Peggy to see a correlating pattern between race and gender, which she connects to her educational experience. My schooling gave me no training in seeing myself as an oppressor, as an unfairly advantaged person, or as a participant in a damaged culture. I was taught to see myself as an individual whose moral state depended on her individual moral will. At school we were not taught to about slavery in any depth; we were not taught to see slaveholders as damaged people. Slaves were seen as the only group at risk of being dehumanized. My schooling followed the pattern which Elizabeth Minnich has pointed out: whites are taught to think of their lives as morally neutral, normative, and average, and also ideal, so that when we work to benefit others, this is seen as work which will allow "them" to be more like "us." (4) This idea is supported by Eleanor Kutz and Hephzibah Roskelly in An Unquiet Pedagogy, and their observations of school culture. In their analysis of the connection between language, thought, and culture, they come up against the question that if all children, no matter their background do indeed grow up learning complex and extensive linguistic training, if their language experiences are not deficient but simply divergent, then why do they have problems in school? Kutz and Roskelly argue it is because "what they come with is not understood and not valued by the [formal] system which educates them" (68). Children who do well are not simply good students, but have an advantage of living in the culture which is most closely reflected by the school system. Like all children, middle-class children learn the language practices of that end up being privileged in the schools long before they learn to read and write, bringing with them to school what they've learned at home. For all these children, the language practices that surround literacy are learned unconsciously and early, not through overt, direct instruction (68). So, as difficult as it was for Peggy to examine her own privilege, white, middle-class boys in a system established and maintained by and through a white, middle-class, male perspective, would naturally perceive their privilege even less because they are so privileged it is invisible to them. School reflects their home life to such a degree as to be virtually seamless. Growing up in such a system, it becomes clear, therefore, that one reason White men do not feel privileged is because others are not privileged. In monopolizing the space, in holding such vast privilege, White men have no reference point against which to measure their power, or see the lack of privilege of others. This, I believe is the heart of White experience. Invested in an ideology which, in the name of equality identifies color as a purely superficial characteristic, White identity maintains a systemic sense of colorblindness making self-reflection problematic. Last night I was thinking that I had not done enough secondary research to support this contention because I had not tried to find more authors who write about the White experience, and that the bulk of my evidence came from my own experience, but the truth is, very few White people write about White experience and identify it as such. All the work I have done to trace the theological and scientistic influences on educational thought has centered on the work and thinking of White men, and been written from a White perspective, but no one remarks on this fact. Now I realize that I have not simply been doing secondary research, but primary research in that my reading has shown me how people have composed the history of Western thought. hooks says that "the person who is most powerful has the privilege of denying their body" (137). This is not only true on an individual level, but on the systemic level of historiography. In all the talk about Plato and Socrates, Newton, Descartes, and Laplace, no one mentions that they are all White men. Of course, all the people doing the writing are White men, except for Fritjoff Capra, and he does identify these men as Western. hooks identifies the problem with this lack of identification: "The erasure of the body encourages us to think we are listening to neutral, objective facts, facts that are not particular to who is sharing the information" (139). But of course this is not true. Every thought we have, every word we speak, every action we take, everything we look at, is informed by a rich and complex base of personal experiences which define what we say, what we do and what we look at. While the first three are readily accepted, the fourth is less obvious, but it is arguably the most important in that it is how we define what we see by how we see it that determines what we think and say and do. "The important question about language and about literacy is how it allows us to place ourselves in relation to the world -- how it supports our process of Œmaking sense' or making meaning"(Kutz, Roskelly 120). Language and reality are dynamically interconnected" (Freire 29). If language and literacy are major components in the constructing of reality and meaning, then how we learn to be literate has a tremendous influence on the construction of identity. Reading and writing as making