Feeling Race’s Funny Bones

• In Event: White Study Hall: Collective Investigations and Creative Responses to the Problem of Educational Whiteness

Abstract

When we scheduled our dates for posting prompts and reflective responses, there was some back and forth about which weeks worked for everyone. As soon as I protested my assigned date, which I figured would not give me enough time to write something sufficiently thoughtful, Author 1 said something along the lines of, “don’t do your usual thing” or maybe it was “don’t do that thing you do”—meaning, I assumed, don’t try to make this post an aesthetic object—just write raw and messy and quickly. I knew what she meant, even though she didn’t really say it that way, and so I agreed to whatever date and looked forward to just writing on the issue. Her warning stuck with me. What’s that thing I do when I set out to write about whiteness or race or maybe just anything I know I might eventually present at a conference?

The pressure to say the right thing the right way in educational spaces came up in our discussions and prompted me to consider how I write about sensitive topics, like race. I kept thinking about the “wrong” kinds of feelings that rupture “right” classroom performances in speaking and writing about whiteness in particular—those feelings that rarely, it seems, get emphasized in classroom discussions about race and racism. I considered my own instincts to play it safe in the classroom and the familiarity of feelings of guilt and shame that often accompany the subject of whiteness in educational spaces. Oftentimes, the goal of many teachers (myself included) is to provide students with ah-ha moments--to spark light bulbs that help illuminate the problems of which we are a part. But what about ha-ha moments, or the funny bones that might be missing in classroom conversations about whiteness and that might work as potentially effective tools for undoing white supremacist practices?

In my paper, I explore humor as a generative and complex site of discomfort, transgression (Berlant & Ngai, 2017) and connection for re-feeling whiteness. I consider how humor can provide a collective breath, expand delicate territory, subvert subjects, trigger unease, and raise difficult questions about who gets to laugh at what, at whose expense, and who has the privilege of laughing given the painful experiences of white supremacist realities and microaggressions. Engaging several “ha-ha” moments that emerged in educational discussions about race, this paper works towards possible assignments that mobilize humor as an awkward tool for poking holes at whiteness, opening up uncomfortable questions, and building a side-splitting, brave & critical classroom community. Rather than present a cleaned-up, aesthetically tweaked paper, I offer loose moments of race-humor experienced by educators in their classrooms, reflect on the concerns and discomforts about humor raised in our collective conversations, and come up with prompts/assignments inspired by teachers and artists whose work joins humor and critical punctures into the thick (even if fragile) skin of whiteness.

Author

• Maya R. Pindyck, Moore College of Art & Design