“Racist!” Resolved
So, what did I do when the student hollered “Racist!” at me? Fortunately, as I have already shown, this was not the first time something like this had happened. In retrospect, I believe I lost a lot of respect that day from Shawn Robinson’s class—a class in which I never managed to feel comfortable, always wondering if I had somehow backed myself into an unfortunate corner. I’m not even sure exactly what a
commensurate overreaction would have been during this second incident—I knew who the student was the first time; I had no clue during the Africa activity. Thankfully, I am a rather different teacher and person than I was that first time, and so I didn’t have to get all huffed and puffed to prove my point.
“Oh, I get it,” I said slowly, walking to the back of the room to turn off the air conditioner so I could lower my voice to a deliberate volume intended to transmit how not-upset I was. “Because I’m White, and you’re Black. I get it.” Nervous laughter rattled around the room as I kept my voice even, almost playful, like we were all in on the same joke.
I was back to the front of the room again. “I guess you’d have rather I said ‘Europe?’” More laughter, less nervous now. I erased “Africa” and wrote “Europe” in its place. “How about we do Europe? You know, since that’s where my people came from?” The laughter was getting more assured, and in watching the class I was even able to guess who it was that spoke in the first place, as he looked a little less than jolly about the whole scene.
“You know, you try to do a good thing,” I said, almost as if to myself as I counted out coordinates. “The White man always gets to go first, and I try to cut the Black man a break, and you guys think I’m a racist. Oh well, I tried, I guess.” I finished writing the coordinate for Europe, and the class is positively roaring now. I turned around
dramatically and swept my eyes across the class, certain now that I knew which student was my culprit.
“Okay, now can I do Africa? Now that we’ve established that I’m not racist? Or would you rather we do Asia?” I go ahead and do Africa, put my pen in my pocket. “Okay, y’all—it’s your turn now. Finish.”
And they did.
Coda
I am convinced that I would have played this part differently, badly differently, just two or three years ago. Even after the incident with Shawn Robinson, I am convinced that it is only my work writing and reading and thinking on my Whiteness and my
students’ Blackness and the intersections and opportunities therein that enabled me to hold in my instinctive White fear of being construed as racist (Bonilla-Silva, 2006) long enough to make something good of the moment, as Tatum (2007) would have us do with these racially charged exchanges. I am convinced that it was in following Richardson’s (2000) admonition to use my writing as a method of inquiry that I was equipped for this moment. She notes, “I write because I want to find something out. I write in order to learn something that I did not know before I wrote it” (p. 924), and I have as solid a proof as I require that this is excellent practice. After all, it was mere weeks before the “Racist!” incident took place that I had written up the Shawn story. Working closely with Professor
Holbrook on the tone and technique of telling a story from another’s point of view, we came out of the process with the skeleton of an article intact; little did I know, though, that the real result of the paper would not surface until the middle of Math Support a few weeks later, when I was able to react to a similar situation with considerably more grace and—one would hope—more efficacy. I believe quite literally that it was my foray into the critical postmodern autoethnography that summer that laid the smooth stones of a foundation for that next school year. Is it too much to hope that it could do the same for a pre-service teacher?
One last thing. I still teach the student who I knew almost without a doubt had called out the word that day, some year and a half later now, though I have never broached the subject of the “Racist!” day with him. I want to bring him into a tighter, more personal focus here, so I am going to call him Eddie. A few months after my story took place, I was glancing over Eddie’s journal. He was standing next to me, kind of grinning, bouncing in that way a teenage boy can do after noon on a Friday, and I happened to glance over the words “And I was kind of rude to Mr. Wamsted at the beginning of the year.” I looked up at him and smiled.
“Yeah, what was with that at the beginning of the year?” I didn’t mention any particulars, and he kind of shrugged his shoulders.
“Yeah, I don’t know,” he said, kind of half looking away while somehow managing to keep his eyes locked on me.
I smiled at him and turned to my computer. “Okay, let’s see what that does for your grade,” I said, and he hunched down over my shoulder for us to check out his
assignments. I couldn’t help but wonder how differently our year might be going had I not been prepared for him that day the second week of school.45
Directions
“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?” “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.
“I don’t much care where—” said Alice.
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat. “—so long as I get somewhere,” Alice added as an explanation. “Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you only walk long enough.”
—Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Carroll,1865/1992a, p. 51, emphasis in original text)
Richardson (2000) says that the power of the kinds of autoethnographical
vignettes I have been telling depends on their “rhetorical staging as ‘true stories,’ stories about events that really happened to the writers” (p. 931). I think now, for the first time, I might understand what she is getting at. What happened between my students and me during our brief encounter may not quite be the “meaningful, productive dialogue to raise consciousness and lead to effective action and social change” (p. 193) that Tatum (1997) calls for, but I think it just might be a start.
I have misled my readers slightly here. Prior to this point all of my Alice quotes have been connected to theory and the trickier stuff of the dissertation. This section, however, is pretty personal. It just so happens that the conversation Alice has with the Cat is one of my favorite in the entire book, and it rather appropriately leads me into my last little comment here. I like this quote because it reminds me that walking will always get you somewhere; it is only in choosing a direction ahead of time that one is able to reach a
45
Eddie went on to do well in my class last year, and I would call him a key contributor to my positive classroom climate today. The critical postmodern autoethnography has continued to pay dividends.
purposeful somewhere. The Cheshire Cat reminds me that if I write purposelessly I may end up with a dissertation, but not one that matters to me or my students. The Cheshire Cat keeps me focused on my goal.
What is that goal? In conversation with my writing group about early drafts of this section, Erika noted that my reaction to the second “Racist!” incident was certainly better than the first, but that I had not sufficiently troubled possible deficiencies inherent in it. Specifically, she noted the sarcasm that I was clearly hiding behind as a possible problem in my relationships with my students. I want to make clear here that I do find my reaction to be still problematic, to be still reeking of power and privilege, to be still far from ideal. I want to remember the Cheshire Cat—to set a direction for my research so that I end up somewhere I want to be, as opposed to merely any old somewhere. In the spirit of directions, I hope that the next time something like this happens to me—as I am sure it one day will—I can respond with dialogue, with sarcasm-less questions, with a humor hoping for a response other than merely laughter. My second response was certainly better than my first. I hope that my third will be better still.
One Final Conversation “Hey, we did it!”
“Did what?”
“Got to the end of the first part. You finished. You wrote it all up!” “I know, right? And to think that when I first started this whole process I was so scared about the prospectus stage. Now, in the editing stage of the dissertation process, I see that the prospectus is way less than half of what I will write overall. How could I have been so frightened of this first part?”
“You were scared, weren’t you? Scared enough that you had to start talking to yourself, huh?”
“Hey! Now you’re making the existential jokes!”
“Well, I’m a quick study. But seriously, and please don’t take this the wrong way, why exactly are we still talking? I mean, as fun as this has been and all…”
“Oh, that. Well, I was thinking that you might give us one more super quick conclusion.”
“Me? You want me to be the bridge between the halves of your dissertation?”
“Yeah. You were so impressive with all of the ‘double-consciousness’ stuff. I thought you could handle it.”
“So what do I say? I mean, do we really need another conclusion?” “I think so. They call it an elevator speech. If you ran into someone who randomly asks you what I’m doing for my dissertation, and you only had 15 seconds to talk it through, what would you say?”
“I’d tell them it took me until page 90 to get through it, and they better get themselves to doing some heavy reading.”
“Har har. Seriously, are you going to do this for me or not?”
“Yeah, I got it. Here we go, an elevator speech about your dissertation: You’re writing an autoethnography, which is like a super academic, self-analytical memoir. Primarily, you will be examining and presenting your data through the method of writing as inquiry, and you have an example of that in your stories about being called a racist. If you read a whole lot of fancy French philosophers you’ll learn that this type of research is just as valid as anything else out there. You use your example to look at some serious ethical questions of appropriation, consumption, and confidentiality, but you’re struggling toward solutions to these problems as best you can. And you’re super excited about learning how all this will work as you go.”
“Wait, you just made that up right now!” “Well, aren’t you? Excited, I mean.”
“Yeah, I suppose I am. I guess I forgot to say that, huh? You’ve probably hit on a better way to end this first part than any I had in the hopper, so let’s go your way.”
“You’re going to end with my comment?”
“You bet. I’m super excited about learning how all this will work as I go. After all, I expect that the writing process itself will provide me with a rich opportunity to really figure this all out.”
“There’s probably some reference from Laurel Richardson that you’re going to add right there, huh?”
