Teaching beyond "The Shock"

On the night of November 8, 2016, I attended an election party with my partner. We joined friends and colleagues in our small, central Pennsylvania town to watch what we assumed would be an interesting, possibly shenanigans-filled but certainly winnable night for Hillary Clinton. It wasn't long into the evening when we discovered the election process was not going in the direction we had hoped. For some attendees, this news was shocking, and they found themselves leaning listlessly on couches, returning to the kitchen for refreshed cocktails or beer, or overindulging in snacks. I remember feeling sleepy and generally disappointed by the developments of the evening, though I was neither shocked nor confused about the trajectory of the voting or its implications for our country. Disheartened and fatigued by the affective triangulated pendulum swings between hope, indignation, and resignation, my partner and I left the party.

When I arrived on campus the next morning, it was a solemn place. Folks at my liberal arts institution were quiet in their greetings, offering them with bowed heads or exchanged winces and sighs of disdain. Expressions of disbelief, shock, and chagrin passed between people like scribbled notes during a boring lecture. That afternoon, I attended my only class of the day—an upper-level course called Race and Sexuality, which explores the constructions of and complex intersections between race and sexuality and also investigates the ways that these identities/locations/markers are positioned within the social structure of the United States. Paying close attention to how the categories of race and sexuality shape our understanding(s) of social, political, and economic inequality, the students and I often find ourselves focusing on current affairs, discussions in the media, and issues on campus as we interrogate and explore the course's subject. My class was filled with a confident and well-versed set of juniors and seniors who, in the context of a women's and gender studies course, felt the freedom to think and converse in ways that bridged reason and emotion. Bolstered by concerns of social (in)justice, campus politics, global issues, and scholarly drive, the students always came to class prepared for three hours of in-depth communal knowledge production and community building. They relished their ability to talk about racism and its connection with homophobia and transphobia and paid keen attention to the technologies of oppression that produce and reify them.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I entered a room that felt more like a funeral parlor than anything else. After a moment of unintentional silence, where we stared at one another with equal confusion and intrigue (since I had greeted them in that same jovial manner as the previous weeks), I asked them what they were feeling and invited them to talk about their feelings in the context of our class, the university, and the country. And to a person, they each expressed varying degrees of shock. Shock?!?! I found what they shared in terms of their feelings quite alarming, since we had spent a semester talking about how history illustrates and current social and political structures continue to sanction oppression through a pronounced division between people who experience power/privilege and those who do not. But then I looked at my students again. They were young people who, for the most part, were themselves experiencing such a degree of privilege and power, situated within the confines of an institution of higher learning, that this election was the first time they were witnessing up close (or really paying attention to) the country's unabashed endorsement of hatred and violence as acceptable conceptual and practical frames for leading and governing a diverse population.

Like any and every transformative space that I hope to inhabit or co-create, I view the classroom as a context of learning and unlearning for the sake of collective and individual freedom. That is, my hope for such a space, where we are together trying to figure out what the world means, what we (ought) to do as we participate in it, and why we do the things we do—all the while shaping...