Privilege
The Debate that Ate January passed me by without my much noticing, as we are having term start here, and I am swamped - swamped as in trying to claw my way through the email heap, with no noticeable success. Still, now that I am back at the Internets, it keeps bothering me. I am a reader-response scholar: questions of how people read obviously interest me. I am also currently preparing (insert evil grin here) to introduce my students to some texts not written for them or with them as audience, and this is always a true pleasure, if a rather sadistic one. And that brings me to privilege, and reading, and the voices of the non-privileged...
Mostly, I am a privileged reader: white, middle-class, passing as straight, educated, passing as able, not yet old. As a woman, I am a non-privileged reader, of course, and I would like to think that this provides me with some protection against unthinking privilege on the other points. The question that started the debate was how one can, as a privileged writer, write CoC without othering them. How do I read, and teach, CoC and texts by PoC without othering them and without appropriating them?
Firstly, I am not sure that I can. Even with the information gleaned from PoC, is there a way to neither other and exoticise them, nor appropriate their experiences as though I had shared them? I believe that those of us who are privileged have a duty to promote the voices of the non-privileged however we can, and, when that cannot be done, speak for the voiceless. If I cannot use my privilege for that, what good is it for? However, when I do that, I risk being condescending in a lady-of-the-manor way, or to steal the experience and become the voice, not the voice-over.
Secondly, I sometimes think maybe those of us with privilege just need to shut up. This is rather difficult when you're teaching, alas, although I think it could be tried more often. When teaching, I set the tone in the classroom: I decide what type of comment is acceptable, what groups get included and excluded, and while I would dearly love to be able to step back and let the texts, or the students who relate to the texts, speak, I run the risk of avoiding responsibility for the teaching environment - and that I cannot do. I need to make sure that the students who are not privileged also have space for their voices, and that they do not become the exotic extra info, but a valuable part of our collective reading.
Finally, I have become increasingly aware of the dangers of silencing. PoC do, of course, have an absolute right to their voices, just as I have to mine, and that is really arguemnt enough. But I would like to also see the benefit to me (having, like most privileged people, never quite lost sight of that): I need to learn. If I am going to balance in the dangerously narrow space where promoting/appropriating takes me, I have to know things about the voices and experiences I am teaching. I don't see any way in which I could know about these things without being told. Yes, I can extrapolate: I know what it's like to be a oppressed because I'm a woman, and oppression is very similar everywhere, so I can guess - but I will never have the real experience. I will never be black, queer, working class: the door to those experiences is closed to me. But I can listen and read.
I believe in narrative - I could hardly do otherwise, in my job. I believe in the ability of narrative to bring a real experience as close to me as it can get without being my own. If you have experiences that differ from mine, please do me a favour if we ever meet: sit me down and tell me about it. I will attempt to shut up and listen.