Discourse on race in the classroom

race

Tressie McMillan Cottom has an excellent column up on Slate today about teaching structural racism in college and the general and unfortunate trend to run academia, including what happens in the classroom, like a business.

Essentially, Minneapolis Community and Technical College Shannon Gibney, an English and African diaspora studies professor, was reprimanded after more than one complaint of discrimination by white students who said they felt uncomfortable when learning about structural racism.

Of course, white students should feel uncomfortable when talking about race in the classroom, whether it’s historical or modern. And since when does being uncomfortable about a topic equal discrimination?

Just a few feet from both Tillman Hall, named for the flaming racist who helped found Clemson University, and the Strom Thurmond Institute, named for the South Carolina senator who was staunch proponent of segregation (It’s no coincidence, I don’t think, that directly above the institute, the sidewalk is designed in the shape of the Confederate flag), I took a class titled, “Whiteness in America,” and during that semester, I was quite uncomfortable to learn that in subtle and sometimes subconscious ways, whites have used color to their distinct advantage. As a native of the South, I was made to come to terms with the real possibility — many of my fellow students were met with the same sobering reality — that some of my descendants either had servants, indentured or otherwise, or were otherwise rabidly opposed to equality and may have harbored an irrational dislike or fear of black people.

To come to this realization as a 19-year-old is far from settling, but as Cottom points out, that often defines the educational process:

Learning is—should often be—uncomfortable for individuals. When universities have a mission to serve the public good, they balance the needs of individuals with benefits to society and the power of the majority against the humanity of the minority.

And running a college like a business directly defeats the purpose of both:

When colleges and universities become a market, there is no incentive to teach what customers would rather not know. When colleges are in the business of making customers comfortable, we are all poorer for it.

This is where the rubber meets the road for studies in racism and social equality, evolution, gender studies and other potentially controversial topics. The beautiful thing about college — and this is why I personally look back on those years with fondness — is the sheer number of “wow” moments that are pregnant in each lecture or classroom discussion. If students are going to college just to have their previously formed opinions affirmed, they shouldn’t bother picking up the first book, and colleges do them, and all of us, a disservice if they only reinforce what students might want to know about the nature of our world versus other truths that might rattle their cage.