sense of the world both require an understanding of and a connection with the self, as Friere illustrates when he describes his own act of writing. Recapturing distant childhood as far back as I can trust my memory, trying to understand my act of reading the particular world in which I moved, was absolutely significant for me. Surrendering to this effort, I re-created and relived in the text I was writing the experiences I lived at the time when I did not yet read the words (30). So, if we are to understand the relationship between White identity and the literacy processes which make it invisible to White people, then we must return to the body to speak about ourselves as subjects in history. We are all subjects in history. We must return ourselves to a state of embodiment in order to deconstruct the way power has been traditionally orchestrated in the classroom, denying subjectivity to some groups and according it to others. By recognizing subjectivity and the limits of identity, we disrupt that objectification that is so necessary in a culture of domination (hooks 139). (emphasis mine) This next section of my essay is drawn from work I have been doing all semester, and which I have used in other papers. The difference here is, that in place of the word "Western" I am using the word "White" as an exploration of hooks' notion of returning to an embodied history.{1} White identity is informed by a connection between literacy and faith running from the earliest Greek myths, to the Old Testament, to Beowulf, to Chaucer, to Gutenberg, to the Reformation, and on to today. It should come as no surprise, then, that conceptions of identity reflect religious ideology, and yet this seems to me to be one of the most unexamined relationships in White culture. As I develop my own understanding of literacy, and see how it has been informed both by White and Asian cultures, I also see a correlation between the invisibility of White as an identity and White conceptualization of God and divinity. Miles Myers' history of shifting literacies in the U.S. documents the overt connection White theorists have made between education and moral or spiritual development.{2} But a more basic point can be seen in Myers' history about this connection, and that is how White-American educational theory is informed and shaped by a cultural history which refers to God as separate from man, and the Bible as the word of God and therefore sacred in itself, not to be questioned. With the Sacred thus relegated to an unknowable and inaccessible exterior source, never to be found within humanity, but only in a text, it is easy to see how students have historically been conceived of as "sinners," in need of saving, or ill, in need of improvement or curing. For example, from 1776-1864, which Myers calls the Signature and Recording Literacy Period, Horace Mann's notion of curriculum was a joining together of literacy drills and character development, suggesting that politeness was always inseparable from handwriting and spelling and that learning to write one's name was inseparable from morality and spiritual salvationŠOf course, if facility with print did not develop, then there must have been a failure of character, which could only be corrected by more silent drill (49). So, while Mann connects literacy and spirituality, he locates them outside the student, separating the student from the subject, reflecting the initial divorce of the divine from individual being, of God as separate from man. God is not to be found in man, but in the book. Therefore to be divine, to have any hope of salvation, is to be like the book, to deny and suppress what is in the self as evil, the corruption of original sin. Furthermore, since the mind of God is unknowable, it is not necessary that you understand what you are reading, only that you adhere to the form of the text. Myers cites the Oregon course of study, where "students copied their script from the bottom of the page up Œin order to see the copy at the top of the page.' The meaning was the same, no matter what direction one copied"(49). Of course, this would make it impossible for the student to read the text he was copying, but that was unimportant, as long as they could recite religious passage. But even when Biblical conceptions of God and divinity were not overtly linked to education, the pattern inherent in that ideology remained quite strong in educational theory, as it is one of the root assumptions of White culture, and so touches every theory and philosophy developed in it. For the Humanists, all of whom were White men, reading theory was based on the hypothesis that certain faculties of the mind were developed by certain mental activities, and that the study of subjects like Greek and Latin were the best mechanisms for developing skills such as oratory, rhetoric and logic. In colleges, intensive reading was said to have a Œspiritual value' because concentration on such matters as tense and pronunciation was thought to focus the student on fixed human values; thus the reading of selections from Greek fused into the student's nature, according to Charles Francis Adams, "the imperceptible spirit of Greek Literature, which will appear in the results of his [the student's] subsequent work, just as manure, spread upon a field, appears in the crop which that field bears" (Myers 47). Herbert Kliebard makes the same observation as he describes William Torrey Harris as, "A particular enthusiast for the study of grammar," who, "waxing poetic, claimed that the window of grammar "lets in a flood of light for the explanation for all of the problems which human experience can enunciate"(18).