It is always great to see our students writing so beautifully. However, the student-author shows how much we still have to go to educate ourselves and our students. For quite some time, stressing the personal, emphasizing the naming, the face, the ownership of the wound, is what multicultural education has been advocating for in order to unmake racism as the systemic logic of our dysfunctional society. The emphasis on the personal storytelling, the testimony, the act of bearing witness, interferes in the collective imagination of public knowledge by making real the immateriality or vagueness of the designation discrimination. In the naming of ones pain, the subject-victim becomes visible, it acquires a face, a history, a pain that resonates with that of other communities. We can thus begin to unmake the ways racism gets talked about, discourses that sometimes conceal the very materiality of discrimination (i.e. Trevon, Fergusson, children in detention camps who have names, faces and endure the pain of systemic racism). Id say, contradicting the author, lets emphasize the personal; let us work with testimony; let us bear witness to discrimination in our lives, so that every day we can bring to the fore common sense assumptions about racism not as something that others do, but also as something which lives within us, through us, that is present in our language, in our logic of being-ness. We are born into this mess. It is our duty to fix it. prindlepost.org/2014/11/deardepauw-whats-it-all-about/
Posted on: Sun, 16 Nov 2014 23:34:01 +0000
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