Pedagogies in the Flesh: Building an Anti-Racist Decolonized Classroom

To improve my teaching, I once asked my students to complete a mid-quarter evaluation of our section meetings for the Feminist Studies course entitled Women of Color. In the survey I asked students to share what they liked about our section, what they thought could be improved, and what they could personally do to improve the space. A white student wrote, "You can try to see all sides of every argument, rather than openly disagreeing/devaluing other people's comments. We need to all work to make every person with every background and every race comfortable. … Almost every week, I leave feeling victimized personally and upset."

Upon reading this student's comments (which, ironically, she answered in the section that prompted her to reflect on what she should do to improve the space), I tried not to be shocked at her inappropriate and liberal use of the word "victimized" in a class that explicitly focused on the disproportionate exploitation of and institutionalized violence against women of color. In the spirit of the evaluation process, however, I reflected on moments when I had openly disagreed with students' comments. Was she referring to the time I gently (so I thought) challenged a white student on calling herself "oppressed" when she spoke of being one of few whites living in a racially hostile majority immigrant Mexican-US border town? If so, I would hope she would understand that this student's misuse of the term "oppressed" disregards the systematic favoring (encoded into US law and policy) of white citizen bodies at the expense of those of brown immigrants, regardless of incidents of interracial bigotry.¹ I would also hope she would understand that openly disagreeing with such statements is crucial in the decolonized classroom, which I define as one that actively works toward dismantling historically shaped hierarchies of privilege and entitlement in both theory and practice. Amidst all this, I remembered that this student received a perfect score on the midterm exam.² How was it that she could eloquently articulate the "interlocking oppressions" disproportionately impacting women of color on a test yet in practice subscribe to colorblind rhetoric?³ Furthermore, how did this incident relate to another student in the same section approaching me after class one day to hug me, grateful for the class for validating her identity as an Asian American queer woman of color?

I begin with this story because it offers a window into some of the challenges of teaching intersectionally in the anti-racist feminist university classroom. Such racial tensions commonly arise in classrooms that foreground theories of power, such as those within ethnic, women, gender, and sexuality studies. Students like the one I described are not unusual. It is worth noting, however, that distressing racial experiences frequently occur at the expense of people of color—and often in classrooms where people of different racial and ethnic backgrounds are required to interact. With 78 percent of undergraduate Feminist Studies majors at this institution identifying as "minorities,"⁴ embodied tensions have surely arisen in my classes. Indeed the education of white people cannot depend on the revictimization of people of color.

We are in critical need of a pedagogical intervention. I call my intervention "pedagogies in the flesh," inspired by Cherríe Moraga's articulations of "theory in the flesh" and M. Jacqui Alexander's themes of fire in Pedagogies of Crossing.⁵ Grace Chang's piece "Where's the Violence? The Promise and Perils of Women of Color Studies" outlines Chang's visions, efforts, and challenges in developing a "women of color studies curriculum" and methodology that center the daily survival and many forms of resistance engaged by women of color to challenge linked systems of oppression.⁶ Building on "Where's the Violence," I argue that pedagogies in the flesh are necessary to counter the ways we might unknowingly facilitate and reproduce psychic racial violence in the university classroom. Utilizing queer of color theoretical frameworks, I focus on the decolonized classroom as a powerful site for women and queer of color empowerment and growth for all students.^7...