Did you really just say that?

During a long and rather slow day at work this week I decided to catch up on some reading for class. Among other articles, I read Tatum's "The Development of White Identity" mostly because I was intrigued by the title. The article came from a different perspective than many I have read before, and it really got me thinking about my own life, the people I hang out with, and the daily interactions I have. Obviously, I do not consider myself racist and would say that I was raised in an environment where the main issue of race was that it should be a non-issue. As I sat there in the small confines of my job deep in thought about these issues, a customer approached interrupting my ruminations to order a double espresso. With the call back to reality and to actually do my work, thoughts of Tatum's article vanished from my consciousness and I continued with the tasks at hand.

Fast forward to a few hours later: I am off of work, attempting to relax, and meeting up with a some friends who were visiting in town and who I hadn't seen in a while. It was great to catch up, but as the night went on this friend continued to make one racist joke after another, leaving no ethnicity out. At first I just let it go, but after a while it simply became obnoxious. Here I was, just hours after reading an article that reflects on both overt and institutional racism and the way in which White people either perpetuate or try to stop it, and the reading had suddenly become my reality. I was shocked, as this friend of mine could have been one of those quoted in Tatum's reading. I did not really know what to do. Eventually, he could see that I was offended, and I even told him that his remarks were not disimilar to the racist remarks I was reading earlier in the day, but that did not seem to phase him. This was frustrating for me, and I guess is something I am still trying to work through and understand.

Are We Speaking the Same Language?

I really enjoyed Sera's visit to class the other day and was interested in what she had to say about the use of different languages in and out of the classroom. I think that it is a smart move to affirm and acknowledge other languages even if it is one you do not understand. Speaking from a standpoint of very limited experience, I think that one of the biggest aspects (and challenges) of teaching, or working with kids in general, is to establish a relationship of mutual respect and understanding. This can be done no matter what language a child is speaking - Spanish, Korean, Vietnamese, or even the various versions of English we all already admitted to using a couple of weeks ago. If language is a large part of one's identity then to embrace a student's language is a crucial part of making the student feel like he or she is being accepted and respected. There are plenty of techniques we use as tutors/teachers everyday to attempt to engage a student, and I think that embracing different languages is simply another way of doing this.

Gates

Gates talks about race being connected to history in the context of black slaves writing "out of slavery".  He speaks of the challenge of blacks in the 17th and 18th centuries to establish oneself as a human being capable of reason and enlightenment by way of writing.  I thought his point about the Enlightenment was interesting in that the while the Enlightenment "is characterized by its foundation on man's ability to reason, it simultaneously used the absence and presence of reason to delimit and circumscribe the very humanity of cultures and people of color" (Gates 593).  Previously, when thinking about the Enlightenment I thought about it as a time where culture, the arts and sciences, and innovative ideas flourished.  While this may be true, Gates brings up the point that the Enlightenment in a sense established a status quo of knowledge, reason, and mastery of the arts and sciences,  and if one did not fit that, then they were consequently not enlightened, and possibly less human.  This is a strange notion, to be so enlightened that you can decide who is human and who is not.

Another interesting point about Gates' essay was when he wrote that slaves were writing themselves out of slavery.  His line at the end "black writers wrote as if their lives depended upon it" seemed to me reminiscent of Mahiri's "Writing for their lives" (Gates 596).  It appears as though writing for survival has been almost a constant for some in the black community for hundreds of years, just in different contexts.  I am not really sure what to make of this insight. I just could not help but draw the parallels between the word choice of both men.  Something to consider I suppose.