"Why not hate the white man? What the hell has he done for my people? All 
that devil -- the white man -- did was come to my home with the gun powder 
they stole from the Chinese and their cannons and ships and took my people 
against their will. My people were forced to work for free for this devil. 
Then, years later, you tell me that I am hated because I am African 
American. I never asked to be here. I cannot believe the ignorance of the 
Caucasian devil and his children. This backwardness first showed up when 
the devil captured my people. He called us "niggers." We know that the 
first captives came from the Niger River area, so wouldn't you think he'd 
call us Nigers? The devil doesn't. His children today display the same 
ignorance. One individual, during our discussion, said "[Malcolm X] is no 
better than the Ku Klux Klan." It is funny that the student felt that way, 
because I do not remember Malcolm X ever hanging a white man or burning 
down a white man's house or burning a cross in a white man's front yard. 
No, there is no southern town where Caucasians are not allowed. The 
national news never did a story on that town and their signs that 
said, "don't let the sun set on your white butt" all around town. 
Therefore, there can be no comparison between Malcolm X and the Ku Klux 
Klan.

Why shouldn't I hate every blonde-haired, blue-eyed, Aryan, Anglo-Saxon 
white man, woman, and child of European descent that I see? I did not ask 
to be here among the Caucasian race!"

Jerrold White, It Hurts Just To Think: Notes from a Native Tongue, 
retrieved on 13th July 2005, from 
http://www.colorado.edu/journals/standards/V6N1/EDUCATION/white.html


HOW CAN I MAKE A CRITICAL POSTCOLONIAL ADDITION TO OUR ARCHIVE OF 
EXPLANATIONS OF EDUCATIONAL INFLUENCES IN LEARNING?

I'd like to have a go at rising to the educational challenge in the above 
question. 

Have you come across the journal, Standards: The International Journal of 
Multicultural Studies? 

http://www.colorado.edu/journals/standards/

I did yesterday. The journal is exciting for a number of reasons. There 
was a special edition called EDUCATION. 

Do take a few minutes to visit, 
Volume VI, Number 1 -- EDUCATION 
http://www.colorado.edu/journals/standards/V6N1/v6n1.html

Reading the papers in that edition, I came across two that gripped me 
because they have emerged from  a relationship between teacher and student 
that is held in a pedagogy of love, compassion in a register of 
inclusivity that can also handle anger and hatred in writing, too. I think 
writing of this kind could enhance our archive of explanations of 
educational influence. In the process two educational standards of 
judgement can be pointed to - the first is the nature of inclusivity, and 
what counts as an inclusive standard of judgement for an inclusive 
teaching practice. The other is to do with the content issues that British 
teacher-researchers may need to consider if we are to capitalise on the 
benefits of multiracial and multi-faith teaching practices in schools and 
society. 

To follow my logic in this matter do look at,

It Hurts Just To Think, by Jerrold White 
http://www.colorado.edu/journals/standards/V6N1/EDUCATION/white.html

and then, 

A Rhetoric of Difference, by Bonnie Richards, 
http://www.colorado.edu/journals/standards/V6N1/EDUCATION/richards.html

I find Bonnie and Jerrold's writing to be 'educational' in the widest and 
deepest senses.
First, there is the educational standard of judgement that emerges clearly 
from it - and one that I have been evolving in my own practice - but would 
not have been able to articulate without Bonnie's and Jerrold's papers:

my educational standard of judgement of inclusion of the ontology of hate 
and anger is part of my faculty of humanity as 'mixed-race' educator (as 
well as my inclusion of loving, creative and hopeful expression, i.e., as 
demonstrated in my students accounts of their undergraduate theses, 
Staples: 2005,  and Smith: 2005)

my educational standard of judgement of inclusivity concerning the 
inclusion of expressions of anger and hatred in academic writing is clear 
and straightforward. Anger and hatred have a legitimate place in inclusive 
communities of educational practice because they are part of a faculty of 
humanity. Anger and hatred can counter the aggression of the other as well 
as generate it. And, as Jerrold White exemplifies, anger and hatred are 
key to the identity and subject position of my fellow human being(s). 
This is my contribution to adding to our archive of explanations of 
educational influences in (my) learning. 

Educational inclusion seems to focus on the act of legitimating the anger 
and hatred of the learner in their unique text, if I read Bonnie and 
Jerrold rightly. 

