For those of us who teach about systemic racism, white privilege, and white supremacy as culture, policy, and foundational to social institutions, the bulk of our time spent supporting each other and discussing pedagogy focuses on difficult moments, attacks on our teaching, and all kinds of ugly stuff that can occur (and has). It gets to be a lot. It can get depressing. For some faculty of color, it can be traumatic.
That said, I want to turn to something less depressing. My previous posts in this series on anti-racist pedagogy have likely been too focused on the negatives. So this post is going to be different. While speaking to my friend Dr. Brooke Vick this week, she mentioned hope as an important piece of anti-racist pedagogy. Her words reminded me why we do this in the first place. When I sat down to write this post today, hope was not the topic. But Brooke’s point is still whispering in my ear.
Note- I am not writing from a toxic positivity perspective here. Hope is not meant to replace or negate teaching about realities of oppression.
Where is the hope?
Educators and students benefit from hope, for both overlapping and unique reasons. Many students enter our classrooms either unaware they will be learning about race, systemic racism, and whiteness. They may be expecting a “race neutral” course or to learn about culture, food, and traditions. Among student who do expect to be discussing race and racism, they may expect to learn about individual prejudice and extremists groups. For a wide range of students, white and students of color, a multitude of less than pleasant topics lead to equally unpleasant emotions and reactions. I try to prepare students early on about common thoughts and feelings they may encounter as we navigate learning about subjects considered taboo and impolite in U.S. society. This includes having the urge to lash out at me as the person responsible for their experience of learning about deeply disturbing histories, systemic oppression and privilege of the present, and the overwhelming barriers to dismantling racism. We also discuss that they may have the urge to stop reading the materials, avoid attending class, or drop the course altogether.
When I ask them to predict what types of emotions may bubble up? They jump right in with the list: (white) guilt, depression, sadness, anger, frustration, helplessness. This list of negative emotions is usually what they predict. Most times, I must prompt them with, “What about positive emotions?”
Hope.
Hope is the first thing they say.
Honestly, I do not typically see a lot of hope being intentionally incorporated into ARP practice. Syllabi tend to get bogged down with covering histories of racial oppression, the lived experiences of people of color, and white privilege. We must cover the realities of systemic racism. We must. And yet, educators quite typically throw in some information about action for social change or anti-racism in the last week of a course, if at all. The portion of the content most closely related to hope feels a bit shoved in at the end of the course. I am guilty of this very approach. And this section may get cut if course progress lags and something needs to go.
Without hope, anti-racist pedagogy leaves us without pathways for action and social change. That means hope must be taken seriously as an essential and central tenet of ARP. Fall courses grant us a new opportunity to find ways to infuse hope into our anti-racist pedagogies.
How might you intentionally incorporate hope into your own anti-racist pedagogy?