On this put up, I’ll replicate on my expertise within the Vital Philosophy of Race class I took with Jackie Scott at Loyola College Chicago in Spring 2022. I selected this expertise as a result of the pedagogical mannequin of the category supplied me one thing totally different from different philosophy programs I’ve taken. I might broadly describe this mannequin as participatory and therapeutic. I’ll describe these traits individually under.
Participatory pedagogy
Just a few days earlier than the beginning of the course, Jackie despatched us a Google spreadsheet to share our educational pursuits across the philosophy of race. Two of us college students contributed principally to the dialog, and Jackie took our enter under consideration when placing collectively the course syllabus. This train made me really feel thought of from the start of the course.
As well as, from the third session, we started to place collectively a psychological map that served us the remainder of the semester as a path to understanding the logic of racism in america. We started this desk with the ideas of W. E. B Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk and Linda Alcoff’s “Mestizo Identity.” These texts study American racism from the angle of individuals of shade.
All through the course, we nourished this desk with the ideas of Audre Lorde, Kristie Dotson, Shannon Sullivan, George Yancy, José Medina, and María Lugones, amongst others. In assembling this desk, we recognized totally different harms that racism causes to folks of shade and white folks in america. We additionally recognized potential methods to counteract the harms of racism. At school, we known as these intervention methods.
Importantly, on this pedagogical course of, the instructor accompanied us as a facilitator and associate in thought and dialogue. I do not forget that, within the courses, Jackie would sometimes ask a query whereas sharing this paraphrased disclaimer: I’m asking this query not as a result of I’ve a solution prepared; I should not have a solution, however I would like us all to search out it collectively. This reflection exemplifies the pedagogical method of the category.
In keeping with Jackie’s conceptualization, racism is a illness, and as such, it detrimentally impacts the physique (Scott 2019). Or in Du Bois’s phrases, racism is an issue during which folks of shade are the issue (Du Bois 2007, 7). From this understanding, the questions “what’s racism?” and “how will we confront it?” are ever new questions and ones that, within the context of the category, all of us—together with the instructor—took on the duty of addressing. This method made the category extremely participatory.
Therapeutic pedagogy
Through the lectures and in written assignments, Jackie insisted that we help our arguments with examples from our experiences. This invitation helped us put flesh on the ideas within the course texts. Fanon’s historical-racial physique schema, Sullivan’s ontological expansiveness, Medina’s epistemic virtues and vices, and Lorde’s makes use of of anger, amongst many others, got here alive in classmates’ narratives.
From my perspective, an important facet of this method was the group expertise throughout this course of. I analyze this expertise with Lugones’s idea of “world touring” under. We labored on this idea throughout the class, and I developed it in depth in my last essay.
Lugones understands “world” as a “seeing circle” (Lugones 2003, 159–60). In keeping with this notion, explicit social circles present us with particular methods of perceiving ourselves and being perceived by others. The assorted social circles we transfer amongst are “worlds” during which we exist and to which we come and go each day (Lugones 2003, 87–8, 129).
In one of many courses with Jackie, for instance, a classmate shared her experiences with a circle of colleagues racialized as white. She expressed discomfort with the racist insults that they used. In Lugones’s language, this social circle is a “world” inside the numerous worlds during which my classmate strikes.
Importantly, in sharing this expertise with us, our classmate confirmed the group one in all her worlds: a “world” during which white privilege prevails over different methods of perceiving actuality. Our classmate shared the ache and discomfort she felt from belonging to that world. This expertise opened the door for the group to speak in regards to the “worlds” during which we transfer and during which we, as folks of shade, are considered with mistrust and contempt. This sharing was primarily motivated by our curiosity in illuminating the ideas of the category readings.
Primarily based on Lugones’s philosophy, I categorize this sort of expertise as a modality of “world touring,” which I name loving world-traveling. This expertise entails considering different folks’s “worlds” with the will to “perceive what it’s to be them” and “what it’s to be ourselves of their eyes” (Lugones 2003, 97). Within the classroom, I skilled this idea in my very own flesh once I listened and checked out classmates with respect, affection, admiration, and affirmation as they narrated their (dis)encounters with American racism.
Likewise, I skilled loving world-traveling after sharing a troublesome state of affairs in one of many “worlds” during which I transfer. On this “world,” the trend and confusion I endured at witnessing the homicide of George Floyd was invalidated. This expertise led me to mistrust myself and my affections when dealing with this case that shook Individuals in 2020. Floyd’s final phrases, “I can’t breathe,” resonated with the sense of suffocation I felt once I thought my anger and confusion had been character flaws. This thought, in flip, was confirmed by the attitudes of silence and indifference I contemplated within the “worlds” the place white privilege reigns.
Once I shared this expertise with my class, I felt validated. Furthermore, I felt my interior world validated by my classmates’ and instructor’s listening, receptivity, and empathy. It was as in the event that they had been telling me: I consider you. This expertise helped me regain confidence in myself and my affective expertise of racism—an expertise silenced and domesticated in circles of white privilege.
In trying to grasp racism collectively, the classroom turned an area for collective therapeutic. This strategy of group reflection helped us to not really feel despair for ourselves and our lack of ability to confront racist constructions however to venture this despair onto the racist constructions that encompass us (Scott 2019). On this sense, the expertise of the course was central to understanding affectively and corporeally that our our bodies and affections are usually not the issues; reasonably, the shortcomings are in society and the legal guidelines that victimize racialized our bodies.
Just a few months after the tip of the course, we met once more to make amends for what we had been doing with our lives. I skilled this assembly with pleasure and delight because of the environment of affection and respect we cultivated throughout the course.
The expertise of this course clarifies that areas of belief and reflection in communities victimized by white privilege and supremacy are important. This course supplied me an experimental setting to consider what methods we will undertake in my collectives and communities to confront white supremacy.
Reflecting on the expertise of this course, I’m wondering with awe, what’s philosophical work able to when it focuses on therapeutic folks’s our bodies and impacts, and is oriented in direction of social justice?
Miguel Cerón-Becerra
Miguel Cerón-Becerra is a Jesuit brother and a doctoral scholar in philosophy at Loyola College Chicago. His analysis focuses on the transnational exploitation of girls’s home labor.
