Teaching White Privilege

The day after Prop 2 passed, I thought about how personally attacked many students and faculty of color were feeling. I thought about my grandparents, who fought in court and in local politics against desegregation in the Little Rock schools in 1958. I thought about my place, as a white teacher and student, studying black women’s writing in an institution that diversifies through tokenizing ethnic studies and minority students more than rethinking the racial grounds for its prestige. I felt hollow and confused—what was the point of all our anti-racist anger and hope, if not to fight the destructive segregation of our communities?

I thought and felt all these things, but when I entered my class, in front of fifteen white students, I said nothing. I chose comfort over pushing them to talk about race. I rationalized that I couldn’t “be objective” enough to facilitate a productive discussion. My students didn’t flinch at my silence. I’m white, after all, and so are they—so why should we talk about race? What does racism have to do with our literature class? Everything. We are a room full of white people, reading texts by white authors, avoiding talking about race amidst a state-wide initiative to “purify” our classrooms of racial conflict or difference.

While I would like to live in a world where white folks would listen to and believe people of color about the racism of their daily lives, the reality is that seeing a white person (and a teacher at that!) challenging systemic racism might have moved some of my white students out of their assumption that racial justice is a black issue—and liberal whites do best to cheer them on from the sidelines. But my choice to say nothing about my anger over Prop 2 made me complicit with the idea of comfort and safety that belongs to all-white spaces. When ideas are settled, and when comfort is the goal of a classroom, genuine conversation and interaction stops.

We need more racial diversity at Michigan, but the way to achieve that is not just to bring more black students and faculty in. That’s an important first step, but until white students and scholars begin to think about education as a struggle to get outside of our racial privilege to choose not to think about race or racism, incoming students of color will have to shoulder the burden of educating their classmates about race. Too often affirmative action programs confuse the racial identity of the student, what their academic interests will be, and what voice they will represent in a class discussion. As a teacher, I sometimes find myself slipping and looking to the students of color to answer questions about race and racism, or worse yet ignoring racial dynamics in the classroom because there are no students of color. By appealing to a system that assumes each racial category must speak always and only for itself, we are failing to demand real integration – the kind of integration my grandparents feared so much – the kind of integration that forces whites to recognize our systematic racial privilege and move beyond it into real conversation and change.

-Emma Garrett, Ann Arbor

We Need Water Affordability

The Michigan Welfare Rights Organization submitted a Water Affordability Plan to the Detroit City Council several months ago, and it has been under review and disintegration since. The plan is flawless and would allow low-income workers to pay smaller amounts toward water usage and it would eliminate water shut-offs forever. We are engaged in a battle of attrition as the Water Department continues to “nit-pick” and ask for constant “clarity” about this or that sentence. There is no desire to interrupt the shut-offs of the 45,000 customers who are victims of disconnection annually in Detroit. Victor Mecardo is the enemy of the people clearly, and we are stuck with him and his boss because they have no appreciation of this issue.

We are engaged in this episode only because the community believes that we must always approach negotiations first as a matter of procedure. We have already launched “07 Spring Offensive” around two issues: water and housing. Here is what is transpiring. Welfare Rights has issued the call for direct action and civil disobedience. In late February or early March, we will have developed two documents.

First, we will enroll Detroiters into the Water Affordability Program by mailing postcards to the Water Department outlining their new payment arrangements. Second, we will have secured the list of vacant homes owned by the State, will have conducted the appropriate review to determine which ones are acceptable, and we will be moving homeless families into them. We will have to arrange a payment arrangement before they get inside and will set up an escrow account to hold these payments. We will be recruiting soldiers for this battle soon, as this encounter will place us in direct odds with the state apparatus, and will expose how these Democrats are going to treat us as the people organize to do the right thing.

My advice to all revolutionaries is to get those colonic’s mixed, start intaking roughage and vegetables, get those systems cleaned out, and get those clean underwear readied as we are turning the screws up on Capitalism in the region. A fight against straight out state-sponsored oppression is going to make us targets for pain and suffering, so we are also starting the process of asking for international observers from Venezuela, from Cuba, from the Hague, and from the United Nations as we push forward.

Well, these are my reflections and my report to you about what’s going on. Find a place within this struggle where you can latch on. The message is, “get in where you fit in”.

-Maureen Taylor, Detroit