Week 1: Straddling

The readings for this week were a welcome reminder for me of the ways in which identity and social location are intimately connected with teaching practice and praxis. I spend most of my time outside of school in community organizing spaces, specifically in organizing white communities to engage meaningfully in the movement for racial justice. This work is challenging and it constantly pushes me to think critically about my identity as a White woman teaching emergent bilinguals in a largely immigrant community of black and brown families in South Providence. While I spend ample time reflecting on my interactions with students and their families  and acting in ways that I believe are explicitly anti-racist, it is so difficult to counteract the insidious white supremacist values that are entrenched in our schools and communities, and it is a struggle that I do not take lightly.

Recently, I have had an exceptionally hard time reconciling the work I do outside the classroom with that which I do inside. Although my lessons are designed to be critical and anti-racist, and I attempt to organize my classroom in a way that is culturally and linguistically responsive and within a restorative framework, I am teaching in a toxic school environment that is riddled with zero tolerance and punitive policies aimed primarily at shaping students into compliance whatever the cost. This is simply exhausting, and identity and social location are at the heart of these systems and of this work.

In terms of the readings, specifically, I was struck by each of them in different ways. In Yo, Miss! I especially appreciated the drawing on page 23 at the end of the chapter, offering an inside look at Ms. Wilde’s brain and the competing thought bubbles within it. That image is exactly how I feel every day. The devil-angel complex was definitely spot on. Often, it is easy to take students’ comments personally and to heart, and I spend many afternoons replaying the events of the day in my mind, and imagining hypothetical responses to them, wondering how I should react the next day, contemplating if I made some fatal error with my tone of voice or word choice or body language. Something I noticed in the picture that is definitely true in my own life was the size of the different thought bubbles, and the ways in which the elements of self-care (i.e. cooking dinner, reading a book, taking a walk in the park) were much tinier than the other thoughts, and were often overlapping or even partially covered. I know that for me, teaching can become so overwhelming that I often forget to make space for the other things that make me whole.

In Locating Yourself for Your Students, I found the discourse on whiteness to be particularly interesting, as it is something that I have spent a lot of time reflecting on in my own life. The authors note that there is a harm in not naming whiteness, as it allows a position of dominance to be upheld. This is definitely true, especially in the classroom and in schools as a whole. I thought it was interesting that the students said that they appreciated that they “did not have to act as if it were a secret [she] was White” (Parmar & Steinberg 2008). The idea that whiteness is a secret, or is an unspoken piece of our identities contributes to the harms that white supremacy can inflict, and allows us to avoid holding white people accountable for their privilege.

“They said they knew at every moment of their lives they were not White, but they felt White people did not know that they were White” (Parmar & Steinberg 2008). So many white people do not explicitly identify as white, understanding it as a default identity. In my community organizing work, this has been one of the biggest challenges in mobilizing white communities. There is so much educational work to be done around understanding whiteness, and this is often our point of departure with white organizers in order to reduce harm in POC-led organizing spaces.

In “Identities and Social Locations: Who Am I? Who Are  My People?” I was particularly struck by the author’s discussion of how our connection with and experience of home as a child can affect our identity development as adults. I am a first-generation college graduate, and this part of my identity was a huge preoccupation of mine during my college years and those immediately following. I struggled so much to connect with my family and felt out of place at the elite college I attended. I found some solace in a book by Alfred Lubrano called Limbo: Blue Collar Roots, White Collar Dreams. In the book, Lubrano talks about the “straddler” identity, a phenomenon experienced by those who experience changes in social class and SES throughout their lifetime. He notes that straddlers feel a sense of disconnect from both communities, and do not ever fully leave behind their past nor settle into their new class identity. This book provided some healing for me, if only to allow me to sit in the discomfort and accept that this is a part of who I am, for better or worse. [Here is a link to an NPR interview with Lubrano about the book and his journey through class consciousness.]

References

Kirk, G. & Okazawa‐Rey, M. (2010) Identities and Social Locations: Who Am I? Who Are  My People?

Wilde, Lisa (2015). Yo Miss! Chapter One

Parmar, P. and Steinberg, S. (2008). Locating Yourself for Your Students