"Let's Talk, Cry a Little, and Learn About Each Other": The Failures of Dialogue

• In Event: Emotions as Radical and Racially Just Pedagogy: Reasserting Our Hearts During Times of Undemocratic Educational Duress

Abstract

The belief that talking about our feelings and sharing our stories will lead to greater understanding and profound change is a powerful pedagogical thread in diversity debates. It is rivalled by the belief that learning more about ‘others’ is the path to greater acceptance, appreciation and harmony. These are alluring ideas. They are also central to much diversity, anti-racist and multicultural work. Jane Ward (2008) describes the ‘ideal’ multi-pronged approach to diversity, one which works on three levels: organizational, political and social-psychological. The goal of the social-psychological approach is to build a “multidimensional consciousness [which] requires that activists use their own experiences, culture, and emotions as a means of connecting to forms of oppression that they do not directly experience.” Often this attempt to raise consciousness is the first step in organizational attempts at diversity; unfortunately it is often the last. As my own research in community and feminist organizations shows, it is also a practice often marked by stalled and volatile debates, and notably emotional expressions of guilt, denial and innocence by white participants.
Focusing on anti-racist workshops within community organizations, my research has shown that pedagogical attempts at anti-racism are not only highly emotional events, they also have profound emotional and organizational effects. Producing and reproducing representations of emotion and racial identity – the angry woman of color, the weeping white woman -- anti-racist education becomes not only the site of conflict, but also the very subject of conflict. If there is any possibility for recuperating dialogical and pedagogical approaches to anti-racism and diversity, then, the first step is to understand their failures. In this paper I show that the historical practices of self-expression in pedagogical efforts which emphasizes personal and emotional disclosure, does not fulfill its vision of an open, warm space for the equal sharing of experience. Rather, by using people of color as resources the anti-racist workshop can reinforce the very relations of race it seeks to overcome. Here I argue that a number of threads come together to encourage discussions about race which are highly emotional, personalized and defensive, including therapeutic approaches to self-expression, liberal notions of reform through knowledge, and the widespread use of confessional techniques. As I highlight in this paper, the failures of anti-racist efforts in educational and community spaces helps us to understand the ways that emotional expressions of guilt and claims of innocence are among the most visible landmarks of the subterranean affective and moral flux of well-meaning racial encounters. I end by exploring the ways that we might imagine discussions of racism that are ethical practices that yet still manage to avoid individual preoccupations with morality that plague so many pedagogical efforts.

Author

• Sarita Srivastava, Queen's University - Kingston