Words of Fire (83 page)

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.

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.
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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.

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.
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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.
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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” family

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.
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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.
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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.
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Their poverty is not only a gender issue but is related to a legacy of class and racial discrimination.
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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.
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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.
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Rich examples of resistance are also found in the new scholarship on women in domestic work.
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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 working-class women as victims.

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:

To do otherwise is to deceive ourselves. The experiences of a few exceptional black women, as typically portrayed in the classroom, serve to deny the reality of oppressive structures. This approach does not help students develop an appreciation for the role of race, class, and gender in people's lives. As we attempt to bring women of color out of the margins, we must be prepared to challenge students' tendency to romanticize a few heroines.

These two practices, teaching about women of color as tangents to the “generic” woman and examining the lives of exceptional women of color,
work to justify and perpetuate the marginalization of women of color in women's studies scholarship. Approaches such as these retard the field of women's studies and complicate the task of integrating women into the high school and college curricula. While these approaches might represent a step or phase in the process of changing the curriculum, we must also remain clear on the larger goals and objectives of curriculum transformation. As pointed out earlier, each step in transformation brings its own set of problems and contradictions into the classroom. If we are not clear about our ultimate goal, we may become discouraged and retreat before new problems. In the end, we seek a curriculum that teaches an awareness and appreciation of the diversity of human experiences as well as the commonality of the human condition.

If a course is structured around the dominant-group experience and people of color are marginalized, faculty members lose the opportunity to critically address social structure—that is, the ways in which the institutions of society shape our options and influence our behavior. Transforming the curriculum requires explicit discussions of the roles of gender, race, and class in shaping the lives of everybody. This is accomplished by exploring the diversity of the experiences of men and women in the United States and around the world. For example, being female means privileges and the accompanying restrictions of dependency for some women, while for others it means poverty and the burden of supporting themselves and dependents.