{3} But Kliebard goes on to observe: As it happened, the ability to think in this context was accomplished primarily by vigorous exercise of innate faculties of the mind. Since the function of the school throughout most of the nineteenth century, was seen as intellectual development, the vital importance of these traditional subjects was taken for granted (20). So White theorists considered only studying the words of Greek and Latin male scholars, forgetting to engage themselves with the questions those scholars considered: to wrestle with them and come to their own understanding of Good, of Truth, of Love. They took for granted that what the Greeks studied was important, and so did not question it. "Thus, the text of signature literacy was an authoritative text which was always a delivered, fixed, sacrosanct object, not a variable text to be interpreted. In this view of reading, an Œauthentic' reading, was the Œoriginal' reading or Œan affinity with what came first.' not a new or innovative reading" (Myers, 47). The act of theorizing about what the Greeks said and how they said it, studying their words as a subject separate from studying what the Greeks themselves studied, led to the concept that teaching Greek was a matter of teaching white students to recite what had been said, not to consider how the questions they asked could be answered for one's self. Kliebard observes, ...that most of what went on in the schools of the nation was, by and large, not only dull and lifeless, but utterly devoid of intellectual stimulation. Mental discipline as a defense of humanism, noble as that idea may have been, was translated, more often than not, into monotonous drill and inhumane treatment of pupils (23) Because the theory of values is fixed, so are the curriculum and the pedagogy. Coercive, rote memorization used to inculcate "fixed human values" in students while deliberately and systematically discouraging any attempts to understand the meaning of the words is inherently contradictory and ultimately self-defeating. The roles of White teacher and White student are cemented in place, and the student becomes only the receiver, a blank slate for the divine word to be written on. The teacher becomes the Authority, the dispenser of wisdom. Who the student is as an individual is unimportant; the purpose is to fix the values in the student in a rigid, unchanging sense. However, in spite of his role as The White Authority, the teacher is equally unimportant as an individual, because his individual qualities are irrelevant. The teacher is not allowed to bring any individual perspective to bear on the substance of the lesson any more than the student. As a result, in a White paradigm where the values, the curriculum, and the pedagogy are fixed, rigid, and discrete, the desired values are not absorbed; far from creating thoughtful, reflective individuals who ponder the nature of the universe, White people become rigid, intolerant, and unreflective, as trapped by their assumptions as those they oppress in the drive to force everyone to conform to the patterns of thought with which they themselves have been programmed. Tracking, slavery, standardization of curriculum, pedagogy and testing, Indian boarding schools, Jim Crow laws, grades and grading, The Literary Canon, toeing the line, school uniforms, grooming codes, discouraging the use of "I", the Japanese Internment of WWII, and the Pledge of Allegiance are just a few examples of such coercive thinking. Even White science does not escape this pattern. Indeed, it exacerbates the tendency to separate things, to dissect them, to create artificial distinctions in naturally integrated and organic systems. A scientific theory is only as good as the observation and the observational technique on which it is based, a point about observation which is so basic that it is very difficult not to overlook. After all, the first time we see a bear we ask "What is that?" We rarely ask, "How am I looking at that?" the first time, or the hundredth time we see it. And yet it is this question of observation which is at the basis of how we form all other thought, not just in America, but in Asian cultures as well; the concepts of comprehension and perception are synonymous in many respects: "I see what you mean." When referring to Newton's philosophy, it is described as the Newtonian or mechanistic view of of nature. The difference being, in Asian mystical thought, it is understood that all knowledge flows from personal experience, whereas in Cartesian methodology, the I is deliberately separated from the world, and knowledge is based on the abstractions we form to describe the world according to rationalist logic. Newton's view of the universe, combined with Descartes' separation of the I from the world, gave rise to the premise of scientific objectivity: that the world can be observed without mentioning the observer, that observation can be a neutral act. In White thinking this is the most desirable of perspectives because it is thought to make an empirical, rational knowledge of nature possible.