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Contents
My First Major Mistake as a Writing Instructor
My Relationship with Race
As an International Graduate Teaching Assistant (IGTA), I believe it is important to broach uncomfortable discussions about race. By discussing it in writing classrooms, graduate instructors, if they are people of color like me, will be able to personalize their own experience with race. By opening themselves up, students of color will also be able to share their past and concurrent experiences with racism. Moreover, the white students who may or may not have racist feelings will also know what constitutes racial offense. For that reason, in Teaching Racial Literacy, Mara Lee Grayson argues that talking back to racism does help us question our prior knowledge and understand our past conceptions of racial literacy (84). Grayson suggests students use writing as a tool to share their experiences with racism. Using personal narratives or memoir will allow individual students to reflect on their experience with racism and talk back to it as part of the healing process for creating an equitable world (95-101).
That is why Asao B. Inoue urges educators to give materials that raise awareness of racism and create an engaging classroom atmosphere which makes students thought-provoking and gives them a new platform to raise their voice against white oppression in writing. Grayson opines that students may not view themselves as racists but their views on race are largely dependent on their living conditions and sociohistorical-cultural contexts (Grayson 81). Exploring an individual’s position with “race, racism and racialism” is important for questioning any biases that the individual has towards other individuals (Grayson 81-2). She develops an intersectional understanding to stress the point that everyone’s experience of race is not the same. But she finds it important for privileged white students to position themselves and investigate/question their own perceptions about racial matters (82). Without empathy for people of color, Grayson does not think that the white students will be able to “understand their own racialized identities” (82).
While teaching first-year writing courses, college teachers are not encouraged to set up a syllabus delving into the issue of race and racism in the USA. I laud my first-year writing director for including articles on racism. When I began teaching as a GTA in my first semester, I was shocked at seeing the reluctance of my first-year students to talk about racism. As discussion of Critical Race Theory (CRT) is banned in my state’s public schools, my students tended to move with caution when the issue was involving race and racism. Even my students of color were not eager to talk about racism. Some of my intellectual cohort did not feel comfortable talking about topics related to race and racial discrimination. Like me, they did not want to make their students uncomfortable.
As a graduate teaching student, I teach to survive. I aim to improve my students’ writing, but do not intend to force them to talk about something that they do not want to, although it should be beneficial to them. I am on an F-1 visa. I have a young family. I do not want to receive any complaints because of raising a sensitive topic. My fellow graduate cohort members who are on F-1 visas try to stay on the safe side when it comes to discussions about racism. Our fears could be illogical, but they are genuine. By remaining nonchalant about the history of racism, and not encouraging my students to openly address racism, I indirectly contributed to white supremacy. I agree with Inoue that when the classroom environment does not address racism, students of all races and color are deprived of developing critical lenses in which they might have/could have written about issues that challenge the preordained structure of society where “the dominant discourse of the classroom is a white discourse and informed by a white racial habitus” (79). Therefore, I failed as a teacher.
Victor Villanueva Jr.’s Boostraps: An American Academic of Color speaks of marginalized graduate students’ struggles in academia (100). Although graduate studies are tough for all, the pressure of completing graduate studies multiplicities because of external factors, such as academic racism, white supremacist thoughts, and cultural and linguistic segregation (117). Villanueva requests scholars to get rid of the mindset of white supremacy. It can be only done from dismantling the discourse of white supremacist language. On this note, we might want to appreciate the plurality of tongues and diversity of thoughts that the IGTAs bring with their discursive formations. In my university, first-year writing students can choose a topic on their own. In first-year writing classrooms, students are required to choose their topic for writing their full paper. I tend to discourage them from choosing a topic such as abortion; it is a discussion topic that often feels off limits in my state. Personally, I think students should be encouraged to choose any topic that they feel passionate about. Although it is important to discuss sensitive topics in writing classrooms, the reality is most international graduate students prefer to sit in their comfort zone. In fear of students’ reprisals and to keep their jobs safe, most international graduate students do not encourage students to write about sensitive topics, such as abortion and gun violence. For example, in my first year, I told my first-year students that they would not be allowed to choose any sensitive topics such as “Abortion.” Later in the day, one of my students sent me an angry email (justifiably so!) about reducing their choice of options. Since my former first-year writing director had discouraged us from initiating conversations around those topics on their assignments, I just wrote a sincere apology to that embittered student for curbing their freedom. But I still feel guilty about not giving them the full freedom to explore topics for their assignments. If my students had a more courageous teacher in my place, they would have found more opportunities to develop their critical thinking abilities. Without academic freedom, it is not easy to improve cognitive thoughts as a writer. In retrospect, I wish I would not have been such a limiting factor in my students’ writing choices.