When Emotions Talk, Everyone Listens: Graduate School Antiracist Pedagogy

• In Event: Feeling Race: The Significance of Emotionality in Antiracist Education

Abstract

Ellsworth (1989), a white woman, once wondered how she could teach her own students about antiracism when she was not free from her own racism. But can one ever be “free” of their own racism when racism is structural? This inescapability is a plausible reason why antiracist pedagogy can be emotional. Furthermore, antiracist pedagogy often elicits emotional crisis (Tatum, 2003). This crisis occurs because unlearning a sense of self cannot be done rationally (Kumashiro, 2000). Crisis in the antiracist classroom is more about emotional than cognitive labor. To better understand how students and educators experience such pedagogy, I conducted a critical ethnography, as a participant observer, of an antiracist graduate classroom. In the class, there were seven whites and three people of color. My guiding question was: How do participants experience antiracist pedagogy as a topic(s) of study in a graduate level classroom?

Although “emotions” are contextual and subjective, I define them here as responses to stimuli that express a person’s feelings in the form of talk, utterances, text, and/or physical responses (Grosland, 2013). For this study, I use two tenets of Critical Race Theory as a way to interpret race and racism. One, the critique of liberalism is useful because it problematizes liberal ideology for its narrow focus on incremental change when more critical, direct, and transformational approaches are necessary (DeCuir & Dixon 2004; Ladson-Billings 1998; Saddler, 2005). Second, the permanence of racism is the belief that racism is a normalized part of life in U.S. society and that whiteness contextualizes all other political systems (DeCuir & Dixon 2004; Grosland, 2013; Ladson-Billings 1998; Lopez 2003; Taylor 2009). To analyze emotions, I used aspects of Zembylas’ (2003) genealogies of emotions in teaching. Part of his genealogy is that “emotions are not private or universal and are not impulses that simply happen to passive sufferers” and that “emotions are constituted through language and refer to a wider social life” (p. 110). This perspective challenges dichotomous notions of private (existentialist and psychoanalytic) and public (structuralist) domains of emotions. In my research, emotional responses comprise a “language” that speaks to wider issues of racism and social life.

Results from my research were twofold. First, I looked at the emotional implications of the rapport students built by interacting outside of class. Second, I critically interpreted the finding that those who were racially aware, identified as a member of a racially targeted group(s), and/or had more experience with antiracist pedagogy (as a student or teacher) displayed fewer observable emotions of distress. Conversely, individuals who embodied fewer of these qualities, mainly whites, were comparatively more emotionally demonstrative. Since emotions are fundamental to human experience, I caution that “working against oppression…should not be about advocating strategies” but instead becoming comfortable with pedagogical unknowns (Kumashiro, 2000, p. 45) or discomfort, like engaging the emotionality of race. Recommendations include assignments that provide interactions outside of the classroom, homogeneous group opportunities, and teachings on the emotions of antiracism.

Author

• Tanetha Jamay Grosland, University of South Florida