{4} It is pure, based on the irreducible concept of cogito ergo sum, and therefore, anything observed from the techniques created from this premise can be taken for purely technical fact, unadulterated by bias or human fallibility. And it has worked. In their efforts to understand the truths of the universe, to explain and comprehend its nature and movement, men like Newton, Descartes, and Pierre Simon Laplace were able to develop differential calculus, unify algebra and geometry, and to accurately account for the motions of the bodies in the heavens, to the tides of the oceans (Capra 57). But there is an old Taoist saying, "Oh fortune, in which disaster hides! Oh disaster, where fortune resides!" The disaster of the success of the scientific method of objectivity is that it has been so successful in explaining the movements of the planets, enhancing technology and industry, and in developing weaponry all the way up to nuclear bombs, that it is adopted and applied to situations and contexts without questioning either its appropriateness or its validity in those contexts. As a result, those who utilize it do not come to question themselves, or their own relationship with nature, how they themselves are a part of it and perceive it. What's more, it is taught as a way of thinking without ever giving students the chance to question it for themselves. Teaching and accepting the concept of scientific objectivity without question problematizes one's ability to understand the relationship between rational knowledge and the process of abstraction, yet it is crucial to understand this relationship because it is the root function of the scientific observation. In The Tao of Physics, Fritjoff Capra explains that abstracting, or generating an abstraction is integral to rational knowledge because the infinite diversity and complexity inherent in nature defies specific classification and description without the generation of a generalized model which represents specific things and certain features, and which is then used to represent reality. "Thus we construct an intellectual map of reality in which things are reduced to their general outlines." In this way it is clear that rational knowledge is a system of seeing composed of "abstract concepts and symbols, characterized by the linear, sequential structure which is typical of our thinking and speaking" (27). Thus, the disaster hiding in this process is that the more successfully such a generalized understanding describes nature, the more likely it is to be mistaken for nature itself, the entire process of abstracting overlooked or even forgotten, even as it used. In this way, a White dependence on abstraction as reality is constructed which artificially divides the self from the world, and makes fluid and harmonious interaction with the world problematic. More basically, it makes the examination of self impossible once the abstraction of objectivity is taken for granted. Emotion, feeling, previous experience, personal taste, racial identity, all these would go unexamined as they are cast aside in the name of objectivity, and so their influence, which cannot be denied, only ignored, becomes invisible and works invisibly to defeat the very purpose of objectivity, to see the world more clearly. Interaction with others is similarly problematized because, being unable to understand how being White informs the way one looks at the world makes it impossible to understand differences in world views. If you understand that your way of looking at the world is not a way but the way all humans look at the world, because you have learned to unconsciously and uncritically equate "White" and "human" as equally interchangeable, then the idea of "another world view" will be ludicrous, or at least incomprehensible. These are not easy concepts to grasp, and are aggressively attacked. It is a strange thing, but even with all the social power and cultural dominance White Americans possess collectively, the subject of race is a very threatening subject individually. I remember one conversation about race in my classroom, in a private school where the board of trustees and the administration were 100% White and always had been, the faculty was 99% white, the student body was 95% percent white, where the only Black people hired by the school were cafeteria and cleaning staff, a White boy angrily declared that there was a serious problem with racism in America because Blacks can have their own beauty pageants and their own magazine. This sounds ludicrous, of course, but even fully mature, thoughtful White adults have great difficulty reacting calmly when faced with a view which does not fit into their understanding of race as an unimportant facet of life, which has no bearing on their sense of identity. When I started doing multicultural work at my school, I ran into resistance that looking back, I can hardly believe. One morning, after giving a speech in chapel about how being