CHAPTER 6
A SECOND INTRODUCTION46
“And ever since that,” the Hatter went on in a mournful tone, “he wo’n’t do a thing I ask! It’s always six o’clock now.”
A bright idea came into Alice’s head. “Is that the reason so many tea-things are put out here?” she asked.
“Yes, that’s it,” said the Hatter with a sigh: “it’s always tea-time, and we’ve no time to wash the things between whiles.”
“Then you keep moving round, I suppose?” said Alice. “Exactly so,” said the Hatter: “as the things get used up.”
“But what happens when you come to the beginning again?” Alice ventured to ask.
“Suppose we change the subject,” the March Hare interrupted, yawning. “I’m getting tired of this. I vote the young lady tells us a story.”
—Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Carroll, 1865/1992a, p. 58)
Having a rather active imagination, I am going to invite my reader into a recurring daydream of mine. A couple of times a year, after my children settle down to sleep, I leave my wife at home and head out on my bicycle for a kind of mini-adventure. I ride somewhere for dinner, which I eat alone while reading bits and pieces of several books, and I then make my way to the movie theater near my house. In a previous life—
sometime after college but before marriage—I would typically go by myself to see one or two movies a week; it remains one of my all-time guilty pleasures. It is entirely possible that the audiovisual and narrative stimulation I experience from the movie itself is
primarily responsible for my recurring fantasy—soon to arrest my imagination on the ride home—but I can certainly isolate some other factors. Riding the empty roads back from the movie close to midnight is a stark contrast to my daily commute (also by bicycle), and
46
Much of this chapter has been adapted from a previous publication (Wamsted, 2012a). Many thanks to the editors at Qualitative Research in Education and the publishers at Hipatia Press for allowing me to (re)use my ideas about the barriers to autoethnography.
the sidewalks splashed with silent lamplight probably evoke a certain amount of nostalgia in me for a time long past, when as a boy I used to race home in an effort to make curfew. I still sip soda and consume candy during these late-night films, as if I were a much younger man, and the now atypically large amount of sugar might interact ill with the adrenaline of the ride; probably this effect adds to my mind racing wildly. Whatever the exact causes, these mental and physical contributions culminate in the same waking dream, every time, at the same point of my ride: the old covered bridge.
I am alone, racing across a converted bike and foot path used to traverse the massive interstate perimeter of my hometown, so high above the occasional cars below that I feel not only alone on my bike, but also in the world. It is here that my brain always skips a beat, and all the science-fiction and fantasy movie and novels I have consumed in my life assault me in a moment, and I find my mind wandering, wondering: “Probably this is where I will travel back in time. Probably I will emerge on the other side of this bridge at some point in my distant past. Probably I will not be able to go home tonight. Probably I will have to solve this puzzle instead and figure out a way to return to my own time. Probably my life will turn suddenly into the plot of a fantastic book.” Ridiculous as this sounds, rest assured that it all makes perfect sense in the slipstream calm of the moment.
I always imagine myself in the same time—fifteen years ago, 1997—though I have no idea why. I usually picture myself riding my bicycle in the middle of the night 90 miles to where I was in college at the time, accosting my 20 year old self and his friends, pleading for help in finding a way back to my present life. I picture the conversations I would have with these boys: what I would or would not share, what advice I would give,
on which matters I must remain silent. I envision myself sitting in all our old haunts with them, marveling at the situation at hand, them trying to get me to tell them everything and me demurring in the interest of the pseudo-canonical rules of time travel. I think this through every time I cross this bridge, wonder anew at what I would do were such a thing to occur, how I would convince them to help me escape the trap of the past. Oftentimes the spell continues for the remainder of the ride home, breaking only after I creep quietly into my children’s rooms to tuck them under covers they are still asleep beneath and slip silently next to my wife who still shares our bed. It is a powerful fantasy, one which has an unexplainable hold on me. At risk of offending the Freudians, I am not going to attempt to explain it; rather I merely move on to state what I think all of this has to do with autoethnography.
Meeting the Other
The March Hare is bored. Alice is attempting to suss out the rules that govern the seeming chaos of the Mad Tea Party, and the Hatter is eager to explain. The Hare, however, is tired of such philosophizing. Much like my reader, I might imagine. The good news is that by and large the theoretical sections of my dissertation have been handled already; it is time, finally, to move on to some stories. There remains, though,