Being on the "Outside" While Teaching on the "Inside"

Being on the "Outside" While Teaching on the "Inside' Barbara Winslow This brief essay is part of a more general discussion of my experiences and evaluations of teaching working-class and immigrant people of color. AU of my professional teaching experience has been in one way or another on the "outside." Many of my ideas that were formed in the late 1960s, about the abiUty of people to successfully teach and write about people and cultures not their own, have of course, undergone changes. As a undergraduate and graduate history student at the University of Washington, in Seattle, I was involved in the struggle for black and women's studies. The ethos of the time, and one with which I was in agreement, was that only African Americans should teach African-American Studies, only women should teach women's studies, only lesbians and gays should teach courses dealing with lesbian and gay history. Part of this ethos came from the fact that there were so few numbers of African-American or women professors. In the history department there were no women or African Americans on the faculty, and, of course when I was a graduate student (1968-1972) no "out" lesbian and gay faculty. The overriding idea was that any African American, any woman, any lesbian or gay professor was preferable for teaching in that field because they were teaching from their unique experience of being black or female. Someone who was supportive of those movements was clearly second choice. In other words, African-American, women's, and lesbian and gay studies were from the outset viewed in a partisan way. The first course in African-American history taught at the University of Washington in the spring term of 1968 was not taught by an African American and this caused tremendous resentment by the Black Students' Union (BSU) which demanded an African-American professor. There was a huge struggle culminating in a sit-in over the creation of black studies, and the aggressive recruitment of black faculty and students to the University of Washington. I participated in one of the first black studies courses offered by the BSU. The course was not officially sanctioned by the university. I was the only white student in the class. It was the first time that I had ever been a minority of one. In past college courses, women were in the minority, but I never remember being the only woman in a class. As the only white student, I was occasionally called upon by my professors to speak for all white people; most of the time, however, I was ignored, not caUed upon when I rarely raised my hand, and was generaUy looked upon with suspicion. I got a sense of being the reverse "raisin in the sun," and this © 1996 Journal of Women's History, Vol. 8 No. 3 (Fall) 1996 Dialogue: Barbara Winslow 157 was an experience that sensitized me to issues of race "exclusion" regardless of where and to whom I have taught. There was not as great a difficulty getting women faculty to teach the early courses in women's studies, for there were plenty of women graduate students. Mary Logan Rothschild and myself were among the earliest to teach women's history at the University of Washington. We had support from some male faculty, most notably Alden Bell in the history department . But there would have been opposition and resentment by women's liberation activists to men teaching in that area as well. We believed most strongly that only women should teach women's studies courses. The greatest academic, inteUectual, and professional influence on my life, and the person who encouraged me and prepared me to teach as an "outsider" was the historian and peace activist, E. P. Thompson. I studied with Thompson at the Centre for the Study of Social History at the University of Warwick, in Coventry, England. Thompson encouraged me to teach in working-class institutions, and gave me confidence that in spite of the class differences, I could be an effective teacher. He related many of his experiences teaching worker education at Halifax, and pointed out that workers expected middle-class intellectuals to know...