Asian-American has informed my experience as a student, I was stopped in the hallway outside my classroom by the head of the Classics Department. The building was designed two decades before, and on a very limited budget, and so the hallway was very narrow. Students pushed past us in a steady stream on their way to their first class, and this White man, in a loud voice, in front of all these students, declares that he never noticed I was Asian until I pointed it out. In another incident, this time in the faculty lounge, but in an even louder, angrier voice, accused me of being intolerant, anti-White, and anti-religion, finally culminating with "and all this business of you changing your name, by focusing on your Asian half, denying your White heritage, you've obscured everything in you that I can identify with!" And he stormed out of the room. Ensconced in a school separated from the rest of the city by a gate and a six foot high fence, forty years of traditional exclusivity, surrounded by colleagues, students, administrators and trustees the vast majority of whom look exactly like him, this man still doesn't feel safe enough to let one person be different. And such a small difference. The name Gene is alright, but just add one syllable, just acknowledge that one bit which has always been denied in White society, and suddenly I am a threat, and cannot be identified with. Suddenly, I no longer fit the definition of how he saw me, and so I was a threat to him. ßßßß Okay, this is as far as I am able to get in my response to my heuristic question at this time. I am painfully aware that it is unfinished, in that I have not even begun to unpack the word "man" and its related terms, "manliness," "manhood," and "manly," and so have not been able to incorporate the ideas and thoughts of the men I have spoken with on the subject for the purpose of this draft, but I am actually stuck. I am having some trouble articulating what all of this "embodying of history" is in aid of, and I am getting frustrated. Part of this has to do with voice. I feel perfectly free to speak with authority on my experiences an Asian-American, but even though I am arguably more White that Asian, having grown up in White culture and being half White myself, possessing a great deal of fluency in English but not in Korean, I am still reluctant to speak about what it means to me to be White with a equal sense of personal authority. This is perhaps, a far more eloquent illustration of how difficult it is to write about "the White experience" than any explanation I could compose, as well as how hard it is to escape a racist conceptualizing of Asian experience as more readily categorized and represented than White experience. So I will include two other pieces of writing which I composed during my quest, as they illustrate other aspects of my voice and feelings on this subject as it relates to me personally. So I guess that's the answer. This essay is far too academic for me to really talk about what I need to talk about concerning what it means to be White, as opposed to how I see the cultural roots of White identity. Also, trying to explain those things in this format would be to adopt far too authoritarian a voice, as though I would be dictating to other people how they should see what being White means, and I absolutely want to avoid that. Having said that, I can now say that, while going through all that history and "embodying it" may seem like I am trying to say that being White is bad, and that White ways of thinking are bad, that is not the point. The benefit I see to "recognizing subjectivity and the limits of identity, [is that] we disrupt that objectification that is so necessary in a culture of domination" (hooks 139). Because, as these next pieces try to express, I believe that White denial has not simply led to the oppression of others, but to an oppression of self, and that is only through an acceptance of self that choices in life can be made freely. The first piece, the little white lie, deals with the impact a partial teaching of history has on identity and self identifying, in a White context. The second, the white house, is the first draft of an extended metaphor illustrating my experience growing up colorblind. Works Cited Capra, Fritjoff. 1983. The Tao of Physics. Boston: Shambhala. Freire, Paulo and Donaldo Macedo. 1987. Literacy: Reading the Word and the World. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey. hooks, bell. 1994. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge. Kliebard, Herbert M. 1984. "The Decline of Humanistic Studies in the American School Curriculum," in Forging the American Curriculum. New York: Routledge. Kutz, Eleanor and Hephzibah Roskelly. 1991. An Unquiet Pedagogy. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook. MacIntosh, Peggy. 1988. "White privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences through Work in Women's Studies." Wellesley, MA: Wellesley College Center for Research on Women. Myers, Miles. 1996. Changing Our Minds: Negotiating English and Literacy. