tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4470800272309893246.post3985496657749592114..comments2023-08-23T08:13:02.884-05:00Comments on CCCC: Definition Matters: Teaching the Materiality of the Trope Race, Using Barack Obama's, "A More Perfect Union" SpeechNCTEhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12254024796847309329noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4470800272309893246.post-71179681589913980862008-07-14T20:13:00.000-05:002008-07-14T20:13:00.000-05:00Wonderful questions, Joyce. I think the subjectivi...Wonderful questions, Joyce. I think the subjectivity of the students in Krista's class would be an interesting aspect for them to reflect upon themselves. Perhaps Krista asked them to do this during the semester. I think, reflecting upon where each sits on the landscape of racial tropes may help them consider how and why they find particular definitions/tropes of race more compelling than others, or even simply see them. <BR/><BR/>I also wonder how we can insert this conversation, along with Victor's ideas, in larger discussions we have at our respective institutions? I mean, how do I get my institution to address race in this complex way without using it as a marketing tool (e.g., in "Diversity" collateral) to promote static colored bodies? At each university I've been at, everyone loves to "celebrate diversity" but they don't want to confront difference. <BR/><BR/>Asao B. Inoue<BR/>CSU, FresnoAsao B. Inouehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05728962184475635542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4470800272309893246.post-71539549699275312772008-06-22T20:34:00.000-05:002008-06-22T20:34:00.000-05:00The June 20, 2008 issue of "The Chronicle of Highe...The June 20, 2008 issue of "The Chronicle of Higher Education" reminded its readers that Monday, June 23, 2008 (tomorrow) is the 30-year anniversary of “the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke.”<BR/><BR/>The article doesn’t really stimulate much new thinking about affirmative action and race in academic admissions. But it gives readers an important review of significant legal contests that followed the trajectory of the Bakke decision, including the Supreme Court decision about the University of Michigan cases in 2003. Mostly, the article simply mirrored the open-ended and eroding arguments about affirmative action in an academia that still “grapples with race in admissions.”<BR/><BR/>I note here that another political, anti-affirmative action wave will show up at the polls in five states in November 2008 if Ward Connerly’s plans work out as they did in California, Washington State, and Michigan).<BR/> <BR/>In addition, "The Chronicle Review" (same issue) featured several short essays on the “legacies of the 60’s,” which attempted to offer some reflective perspectives on the progressive movements of the 1960’s beyond academic topics—-the Vietnam war, the war on poverty, the protests, the assassinations.<BR/><BR/>Should I note that all three of the authors were white males . . . or do those identity markers matter to today’s readers? Should I add that none of the three guest writers discussed the important passing of the Civil Rights or Immigration bills of the 1960’s?<BR/> <BR/>Whatever the future of racialized discourse in the U.S. will look like—-and so much of it has progressed and regressed since the 1960’s—-it will be inextricably linked to our courage and democratic sacrifices to talk about race, whiteness, and racism with each other and in our classrooms as Krista has shown us.<BR/><BR/>But we must also talk with those who can help to change the historical infrastructure of racism and racial whiteness that continues to influence how we make personal decisions, where we live, how we vote, how we see each other, and how we negotiate political power.<BR/><BR/>Have many of you, like me, been hearing too many folks in the media raise the question about why Obama is referred to as a Black man when his mother was White? Yes, I think out loud, in response. It's the structured historical legacy of the “one drop” rule—-we can certainly argue with it, but it still exists.<BR/><BR/>I loved the discussion of theory and pedagogy, together, in Krista’s discussion, just like it was linked in Victor’s previous blog post (and Victor also focused on unpacking racial tropes in discourse).<BR/><BR/>But after reading Krista’s post, I wondered about a few things:<BR/><BR/>(1) How many students in the classroom were non-white students and were they strong participants or mostly silent during the discussions?<BR/><BR/>(2) How did the students respond to the outcome of the class—did they feel more empowered to talk about the materiality of race, and did they understand the role of whiteness in relation to race?<BR/><BR/>(3) Did the students begin to see, for themselves, any relationships between the personal and the structural when they talk about the rhetoric of racism and antiracism?<BR/> <BR/>(4) Did the class have a stronger understanding about where their beliefs about race come from?<BR/><BR/>(5) Were they all voting for Obama? Ha!Joyce Middletonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06502917770443849592noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4470800272309893246.post-6075492223305488022008-06-16T23:16:00.000-05:002008-06-16T23:16:00.000-05:00Krista--your discussion of "A More Perfect Union" ...Krista--your discussion of "A More Perfect Union" couldn't be more timely for me. I'm currently finishing teaching a course on African American Rhetorics, and my students and I listened to and read the speech for today's meeting. (We started discussing it right *after* we talked about his Father's Day address.)<BR/><BR/>I found myself focusing more and more of my own attention on one of the very paragraphs you cite--the one in which Obama refers to his "genetic makeup." Students and I had talked around what seems to be Obama's complex attempt at identification. Complex because he consistently argues that "I'm like you" and simultaneously that "I'm unique--and that uniqueness makes me at least as American as you are, if not more so" (where "you" here often, for Obama, stands in for the kind of structural whiteness you name and interrogate).<BR/><BR/>I argued for my students that this paragraph exemplifies Obama's attempt to distill that identification by way of making a kind of biological claim: rather than "e pluribus unum" referring to the federalist process by which a nation-state is made out of a collection of colonies/states, "e pluribus unum" refers to the process by which Obama believes he, himself, genetically embodies an idea of American perfectibility. Namely, that the guy who has a Kenyan father and a Kansan mother, who went to school in Indonesia, attended Harvard, and worked on the South Side is *exactly* the person who should be president. It reminded me of his line from the 2004 keynote at the Democratic convention--something about how remarkable it was that a "skinny kid with a funny name" could be on the brink of the US Senate. <BR/><BR/>Given a growing collection of scientific studies about genetic alternatives to the tropes of race, and given popular accounts of people "finding" their genetic ancestors--who may be "racially" very different--I was interested to discover this paragraph in Obama's speech. All semester, my students and I came back to the idea of the complex rhetorical positioning that many African Americans have felt the need to inhabit. DuBois famously wrote that he felt his "two-ness," and many others in the African American tradition have articulated an American idea while at the same time shining sharply focused lights on those clear examples where American ideals have fallen short in practice. Does Obama move a step beyond the jeremiadic rhetoric of his rhetorical predecessors by making a more direct claim to a complex genetic ancestry--and, crucially, by making the additional claim that he is uniquely, genetically positioned to reconcile racial divisions?Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com