Women of Color Scholar-Teachers Reclaiming our Classrooms

In their lead-in essay, Melanie Harris, Carolyn Medine, and Helen Rhee draw attention to the challenges that women of color scholar-teachers face in the religious studies classroom, which they view as a microcosm of both the academy and larger US society. Focusing on the question of authority, they further discuss the issues of embodiment, surveillance, evaluation, and emotion. In my response, I briefly discuss three related points: structural stereotyping and the logics of white supremacy, teaching religious/theological studies in an imperial university, and academic citizenship.

First, as Harris, Medine, and Rhee point out, women of color faculty’s struggle “to establish and to maintain” authority in the classroom “involves not only our usual definitions of power but also embodiment: what the professor’s body both teaches and evokes (107). The ways in which students receive and perceive women of color scholar-teachers are related to how women of color have been viewed and treated in larger US society. As the authors suggest, “this structural stereotyping filters into the classroom and challenges authority” (106). The structural stereotyping of women of color has been produced in US society, where different logics of white supremacy have operated. It consists of multiple forms and aligns with what Andrea Smith calls the “three pillars of white supremacy.” By “three pillars,” Smith refers to slavery/capitalism, genocide/colonialism, and Orientalism/war. She argues that white supremacy is “constituted by separate and distinct, but still interrelated, logics.”¹ The structural stereotyping that is in line with each pillar of white supremacy undermines the authority of women of color faculty in different yet interrelated ways in the classroom as well as in the larger academy. The complex dynamic of our differentially situated positions in the academy also affects our experience of embodiment, surveillance, evaluation, and emotion in different ways. This can become further complicated when students in our classrooms become more diverse in terms of racial, ethnic, sexual, and national backgrounds, even though most colleges and universities still remain predominantly white and hostile to minorities.

For instance, if the students we encounter are not only white but also students from various racial, ethnic, national, and religious groups, how does such a change affect power dynamics in the classroom, where our authority is often undermined and invalidated? What if the students in the classroom are predominantly from immigrant families or racial minority communities? This leads to questions about students who are also affected by the logics of white supremacy. In other words, students relate to women of color faculty differently dependent on our racial, sexual, and even national identities as well as the stereotypes associated with such identities. At the same time, their way of relating to women of color faculty is also related to the students’ own experiences as differentially constituted subjects: racialized, gendered, sexualized, and classed bodies in a white supremacist capitalist society. Students want to figure out who these women of color teachers really are in their own way. Hence, while continuing to expose the ways in which women of color are diminished, (micro) invalidated, or even made invisible in different ways in the academy, women of color faculty also need to ask in what ways our students who are minoritized or marginalized face vulnerability in the classroom. This suggestion might sound like adding one more task on the shoulders of women of color faculty, especially when “minority” students often become the responsibility of a woman of color faculty, who are in many instances one of the few if not the only members of color in their department or the university. However, I am not suggesting that women of color faculty should take care of students’ emotional needs that the university cannot fulfill. Instead, I mean to point out how our differentially situated positons in the academy can become more complicated if we face the vulnerability that students themselves experience due to their own marginalized experiences.

Second, if we accept Piya Chatterjee and Sunaina Maira’s premise that the US academy is an “imperial university,”² then we must ask what it means to teach the subject matter of...