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English. Addendum I believe that I have answered two of the questions posed for the Addendum in the revised draft of the original question. At that point, I said, "I see this line of inquiry as being another facet of my overall exploration of how such concerns as race, gender, culture, class, sexual orientation are conceived of and influence education in this country. Understanding that such an inquiry can never be definitive, but ongoing, I hope that the process will enable me to better understand how my own experience relates to others so that I may create in my classroom a safer, more effective space for students to develop their own patterns of thought. I see this as part of what Friere would call developing "political clarity" so that I may be more effective in teaching for social justice. As a teacher, my sense of social responsibility flows from what I wanted all my life as a student: to be. I wanted to be in a way that, with rare exceptions, the books, the teachers, and the schools never let me be, freely and safely. Now I find the best way I can be is to help my students and my colleagues create the same opportunity for themselves. My dissatisfaction with my own teaching has shown me I must learn my own courage, my own mind, my own being, my own political clarity, because I will never find the perfectly safe place to stand, unless I contribute to its creation." What I would add to this now would be to say that my quest has taken me on some very unexpected trips into my past, and that I feel the process has given me a very good start in exploring Lao-Tzu's concept of the Pursuit of Learning. The pursuit of learning results in daily increase, Hearing the Way leads to daily decrease. Decrease and again decrease, until you reach nonaction. Through nonaction, no action will be left undone. Should one desire to gain all under heaven, One should remain forever free of involvements. For, Just as surely as one becomes involved, One is unfit for gaining all under heaven. I read this as saying that learning facts, rules, lumps of knowledge, accumulating pieces of information does not serve one well. But decreasing, being uncertain, unquiet, critical of both the system and of my place in the system, reducing it to what it actually is, allows me to be, rather than to have to act. The more I involve myself in concerns like grammatical correctness, superficial conformity to established forms, and standardized tests, the less fit I am to connect with my students, and gain an understanding of what they need, and so I am less fit to help them. As for the teaching of language itself, I am deeply confused by it. Language has become a mystery to me, a swirling, grey mist composed of millions of variables and concerns that make less sense the closer I get to them, but if I stand still, patterns begin to emerge. Just diving into the words white and man was the work of weeks, and I never even got to finish writing about what I have been able to unpack about what being a man means to me. The two words are so closely interrelated, its as though each drop in the swirling mist is actually every other drop. Learning to deal with them seems to require equal parts chasing after individual drops, and sitting back and just breathing them in. I hope to continue writing on the Man aspect of my subject, just to see where it goes. I imagine it will be very important to my Master's Comp., but I can't see how, at this point. As for how I would use the HQ concept in my own teaching, I imagine that I would have to provide a good deal more supportive structure, while trying to balance a concern for self-direction. I don't know exactly how I would do that until I saw the situation. FOOTNOTES******************************** {1} I have already made the replacements in the rest of this paragraph, and the emotional impact on me is considerable. I am not sure what to make of this yet, but I will try to insert relevant commentary as I continue. {2} It is interesting to note that, while Myers identifies the importance of diversity and race in the construction of his theories, he does not interrogate his own perspective or situate it in any personal sense. He is, of course, a White man from a high SES. Nor does he identify the main theorists in his history as White, even though they all were. it is exactly this sort of "disembodiment" which hooks is referring to as leading to the false impression that we are learning "neutral, objective facts" (139). {3} Like Myers, Kliebard is another White man who neither identifies his own racial and cultural perspective, or that of the White men he examines. {4} Previously, at this point in the essay, I was drawing on the work of Frijoff Capra who, as I mentioned, does distinguish between "Asian" mysticism and "Western" science. Replacing the word "Western" with "White," I realize now that one of the impacts this has on me is to personalize history. It is not some disembodied, abstract, "Western Culture" alone which developed this way of viewing the world, it was the product of individuals who lived and breathed and sweated and toiled over their work, people who may have had the best of intentions, but whose work had repercussions they could not possibly conceive, both for good and ill. [ Return to the Research Room ] [an error occurred while processing this directive] |