"When did I become White?" A South Asian Student Representing US Educational Whiteness in Global Contexts

• In Event: Belonging and inclusion in higher education: Students' experiences at home and abroad (II)

Proposal

INTRODUCTION

I was walking through Vilakazi Street in Soweto, Johannesburg; a historical street that has the homes of two Nobel laureates, Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu. The street, a part of a larger region that was significant in the movement to overthrow the Apartheid regime in South Africa, is today lined on both sides with restaurants, and street-side vendors. We were a big group of about 19, many of whom spoke with a distinctly American accent. This accent and size of the group drew these vendors to us; vendors selling souvenirs to mark their historical struggle against oppression from the Whites, while also showcasing the crafty talents of the local people through wood figurines of animals, pottery items and fabric-work. One such vendor walked up to me and asked me,
“Where are you from?”
“India,” I said, without a second’s thought.
The vendor's eyes glazed over with disinterest and confusion. “India? But I thought you were American. Then you can buy from me with dollars.”
He looked around at my companions and moved intentionally towards them, away from me. This was one of the first times I realized that the fellowship trip I was on, was going to educate me not just in academic and scholarly ways, but also teach me more about how complex my identity had suddenly become when I decided to move from India to the US as an international graduate student of education.

In another incident, the group of which I was a part was visiting an elementary school in Pretoria. What started off as a trip to the institution to understand how elementary school systems function in the capital city of South Africa, soon turned into a spectacle. The principal and teachers, while showing off their facilities proudly, wanted us to admire all that they do with and for their students. The students on the other hand, seemed to have lost interest in what was happening in their lessons. They all came out of their classrooms, and waved at us like we were celebrities. What is it that we were being celebrated for? “For being American,” said one of the teachers beaming, as if that was an achievement that each individual in our group should be proud of. But we were not all American. We were also Indian, Chinese, South Korean, Russian and Kazakhi. Do these identities not matter at all? Are we losing our transnational status and only representing the “Whiteness” considered to be a gold standard of global education?

The two anecdotes above build a short introduction to the 2-week long trip the author took as a graduate student from Michigan State University to South Africa this summer, as a part of the Fellowship for Enhanced Global Understanding organized by the College of Education. What started as an exciting trip for various academic and professional reasons, soon turned into a constant personal tussle for the international students in the group, who were being identified as American, and therefore by extension, representative of White privilege. This study is an autoethnography (Adams, et al., 2017) of the experiences that the author had on this trip that bring to the fore the complexity of identity, intersectionality and privilege, and how these impact educational and academic learnings of a scholar of global and comparative education.

FRAMEWORKS

The author’s lived experiences of education and academic training in a postcolonial context in India, while finding coherence in the South African context is also colored by the fact that the South African system is looking upon her as a representative of the US white system of education. In this paper, the representation of “whiteness” (Leonardo, 2009) by people of color in spaces that are not white, will be approached by feminist theories on decolonizing global educational spaces (McLaren, 2017), with a special focus on intersectionality (Collins & Bilge, 2020) in identity .

METHODOLOGY

Data from this autoethnographic study has been collected over 2 weeks through a fellowship program that the author was selected to go on in South Africa in May-June 2023. During this time, the author was able to record her experiences, insights, questions, conversations with locals, and photographs of sites in her journal. The reason for using this data as a wider study rather than reflections on a trip taken as an international graduate student is to ensure that those with such experiences have a safe space to connect and share their experiences, through which interventions and solutions to decolonizing educational spaces in postcolonial structures can be constructed.

FINDINGS

While the author had expected to have a plethora of academic experiences on this visit to South Africa, what she had not expected was to get an existential crisis about who she was, where she belonged to, and how her research interests were so deeply interlinked with her lived experiences. For the first time in her career as an international student, there was a sense of anger, shame and avoidance with how they were perceived by members of other postcolonial structures, those she thought would have had more in common with because of their non-white legacies. These affective experiences helped the author put together a web of her different identity markers and their representative intersectionality, which is explored deeply in this study.

IMPLICATIONS

This study opens the door for more autobiographical accounts of international students who are trying to cope with the different dimensions of their identity. More autoethnographic studies would serve as a means of protest in order to decolonize what constitutes research in academia, especially in the global south. While wanting to gain a global approach to teaching and learning, this study makes the author realize the importance of having positionality statements and reflections along every step of the way in any academic or professional experience.

Author

• Suha Gangopadhyay, Michigan State University