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in 2009, during an address on the significance of Black history month, attorney General eric holder surprised many when he said, “Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial we have always been and continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards.”1 my sense is that black people and other people of color have shown far more impatience and fatigue than they have shown cowardice regarding “things racial.” after all, black people and people of color have nothing to lose but everything to gain from a frank and critical engagement with issues of race and racism. such engagement is inextricably linked to questions of unemployment, bank lending practices, homelessness, poverty, underfunded schools, environmental racism, unfair incarceration rates, infant mortality rates, current and historically accumulated wealth, police profiling and brutality, past and contemporary racial stereotyping, white privilege, and white power. indeed, “the allocation of resources, with correspondingly enhanced socioeconomic life chances for”2 whites and their descendants, calls for a courageous confrontation of “things racial.” 5 Looking at Whiteness Loving Wisdom and Playing with Danger You might easily be annoyed with me as people are when they are aroused from a doze, and strike out at me. —Socrates, Plato’s Apology Whiteness is not a topic that is usually covered in college classrooms. it generates uncomfortable silences, forms of resistance, degrees of hostility, and a host of other responses that many of us [whites] would prefer to avoid. —Alice McIntyre, Making Meaning of Whiteness education can, and should, be dangerous. —Howard Zinn, “Freedom Schools” 130 Chapter 5 as a nation, we failed miserably to discuss “things racial” during the Gates-Crowley incident in 2009. it was a prime moment for discussing critically the ways in which whites, especially white police officers, come to construct suspicions of black people based on a history of white stereotypes and assumptions. as a nation, we could have had a courageous discussion about perceptions of people of color vis-à-vis white police officers and how those perceptions have been mediated by a real history of white brutality. What needed to be discussed was the sheer “psychological distance”3 that continues to exist between black and white people. We really do not understand each other, not really. had Crowley understood Gates—hell, had he understood what it means to be black in america for the vast majority of black people—he would have been far more understanding of Gates’s response to a white police officer questioning him about the ownership of his home. Of course, at that moment Gates should have realized the existential gravity of the situation and should not have risked potentially greater danger to his own life. and while i can identify with Gates’s outrage, the history of brutalized innocent black bodies at the hands of whites would have, i hope, given me pause. To give a different contextual spin on president Obama’s expression, i would say that as a nation we all “acted stupidly”4 for not engaging this issue with sustained passion and courage, for not seizing the moment to ask difficult and honest questions. at the end of the day, this is not just about the GatesCrowley dyad but, more important, about the broader complex history of white racist america and its morally abhorrent treatment of black people and other people of color. Given that i teach at a predominantly white university and given that i teach philosophy courses that deal with the “reality” of race and the structure of whiteness, i stress the significance of courage and passion in the face of “things racial.” in fact, i would argue that i have attempted to create dangerous spaces within my classrooms. although i address this issue of pedagogical risk in Chapter 2, i do not include there a specific discussion of the concept of danger as it relates to pedagogy. While the term “dangerous” might sound off-putting, implying something physically or psychologically harmful, i use it to describe the activity of encouraging students to engage in parrhesia, or fearless speech. Fearless speech inevitably involves vulnerability and the possibility of loss—a form of loss that speaks to the possibility of a radically new understanding of the self and the historical forces that have affected the formation of the self, a type of understanding that strives to translate itself into praxes that challenge sites of oppression and dehumanization. [3.141.24.134] Project MUSE (2024...

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