Recognizing Class in the Classroom | Part 2

Mentioning my own experience as a student from the working-class points to a second matter. Teachers who are unwilling to disclose their own experiences will risk replicating class-based power within the classroom. “Professors who expect students to share confessional narratives but who are themselves unwilling to share,” says bell hooks, “are exercising power in a manner that could be coercive” (p. 21). Teachers who tactfully offer examples of their own encounters with class, regardless of where they live in the class hierarchy, will be rewarded with more honest and lively discussions, not only about class, but also about oppressions revolving around race, gender, and sexuality. 

Third, it will help if teachers push back against a neoliberal (late capitalist) rationality that responsibilizes the individual for everything. While it is important to our self-understanding to embrace the various dimensions of our identities, in neoliberal cultures a subtle shift can occur whenever we speak up “as an African-American,” or “as a woman,” or “as a white person,” or “as a gay man,” and so on. This shift appears due to the privatization of responsibility. It is certainly true that “the personal is political,” but it is just as true that political power cannot be collapsed into the personal. While it is helpful to acknowledge our own complicity with such power, it can be devastating to genuine communication in the classroom whenever a peer (or the teacher) is perceived simply as either an agent for, or a victim of, a system of domination. This is also where the economics/culture divide can get personal. Whenever this occurs, students are apt to feel that talking honestly about class is the equivalent of walking through a mine-field. It is critical for course participants to remain aware that class-based domination, along with the racism and sexism with which it is entangled, is systemic. For this reason, I encourage my students to adopt systemic language. Rather than employing what Wendy Brown (p. 61) calls “the multiculturalist mantra”—“race, class, gender, sexuality”—I use hooks’ frequently-repeated phrase, “imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.” I call my students’ attention to the absence of commas here. Under neoliberal rationality and practice this is one huge constantly-morphing system, yet is comprised of other moving parts that are systems in themselves. Given today’s radical economic and political inequality, the rather pitiful degree of power most of us possess as individuals in this system enables us to say, relatively speaking, that “the enemy is not in the room.” Acknowledging this often helps de-escalate pain and anger in the classroom, returning conflict to a level that can be instructive and constructive.

(To be continued)

References:

hooks, bell. (1994). Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York, NY: Routledge. 

Brown, Wendy. (1995). States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.