"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