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&+ & G68>HB!E:GHJ6H>DC!6C9:BDI>DC REFLECTIONS ON THEN AND NOW Throughout my year in Elizabeth’s classroom, I was captivated by the drama of her struggles to enact a critical pedagogy in a public school that served a conservative, homogenous community. Daily I learned from Elizabeth the complexities involved in these struggles, which mirrored my own as a like-minded college professor but were different too. The difficulties in both cases often involved resistance by white students to antiracism or to multicultural lessons that critiqued racism, but I also came to see important differences: while I saw white student resistance as a theoretical and philosophical problem, in terms of not only the ethical issues of power and politics in writing classrooms but also the larger ideological forces of privilege and racism that seemed to influence white students, Elizabeth intuitively framed the challenges such students presented in both institutional and affective terms—as a problem at once circumscribed by school boards and required curricula, learning outcomes and relations with parents, and constrained by individual students’ emotional development and feelings. Elizabeth’s intuitive framing has become the backbone of the analysis I offer throughout this book. In this chapter, I define some of the concepts—racism, persuasion, emotion —that are integral to the arguments I make in later chapters. In doing so, I create a framework for understanding racism in Elizabeth’s terms—in terms, that is, of emotion and schooling. At the same time, I provide a kind of personal intellectual history of the roots of this project: how I became interested in questions of white students and racism in the context of literacy education, and how my understanding of these questions shifted throughout my research at Laurel Canyons. A View of Race and Racism When I began this research, the racial designation white was a relatively straightforward, even easy term for me. It was a term students in my own classrooms and at Laurel Canyons seemed to employ without self-con- Racism, Persuasion, and Emotion 17 sciousness as they described their own racial identities. It was a term that corresponded with official data about Laurel Canyons students posted on the district’s Web site. It was also, of course, a term that named a body of research on antiracist education and sociological studies of race—Ruth Frankenberg’s work on white women (1993), Matt Wray and Annalee Newitz’s analyses of working-class white culture (1996), the essays collected in Richard Delgado and Jean Stefanic’s anthology, Critical White Studies: Looking behind the Mirror (1997)—that were important to me as I formed my research questions. But as I began to analyze the materials I collected at Laurel Canyons, the term white became less self-evident. I began to see how students’ voices and stories, their writing and responses to texts, complicated the representations of whiteness I found in the literature on antiracist education, where white students are often portrayed as tangled in structures of privilege and as therefore unable or unwilling to engage in critiques of racism or inequality. I began to see how much demographic data was hidden beneath the term with respect to not just social class but also peer group formation in school, the types of college that students aspired to, the different ways they experienced difference—on a church-sponsored trip to Jamaica, through an aunt who had married a person of color, via a brother who developed frightening neo-Nazi views on race. I also began to see what John Hartigan (1999) and Pamela Perry (2002) show in their ethnographies of white communities: white identity is formed in relation to other groups of whites as often as it is in relation to racial “others.” In short, as my research at Laurel Canyons progressed, I began to notice how much ideological diversity and complexity lurked within white students, including those who regularly uttered offensive discourses about race. Similarly, when I began this research, racism was a transparent term. Because I was interested in rhetoric and persuasion, I limited my definition of racism to language: discourses that promoted negative stereotypes of nonwhite groups, portrayed whites as more “normal” than or superior to other groups, denied claims of racism, denied that racism was a current social problem worthy of attention, blamed the victim for racism, characterized racism as a thing of the past or as something only “extreme” people believed in, creatively reinterpreted critiques of racism, promoted color-blindness...

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