Second there is the act of a teacher legitimating a student's text that is 
angry and writhing in hatred. Not just a black voice, but an angry and 
hateful black voice. I remember a teacher story told by a friend and  
colleagues, Dr Margarita Dolan about her mentoring of a black female 
student. In 'helping' her student to frame her writing in a way that was 
ostensibly more appropriate for the university, her student likened the 
process to having her unique imprint, her unique dialect, her form of 
English language demeaned. The student explained to Margarita that she 
felt the hypocrisy of 'widening participation' in British universities 
while having her 'participation' proscribed. Margarita explained how in 
this encounter she had confronted her own vestigial colonialism, and 
whiteness, simultaneously. Jerrold writes in the genre of a first-person 
particular polemic, with a narrative trope, and it has, for me, that 
quality of Michael Bassey's (1995) notion of relatability because of the 
truthful way this singular, particular account relates to the general of 
my material, political and ideological experience of Western hegemony. I 
bring no judgement whatsoever to Jerrold White's feelings. It is in the 
act of legitimating them in writing that Bonnie Richards places the 'post' 
of postcolonial into her pedagogic practice. I like that, I like that a 
lot. 

What is amazing is that Jerrold wrote this piece but would not submit this 
as coursework to his tutor who was white. How many of us teachers have 
experienced this to our knowledge? How do you legitimate your students' 
writing about their anger and hatred? 

What are your first-person experiences and encounters with hatred and 
anger arising from race, ethnicity, difference, belonging, humiliation and 
identity in your classrooms, with your students? Perhaps in your teaching 
profession, and in your school? I do think that our archive 
of 'practitioner-research' could be enhanced and enriched by sharing our 
stories, research stories or otherwise, in the uncluttered lingo that 
Jerrold and Bonnie use to write their papers. What do you think?

How can we enact this kind of inclusion in our pedagogy and in our 
classrooms? 

I imagine from my own experience that an educator probably has to keep 
her/his body steady and available in the space of anger and hatred. 
Exclusion of hatred and anger from educational research communities would 
seem to be a mis-educational act (Chomsky, 2000). Bonnie Richards places 
her body in the space of Jerrold's angry and hateful writing. And Jerrold 
brings his embodied writing into the space, too. And Bonnie goes one step 
further. She warns educators of the dangers of criticising such writing 
as 'inverted racism'. By pointing to Jerrold's writing as carrying 
severance would be to bring a 'colonial gaze' to Jerrold's writing in a 
normative and judgemental way. Inclusion is the embrace of Jerrold's 
writing of anger and hatred notwithstanding the micro-political 
implications of people rebuffing it, finding it repugnant and closing 
themselves down to it. To see, speak and act in this way would require a 
very unselfish and courageous teacher. 

Where are these teachers who show such courage by reading angry and hate-
filled accounts of whiteness and legitimating them? You must be somewhere 
in this e-seminar? I would like to meet you. I have much to learn from 
you, and perhaps to share with you from the down to earth practicalities 
of my experience as a mixed-race teacher-researcher in higher education. 
Let me give you an idea of what I'm getting at -

I have supervised white Zimbabwean and South African students whose anger 
concerning land redistribution and the loss of their farms and livelihoods 
(as they saw it), and their visceral hatred of the ANC government spilled 
over onto me as a violent acid in their words, gestures and writing. I 
kept my humanity and my body in a space of supervision with those people.  

I imagine this is why I do not describe myself as a 'happy clappy' 
humanistic educator. This is related in time and space to my realization 
of newfound activism in my teaching. Because of my practical, down to 
earth pedagogy I teach against the violence of capitalism. And in order to 
influence change in the Academy, like it or not, one has to 'submit' 
oneself to the scholarship required to craft an aesthetically and 
intellectually pleasing (acceptable) theoretical construction of one's 
educative practice in order to achieve a doctorate. I am 53, Jerrold was 
20 at the time of writing his paper, and shamefully for me, Jerrold has 
more guts than I do to write so powerfully and unapologetically into white 
spaces and describe what we know (each of us knows I hope?) to be the 
immanence of whiteness. 

This is where I could do with some help, please? Reading both papers I 
began to wonder where I could find similar standards of judgement of 
inclusivity being written about by British teachers as part of their own 
informal or formalised self study. I began wondering where I could read 
the evidence being amassed by British teachers researching their own 
teaching practice with black students and students of colour within 
whiteness and a state violence of racism.  

How many teachers are working, as I am doing, with their own anger and 
hatefulness? How many teachers are writing about how they have altered 
their pedagogic practices to take into account the impact of racism(s) in 
the lives of their students and the anger and hatred that flows from the 
deep-rootedness of that pain? I would love to read these accounts. Where 
are they? Who are the teachers are writing these accounts? 

Could somebody on this list suggest any url's to web pages where teachers 
are working towards sustainable relationships, and sustainable learning 
in 'postcolonial' classrooms. If there is any teacher in the e-seminar who 
is relating to the papers above, and to the educational standard of 
judgement that I have added to this archive of educational influence, then 
do please contact me, off-line if that feels more appropriate,

[log in to unmask]

[log in to unmask]

As an educational researcher crafting my written account of my educational 
standards of judgement that guide my praxis of postcolonial critical 
pedagogy as a form of living and live educational theory I was deeply 
impressed by Bonnie Richards and Jerrold White's papers. I would like to 
add this to our archive.

In peace,

Yaqub