The Pleasures and Politics of Affinity

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

Abstract

It’s strange that teaching is often described and felt as a lonely, isolated space. Although we are literally surrounded by people, as educators we often feel alone in the nature of our classroom responsibilities, relationships, and power dynamics. Seeking opportunities for connection and affinity, the intentional structures of study groups, artist collectives, book clubs, and activist groups provide opportunities to not only break the isolation, but to practice and perform towards what Gaztambides-Fernandez describes as a pedagogy of solidarity (2012) that shifts the understanding of solidarity as working across sameness, to the work of social movements that function in relation to “radical differences… that insists on relationships of incommensurable interdependency.” (p. 46)

This paper explores how pleasure and politics within a white affinity space might point towards activist and transformative possibilities in anti-racist work in school spaces. Can collaborating within the context of shared values and white identities, prepare us for negotiating and working across differences of race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability? What sticks and what are the blindspots for doing activist, anti-racist work in individual educational settings informed by the comfort and congeniality of a shared identification with whiteness? How might practicing horizontal power sharing, deep listening, radical imagination, and loving build and activate these capacities in our work as critical educators invested in dismantling white supremacy in our fields of practice and institutional contexts? What are the possibilities of carrying the ethics of self organized spaces and creative inquiry (our affinity space) into those that facilitate systemic functions, incapable of enacting care – the university, the school (Noddings 2015)? When and how might an affinity group serve as protection or a hiding place from the real work of anti-racism and social transformation? How has working across sameness/whiteness informed the ways we see ourselves and our work in spaces of difference/racial diversity? Can we live up to the goals of a pedagogy of solidarity and towards a collective pedagogy that can make material change in the world?

Author

• Jessica Hamlin, New York University