What does Critical Race Theory have anything to do with FYW?
I'm back in Iowa and re-reading parts of Thandeka's Learning to Be White to try to figure out how this book fits into next spring's class.
I ordered the book before really planning lessons around it as a symbol of my own personal commitment to doing something with the book. As T. L. and I talked about last year, even though neither of us are really sure what to think of it, there is some inherent value in putting a book like this in a group of adults and letting them mull it over.
I do know, however, what I do not want this book to do in the class.
These things are:
* To teach white people how "bad" they are
* To enforce racial "political correctness"
* To make the class a class about race
* To incite feelings of shame and serve as a confessor for racial sins
* To attempt to get students to articulate well worn "code words" for denying culpability when it comes to race.
However, trying to plan ahead to how the book DOES fit into the class is not so easy. It's not directly about writing. It's not even necessarily a "scholarly" work.
But what I do find fascinating is how it delves into the politics of racial representation. That is, Thandeka's notion of "non-white zones" as being a defining factor in how white people end up representing themselves and living their daily lives is, much more than superficially, very closely related to how many critical theorists view the dynamics of power at play in forms of discourse.
To me, trying to figure out just how it is that institutional power is internalized and consequently individualized in our own personal writing is one and the same with Thandeka's search to figure out just how it is that "whiteness" has disappeared from our vocabulary but instead turned into our secret mode of being that defines who "we," think, act, and dream.
The only thing I don't know is how students will react to it, and what they will get out of it. But, as always, that is always the big question that is never answered until it is brought up in class.