Teaching What You're Not

A Review of Teaching What You're Not: Identity Politics in Higher Education, edited by Katherine J. Mayberry, New York: New York University Press, 1996.

Laura I. Rendón
Arizona State University

When I was starting to write my dissertation, I became somewhat torn by a dilemma: Should I conduct a study on Chicano students because I am a Chicana or should I engage in research on nonminority issues and avoid being typecast as a minority scholar? Ultimately, I chose the former, not because I believed only Chicanos can study other Chicanos. Rather, I felt a sense of passion about my mission in higher education. I wanted to be an advocate and a voice for students who, like me, began their education with high hopes and dreams, but who, unlike me, ended up with shattered lives and broken dreams.

In the end my ethnic consciousness (i.e., pride in cultural heritage and awareness of racism, discrimination, sexism, and elitism prevalent in higher education and in the larger society) carried me and other minority scholars like me to an appropriate intellectual and socially responsible place in the academy. This is not to say that minority scholars had not ever been present in classrooms where the "great books" were taught. In these cases, what allowed us to teach these works were our intellectual pursuits, despite the fact that we were strangers in this monocultural body of work that was largely devoid of social justice issues as they affected the lives of people of color. So in many ways, the case for teaching what you are not was made a long time ago by minority scholars who joined the professorial ranks.

Now, Teaching What You're Not examines the other side of teaching in college--white, heterosexual faculty teaching nonwhite, nonheterosexual perspectives. The paradigm from which this book was developed seems to place faculty in two camps. On the one hand, there are faculty who believe that only those scholars who have lived the experience as a member of an oppressed group (minorities, women, gays, lesbians, etc.) can study and teach that group's scholarly body of work. On the other hand, a growing number of faculty, both white and minority, believe that difference is bridgeable, that teaching is more complicated than identity, and that there are multiple ways of engagement that go beyond ethnic identity.

Despite its liberal underpinnings, Teaching What You're Not reads like a collection of essays in defense of higher education's scholarly enterprise, with all the traditional trappings, circumscribed by intellectual objective views of who and what is worthy of scholarly study and who can be anointed to teach it. In essence, the book does two things: It presents a defense of an epistemology and it offers case studies embodying the authors' philosophy of scholarly engagement in actual classroom settings.

If all readers want is a philosophical rendering of the pros and cons of teaching what you are vs. teaching what you're not, then perhaps they have come to the right place. In this volume, it is clear from the authors' points of view that the arguments against identity politics far outweigh those that defend the idea that only the historically oppressed can teach topics with minority content. White scholars can clearly teach ethnic studies in much the same way that minority scholars were able to teach nonwhite literature, philosophy, and history. But I wonder if the authors are not barking up the wrong tree. The truth of who can teach what lies somewhere in the middle of the identity politics debate, and this is not well addressed in this volume.

The professorial profession is a privileged enterprise, and faculty build their reputations on intellectual elitism. One gets the feeling from reading this book that the authors, white liberals who supported a curriculum of inclusion, now find themselves on the defense. They are challenged at conferences where they discuss their work. They are now perceived as "them," the oppressor, instead of the liberator.

In this book's essays, the authors go to great pains to describe why they sought to engage in minority issues and how successful they have been in the classroom despite their white, heterosexual privilege. In some of the chapters it is clear that these faculty strive to have students transform their consciousness and to relate to those they may consider to be "the other." Yet, when one reads the case studies of classroom instruction, what mainly emerges is the authors' attempts to socialize students into what academics are

trained to do so well--to understand power relationships, to analyze how knowledge is created, interpreted and transformed, to understand and challenge differing perspectives, to engage in critical thinking and to appreciate academic freedom. To monoculturalists here is evidence that nonwhite, nonheterosexual perspectives can indeed be employed to develop intellectual mind-power, and this is perhaps the book's most powerful contribution.

Yet the essential flaw of the book is that it is framed with an oppositional paradigm, and the model is defended with traditional intellectual elitism, albeit covered up, consciously or unconsciously, by token referrals to democracy and freedom. What is missing is the authors' passion to truly embrace the subject area, both rationally and compassionately to join and unify, indeed, to liberate the thinking of both teacher and student. The reality of minority lives does not exist outside of white lives. To discern identity politics only with the "objective mind" is self-serving and disingenuous. The true challenge of a curriculum based on minority perspectives is not who should teach it or what should be taught. It is to bring wholeness and coherence to teaching and learning, especially in an area where divisions abound.

Teaching the "great works" did not involve advocacy or building bridges among different groups in the larger society. But as the curriculum evolved and the scholarly work of minorities and gay and lesbian activists/scholars became acceptable in a curriculum of inclusion, faculty were called to do more than analyze knowledge for knowledge's sake. White scholars who develop a strong commitment to social justice can embrace ethnic studies to the point that difference becomes bridgeable.

But this can only be done when faculty take deliberate and conscious steps to relate to the real nature of the experiences of others not like them. In order to truly embrace a subject matter that is alien to them, faculty members, both white and nonwhite, gay and straight, must let go of their total preoccupation with their profession and their discipline and immerse themselves in the experiences of those they seek to understand. In essence, the ability of faculty members to teach what they are not depends on the extent to which their scholarly preoccupations take them beyond studying "the other'' into living and interacting with and truly coming to understand (both intellectually and humanistically) "the other." Without some form of ethnic consciousness neither minorities studying other minorities nor whites studying nonwhites, nor even straights studying gays can do justice to their disciplines, much less to their commitment to social change.

At one level, this book is notably worthy as a first step toward taking college teaching to a much higher level. But what a different and more highly relevant book this would have been if it had included a compilation of essays that addressed how racial divides can be crossed, how college and university faculty and their students can personally transcend their identities while retaining their personal peculiarities, how faculty themselves come to change when they seek to embrace the experience of others in more than a detached, scholarly fashion, and how a democratic classroom, employing multiple forms of scholarship, becomes a center of truth and enlightenment. What a different and more insightful book this would have been if it had employed a paradigm of connectivity, based not on a defense of guilt, or worse yet, the defense of the traditional scholarly enterprise, but on how connections among minority and majority cultures can be opened, built and sustained.

In an era where obsession with conflict seems to preclude the ability to focus on solutions, finding a common center is powerfully more important that defending the issues that divide us.

E-mail: atlxr@asuvm.inre.asu.edu

Table of Contents | Issues | Credits |
NTLF.com Home

© Copyright 1996-2000. Published by Oryx Press in conjunction with James Rhem & Associates, Inc. (ISSN 1057-2880) All rights reserved worldwide.