Fighting the Urge to Run and Hide: Critical Dialogic Pedagogy, the Racialized Instructor, Battling Fatigue

• In Event: 63.061 - Hip-Hop Pedagogy and Racial Battle Fatigue: The Untold Stories of Critical Educators

Abstract

The emotional labor is great, the fatigue and frustrations plenty burdensome, when one’s academic, work, and personal lives are engulfed with the passion to critically engage race, ethnicity, and institutional/systemic oppression. Upon saying ‘yes’ to Derrick Bell’s (1992) initial call to claim racism and oppression as real and theorize its impact as well as embrace the lived interactions and experiences that accompany it, many find that the emotional response to this responsibility can be overwhelming. There is oftentimes the strong urge to run and hide under the sheets, clenched hands on pillows over closed eyes, trying to will the brain away from continued critical interrogation of race in life and in studies and drift off to sleep, succumbing to the status quo and normative discourse of ‘it doesn’t matter.' This work is essential and necessary. It informs the relationships, interactions, and social constructs that are a part of the author’s everyday roles as a graduate student of color, engaging in research focusing on the Latino community and its connection with urban schools; as an instructor for an Intergroup Dialogue course on Race/Ethnicity, engaging in race discourse across difference; as a Puerto Rican man, engaging in everyday life on a historically White campus, as well as lived experiences outside of academia living and working for social justice causes in a segregated and deeply divided community. Throughout it all, fatigue sets in and sometimes settles in deeply.
​ This paper will center the author’s role as an instructor of color engaging in critical dialogic pedagogy and as a graduate researcher focusing on issues of race/ethnicity while incorporating the stories of other instructors of color who engage in similar efforts. Through a critical analysis of these stories, culled from qualitative interviews of past and current instructors of color using critical dialogic pedagogy in their teaching, this paper critically engages the praxis at which lived experience as a person of color informs the role of an academic instructor of color and the impact of racial battle fatigue (Smith, Yosso, & Solorzano, 2006) on the teaching experience. This paper engages a critical dialogic framework through a Critical Race Theory lens (Kohli, 2012). Critical dialogue offers a site for understanding and collective meaning making, allowing participants to engage in open and reflective discourse about difficult topics. In order to successfully engage in this process, the academic instructor must be willing to critically reflect and understand the ‘self’. It is this notion of the critically dialogic ‘self’ that this paper will take up, specifically the praxis at which the racialized self must be considered as well. Critically analyzing the racialized ‘self’ allows for a critical understanding of how racial battle fatigue (Smith, 2004) sets in. Further, this paper will engage in an understanding of what racial battles are taking place within a dialogic space, the emotional labor this battle entails, and the struggle to create safe spaces for students while wondering who will save us from being swallowed by the immense burdens of doing critical work.

Author

• Jermaine Soto, Syracuse University