The message vs. the messenger

Last week Wednesday I asked an unanswerable question, namely why we don't call more things "racist" (aside from people--I'll get to that in a minute) or say that "such and such is part of the legacy of racism" (thanks for those who have already commented!).

Right after I wrote that I had the opportunity to see this in action. What I mean, is, I saw an instance of what it looks like when someone says quite forcefully, "This IS racist. This IS racism. This IS white supremacy."

And it was not pretty.

Let me explain. I attended an evening film screening at Southern U.--a series of 3 short films actually. The theme of all three was race; in obvious and subtle ways, all three films addressed issues of racism and discrimination and stereotypes, even while they also handled themes of romance, friendship, and career opportunities. There were two discussion facilitators, one the director of one of the short films, the other a community activist (yep, one of THOSE, an ORGANIZER!). Both were men of color and one of the men, the community activist, claimed to want a real discussion and conversation, but what followed after the very long film screening was the CA going into what I can only describe as a rant.

Let me also take a moment and tell you the demographics of the room. Because of the nature of the films being screened, it was a truly multicultural mix--I'd say over half the audience were undergraduate students of color (predominantly African American and Asian American) and the other half were white undergraduate students. There were at least one-hundred people, with a few older staff/faculty also in attendance (and perhaps a few graduate students as well). But the audience was overwhelmingly of color, and my guess is that the white students in the room were probably of the white ally/interested in race variety (although perhaps a few had been forced there by one of their professors, who knows--although that probably holds true for a few of the students of color as well).

Getting back to the rant. We were lectured at for a good twenty minutes. People began to leave as discretely as they could. Students of color were told that they were being marginalized and oppressed, and white students were told that they were racist. That by virtue of being white they were all racist, and that some of them could become anti-racist through hard work.

Let me pause and say that there was almost nothing that I disagreed with in the abstract. In other words, I agree that white people have internalized racism. But I also think that people of color have internalized racism too. And it's hard to generalize about the kinds of racism that both groups have internalized because individual people are complex so it really depends on other factors such as ethnicity, class, region, religion, and family background/peer network.

What made me distinctly uncomfortable, perhaps mostly as a teacher who works on issues of race was the strident tone and the judgment I felt coming from the CA. I mean, we had just spent an hour and a half watching these films. The flyers all said that the speakers would be facilitating discussion. What followed was the CA lecturing all of us about the evils of racism in this country--which no one disagreed with--but when he culminated by calling half the audience racist, I think that's when he really lost people. Because no one wants to hear that they are racist. It just wasn't the right message for this event. The films themselves did not have the tone which he took. They were more complex and nuanced than just "racism is bad and white people have caused marginazliation of all people of color and we need to band together to end white supermacy." And the CA's message wasn't delivered in a way that made people really listen to him and hear what he had to say. Because his message--that there is white privilege and white supremacy that has guided U.S. policies over the last few centuries, is one I think most of us would agree with. But what do we do NOW. And more importantly, how do we see these films reflecting that, and how can people do anti-racist work in coalitions across racial divides TOGETHER (because that certainly was one of the themes of the films, especially getting African American and Asian Americans to work together on issues of race/racism).

Perhaps the CA was trying to shake up the complacency of the students, especially the white students. Perhaps he meant to be provocative--to get into a debate and argument with some students about these topics, because oftentimes tension helps generate progress in certain controversial areas. Perhaps he's an old school activist from the 1970s who still uses a language of third world coalition buildling that emerged out of the late 1960s and anti-Viet Nam war organizers.

All I know is that as a pedagogical strategy for getting people to hear your message, it didn't work. In other words, the message got lost in the rhetoric of the messenger.

I'm not saying we don't call people on their B.S. But it was supposed to be a film discussion and not a lecture on racism and not a time to tell half the audience that they were part of the problem and not the solution (the brief allusion to the possibility for white people to become allies not withstanding, because he really didn't spend a lot of time on that issue and spent a lot more rhetorical energy emphasizing white racism and white supremacy). And I suspect that the fact that the white students were even there in the first place means they were open to the discussion that was going to follow.

[aside: Many of the white students continued to stay even after the rant--probably because the director's remarks and comments were more measured and interesting. When I wrote above that people left, I mean people of various ethnic and racial backgrounds beat a path out of the auditorium, and after I heard the CA take two more questions in which he chose to lecture rather than engage in dialogue/discussion, I also beat a hasty retreat because life is too short to be continually annoyed by someone who you think is doing a bad job]

I suppose this is why I've tried not to get into ranting in this blog. I mean, I've had my private moments. We all have. We say things in the privacy of our homes that we'd never (hopefully) voice in public. But as a teacher--as someone who wants to really have open discussion and dialogues about race, I found the CAs strategy to be a real failure in education.