Fenster writes:

Here is an article about a college prof getting a reprimand for what for some was a heavy-handed approach to teachable moments about white privilege and racism.  This is tricky territory.   Here, the administration seemed to be in favor of the idea of such teachable moments, with the reprimand coming down because the prof was viewed as singling out white students for extra correction.

This kind of thing is not uncommon, and it points to a real problem in walking a very fine line.

For instance, here’s an interesting article from a couple of years back with a similar theme.  It was written by Jen Graves,  a teacher at an art school, and it deals with her attempt to introduce race into the art pedagogy. She had a case for doing so–discussing African-American artists with a class of white students.

Now, art schools tend to be quite white, less because of any inherent bias on the part of admissions counselors (who are under significant pressure to increase minority enrollment) but because expensive art education tends to be a second or third generation college choice, with a lot of students coming from two professional homes willing to spend a small fortune with what is generally viewed as a limited career payoff. And if you are going to be lecturing more or less privileged white kids about artists like James Baldwin, some mention of race, and racism, is warranted. 

In this case, the teacher opted for the confrontational mode, asking the students to raise their hands if they considered themselves racist, then pushing them on the question to create a teachable moment.  How far she pushed them, and how didactic the moment was, is not entirely clear. 

The general arc is fairly clear where social topics are concerned. First, the instructor starts in safe territory, looking to link a subsidiary social topic to the subject of the course. Second, the discussion of the subsidiary topic takes over as the dominant theme. Third, the discussion can become a proselytizing lecture justified as a teachable moment. 

Now, I wasn’t there so I don’t know how heavy handed this piece of pedagogy came across in the moment. For the record, one person commenting on the article had this to say: 

I was in one of the classes at Cornish where Jen talked about race, and after the class, most of the students were angry- not because she asked if anyone was racist, and admitted to her own “racism” but because she claimed that everyone there was a “racist”.  

It was insulting, because most of us know “racism” as “a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race”. 

Many of the students that I talked to were raised not to discriminate or to think of one race as superior to another, so for Jen to come in and tell us all that we’re racist, when we came to learn about art, was off-putting to say the least. I don’t think it was a good way to discuss the work. Instead it just turned out to be distracting, and had us all leaving confused about the relevance of the class. 

Whatever happened in the class, Graves found herself in a spot of trouble after the fact when, as it turns out, a white student complained to the administration about the class, claiming that in copping to her own racism Graves’ goal was to promote notions of white superiority!  That is truly hard to believe and the charges were dropped.

Would that Donald Hindley have been so lucky!  He is the lefty history professor at Brandeis who, in his haste several years back to make the argument that America is intolerant of Mexican immigration, used the term “wetback” in class.  That he used it to disparage the attitudes of Anglo Americans proved of no use.  Several students complained to the administration and Hindley ended up being disciplined.  Shades of The Human Stain!