Examining the Psychopolitical Dimensions of Race Talk in the Classroom

• In Event: Agency and Implicatedness in Postcolonial, Global Contexts of Education: Interrogating Race, Language, Policy, and Practice

Abstract

Discussing race in educational settings is often a contentious issue as both teachers and students struggle through feelings of pain, sorrow, anger and guilt which assist in stifling otherwise fruitful dialogues about the existence of racism. Efforts to avoid these uncomfortable emotions in the classroom call for pedagogical strategies that create safe spaces in order to talk about race effectively. However, when these attempted locations of safety
do not materialize or are ineffective, future conversations about race are jeopardized for fear of producing these same discomforting emotions. What then is the course of action when these pedagogical strategies fail? If we recognize the racially violent notions of oppression as well as the psychoanalytic presence of trauma caused by the various methods in which Whites have marginalized people of color, we find that safety and race are oxymoronic.
In this paper I theorize how notions of psychoanalytic grief (Cheng, 1997, 2001) and its connections with sociopolitical characteristics of oppression shape students and teachers emotional responses to having conversations about race. I posit that in order to have generative exchanges about race in the classroom, pedagogical approaches should take into account the inherently unsafe and traumatic discourses created by the United States violent racial past (Martinot, 2010); and subsequently, institute procedures that enable students to grapple with the difficult emotions that are tethered to it. Ultimately, reconceptualizing the idea of safety in race talk to account for the presence of racial suffering, can lead to productive discussions about race in the classroom.
In order to illustrate the violent discourses associated with race talk, I deconstruct a class discussion in which myself as the teacher and my students are engaged in a conversation concerning colonialism in the U.S. Utilizing a psychopolitical (Hook, 2005) theoretical framework, I analyze the psychoanalytic trauma present during the classroom exchange and how it determined the emotions that the class felt and contributed to the futility of the interaction. Then, based on this analysis, I conceive of a pedagogy that enables students to safely experience unsafe learning through the concept of “home” (hooks, 1990; Pratt, 1984) as a location for cross­racial cooperation, healing, and resistance. This idea of home can assist students as well as teachers in grappling with the racial trauma invoked from talking about race in the classroom. Further developing pedagogies incorporating these types of locations could improve the nature of race talk in school contexts and create a framework for teachers to both begin and sustain dialogues surrounding the topic while in turn providing students with the opportunity to become more racially literate.

Author

• Justin Grinage, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities