Words of Fire

by Beverly Guy-Sheftall

  I began by discussing my early experiences, because these experiences are common to many. Although we learn these lessons as members of either privileged or oppressed groups, they are similar lessons. If we are clear about the origins of practices that exclude people of color, we can dispense with blaming ourselves and each other for the difficulties we face in trying to change the curriculum. We are swimming upstream against the intellectual racism that flows through American ideology. The disregard for the experiences of black people and other people of color is part of the American creed. To create a multicultural curriculum we must “unlearn” the ideology that marginalizes all but a tiny elite of American citizens.

  Curriculum transformation has the potential for changing our traditional visions of education in American society. Yet, it can also replicate old biases. This is especially likely to occur in situations where the integration process is envisioned as a minor tune-up to an educational system that is fundamentally solid. From my perspective, however, our curriculum needs a major overhaul. It needs much more than the addition of women. It must incorporate the men who are omitted—especially working-class men and men of color. Elizabeth Minnich reminds us that fundamental change is not possible unless we first understand why these groups were excluded.2 Enlightened by such a critique, we can decide how we want to change and what we will teach. We can then select the path that leads to a restructuring of the curriculum toward inclusiveness across many dimensions of human experience.

  CURRICULUM CHANGE STARTS WITH FACULTY DEVELOPMENT

  Integrating the diversity among women into the curriculum is difficult. Most faculty members are just learning about women through recent exposure to feminist scholarship; few of them are knowledgeable about and at ease with material on women of color. This is understandable. No one mentioned women of color when most contemporary college faculty pursued their degrees, yet the lack of correct information is a major contributor to the limited and inadequate treatment of women of color in courses and in research projects.

  As the products of educational experiences that relegated people of color and women to the margins of their fields, faculty members need to compensate for the institutionalized biases in the educational system. They can work to eliminate this bias by gaining familiarity with the historical and contemporary experiences of racial-ethnic groups, the working class, middle-class women, and other groups traditionally restricted to the margins. The first step is to acknowledge one’s lack of exposure to these histories.

  Structural difficulties make learning new information about women and people of color problematic. It is often hard for faculty members to compensate for the gaps in their knowledge when they are faced with heavy teaching responsibilities and the pressure to publish. College administrators can encourage efforts with release time, financial support for workshops and institutes, and the like. Even without such resources. faculty members can develop long- and short-term strategies—for example, by organizing seminars to explore the new scholarship. All that is needed is a commitment and a shared reading list.

  Another difficulty is the interdisciplinary nature of women’s studies. Most faculty members are trained to research a specific discipline. Fortunately, over the years, more resources and tools have become available to help navigate this interdisciplinary field. The Center for Research on Women at Memphis State University has been a pioneer in this area; other research centers and curriculum projects have produced bibliographies, collections of syllabi, essays, and resources to assist with curriculum change. Some resources specifically include race, class, and gender as dimensions of analysis.

  Institutionalized racism and sexism are structured into both the commercial and academic publishing markets, thus making it more difficult for scholars studying women and people of color to publish their work. Women’s studies centers have initiated projects to help faculty identify relevant citations and locate new research, and the development of women’s studies and racial-ethnic studies journals has helped a great deal, but structural barriers persist that impede access to research on certain populations, particularly women of color, working-class women, and women in the southern and western regions of this nation. Thus, the very resources college faculty need about women of color are difficult to locate.

  Learning to identify myth and misinformation about people of color is a critical task in course and curriculum revision. It is a process that alters teaching content and classroom dynamics. For example, with new knowledge faculty members can teach students in ways that appreciate human diversity. Faculty members will also be better prepared to interrupt and challenge racist, sexist, class-bias, and homophobic remarks made in the classroom.

  My own areas of specialization have given me information on the experiences of different racial and ethnic groups in this society. I often forget that everyone is not familiar with how most of the Southwest became part of the United States; with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882; with the implications of the Immigration Act of 1924 for people of color; with the internment of Japanese American citizens during World War II; and with the fact that Puerto Ricans are citizens, not immigrants, and cannot be considered undocumented workers. One has to remember that most dominant-group faculty and students are not nearly as familiar with these histories as are students who belong to specific ethnic and racial-ethnic groups. This history of oppression is part of the oral traditions in ethnic and racial-ethnic communities as well as religious groups. Afro-American, Latino, Asian American, and Native American students enter our classrooms with at least a partial awareness of the historic struggles of their people. They frequently feel alienated in educational settings where their teachers and other students relate to them without any awareness of their group’s history. For example, a faculty member or a student who talks about how Japanese Americans have always done well in this country denies the reality that racism has severely marred the lives of both Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans. For much of this century Japanese aliens were denied the opportunity to become citizens. During World War II they were removed from the West Coast and placed in internment camps, primarily because Anglos resented their economic success. Non-Japanese American faculty and students may be unaware of this history. The lack of correct information on the part of faculty members has consequences for what happens in the classroom: to the Japanese American student, Anglo ignorance of these issues is symptomatic of the persistent denial that racism is an issue for this group.3

  With new information, faculty can challenge myths and begin to interrupt racism in the classroom. The mastering of new information is a key ingredient in combatting the feelings of powerlessness many faculty members experience in the face of the racist and sexist attitudes of their students. Once we acknowledge our lack of information, we can use the many resources available to learn about the experiences of women, people of color, working-class people, and other traditionally marginalized groups.

  WHAT DO I DO WITH NEW INFORMATION?

  A key issue faced by faculty is finding a “place” for working-class women, black women, and other women of color in the curriculum. How do we challenge established practices of marginalizing these populations and truly develop a different educational process? How do we weave this new information on women and specifically women of color into a course on the family, the labor market, the sociology of education, the introduction to political science, and so forth? This is where many faculty learn by trial and error.

  Revising the content of one’s course requires the clarification of personal goals and educational aims.4 This is not an issue that faculty approach lightly. One cannot introduce a reading or a lecture where minority women are covered and then merely assume that the goal has been achieved. Curriculum transformation requires much more. Yet, as we move toward that goal, our individual educational philosophy and commitment to our discipline will play a key role in how we resolve these issues.

  It is common practice to begin initial integration efforts with one or
two lectures on women of color. Faculty who stop at that level of inclusion find that their course is not transformed and that this addition has little impact on students. In fact, this approach can generate new problems. An instructor who performs the obligatory lecture often encounters opposition from students. For example, a black woman colleague of mine taught a traditional course on the family and included a unit on the black family. A few vocal students were quick to remind her that they had signed up for a course on the family, not the “black family.” Had she incorporated material on the black family in every unit throughout the course, the “black family” would not have appeared to be anomalous, but an integral part of the study of the family.

  Yet, this additive approach is problematic. If faculty introduce material on black women or women of color as interesting variations on womanhood, such actions indicate that readings and lecture materials on these populations are not part of the “core” knowledge covered in the class. Students can tolerate a certain amount of cultural enrichment, but if this material exceeds more than one or two lectures, they lose their patience because they think the instructor is deviating from the core. This reaction can be avoided if material on white working-class women, black women, and other women of color (as well as men of color and working-class people) is integrated throughout the course. The diversity of experiences should be presented as knowledge that students are responsible for learning and will be evaluated for covering.

  Approaches that keep women of color on the margins or peripheral to the course materials fail to address critical issues of racism, sexism, and classism. Faculty who use such approaches tend to introduce material on white middle-class people as the norm, and then later ask for a discussion on the variations found among working-class whites and people of color. This approach does a great deal to foster ideas that blame the victim. Students may even use such discussions as opportunities to verbalize the racism they have learned from the media and other sources. Such interactions tend to polarize a class, and then the faculty member has an additional battle to wage.

  In sociology, where attention is given to norms, ideal types, and the like, women of color are often incorporated as deviant cases. Peripheral treatments of groups are obvious to students; furthermore, these approaches complement students’ previous learning about racial-ethic groups. Often when an instructor is about to begin the one obligatory lecture on the black family, the black woman, Latinas, working-class women in the labor market or whomever, a student will ask the question all the students want answered, “Are we going to be tested on this?” This also tends to happen when a guest speaker who is a racial minority or a female is invited to class. Students may listen politely but not feel compelled to write anything down or remember what was said.

  Students carry old lessons into the classroom. They have already learned that what happens to people of color (or to women) does not count. This has been evident in their learning prior to college and continues in most college courses. Learning about different groups is treated as cultural enrichment, not as a part of the basic scholarship of a field. These are essentially correct impressions on the part of students. The core material is still about affluent white men: the historical experiences, social conditions, and scholarly contributions of people of color and women are marginal to the disciplines.

  BEYOND A UNIVERSAL MODEL OF GENDER

  In many curriculum integration efforts in social science teaching, the marginalization of women of color takes two forms. Women of color are addressed either as tangents to the “generic” woman or as the “exceptional” woman of color. In the first case, African American, Asian American, and Native American women and Latinas are present, but their experiences are not critical to the development of theory or paradigms. This teaching strategy is often linked with the view that gender relations are the foundation for universal experiences. Within this framework, other sources of inequality, particularly race and class, might be acknowledged, but they are clearly less important than gender. As a result, scholarship on women of color in both women’s studies and curriculum integration efforts is marginalized.5 Faculty tend to rely upon the experiences of white, middle-class, heterosexual Americans as the norm and view all others are merely exceptions to the rule.

  Sandra Morgen is very critical of this universalist stance. She identifies how looking at the experiences of women of color expands our understanding of critical issues for women and gives a feminist perspective greater depth.6 Morgen examines how we can develop deeper appreciations of motherhood, the feminization of poverty, and women and resistance by examining the historical and current situations of women of color.

  With regard to motherhood, Morgen identifies the way that most white, middle-class feminist scholars see the nuclear family as normative. In a discussion of Dinnerstein’s Mermaid and the Minotaur (1976), Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born (1976), and Nancy Chodorow’s (1978) The Reproduction of Mothering, Morgen argues that much feminist scholarship about “the” familypresumes that working women are a relatively recent phenomenon, and that working mothers are even newer, and that the normative family is mom, dad, and the kids, and that mothers live with their children and are the primary, if not near exclusive, force in their socialization. These assumptions are problematic when explaining the historical and contemporary experiences of many poor and working-class women, and of many women of color. These women have as a group been in the labor force for a much longer period of time, and in situations like slavery, sharecropping, domestic work, or unregulated industrial production that did not allow for the kind of full-time motherhood, or the specific mother-child relations which are presumed in Chodorow, Dinnerstein, and Rich.7

  The impact of racial oppression on the mothering behavior of women of color in the nineteenth century is a theme in the work of Bonnie Thornton Dill.8 She describes how racial oppression not only shaped the productive roles of African American, Latina, and Asian immigrant women, but also influenced the reproductive labor of these women. Dill’s and Morgen’s works demonstrate that much can be gained by using the experiences of women of color to develop new theories about women’s experiences. Such approaches sharply contrast with those that fit the experiences of women of different classes and races into a universal model.

  Morgen also describes how an analysis of the feminization of poverty can be informed by looking at the circumstances of women who are not new to poverty.9 She is joined by other scholars who have discovered that not all women are a husband away from poverty. While many middle-class white women experience a significant decline in their social status when they sever their attachment to a middle-class white male, many working-class women and women of color find themselves attached to men and still poor.10 Their poverty is not only a gender issue but is related to a legacy of class and racial discrimination.11

  We can also see beyond approaches that focus on women as victims by learning how working-class women and women of color resist class and racial oppression.12 Rather than a continuum from accommodation to rebellion, Morgen sees diverse personal and protracted struggles against oppression. These women actively resist the limitations placed on their lives by gender, class, and racial oppression. Denied access to many public spheres, they do not protest by voting or writing letters to congressmen; instead, they are involved in grass-roots organizing, efforts to improve public schools and other neighborhood institutions, jobs actions, and the like. Morgen’s book (coedited with Ann Bookman) Women and the Politics of Empowerment incorporates much of the new research on women and resistance, research that is primarily on working-class women.13 Rich examples of resistance are also found in the new scholarship on women in domestic work.14

  If we abandon the practice of keeping working-class women and women of color on the margins in our teaching and our research, and seek ways to incorporate the diversity of women’s experiences, we are more likely to involve students and challenge their racist assumptions. We can also move students beyond seeing women of color and wo
rking-class women as victims.

  ADDRESSING THE LIVES OF ORDINARY WOMEN OF COLOR

  A second way that women of color are introduced into the curriculum is by a brief look at a few “exceptional” examples. This method is very common in history and the social sciences, where “exceptional” black women such as Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Ida B. Wells, and Mary McLeod Bethune are discussed. In contrast to marginal treatments of women of color, described above, where the population of women of color is seen as an undifferentiated mass, this approach holds up a few models—nonvictims—for admiration. In the case of black women, this is often done under the guise that racism has not been terribly difficult for them. The subtle message to students is that if successful black women could achieve in the face of obstacles, other black women failed to attain the same heights because of faulty culture, lack of motivation, and other individual deficits. A faculty member might not intend to reinforce the individualistic lessons of the American ideology, but students interpret the material in this way because it is a common theme in our history. The “exceptions” approach fails to depict the larger social system in which the struggles of women of color, whether successful or not, take place.

  In “The Politics of Black Women’s Studies,” by Barbara Smith and Gloria Hull, which is the introductory essay in But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies, the authors warn of this practice:A descriptive approach to the lives of black women, a “great black women” in history or literature approach, or any traditional male-identified approach will not result in intellectually groundbreaking or politically transforming work. We cannot change our lives by teaching solely about “exceptions” to the ravages of white-male oppression. Only through exploring the experiences of supposedly “ordinary” black women whose “unexceptional” actions enabled us and the race to survive, will we be able to begin to develop an overview and analytic framework for understanding the lives of Afro-American women.15