This week’s readings brought up so many emotions that seemed to conflict with each other…I found myself nodding my head in agreement and then sitting in discomfort with a phrase I found unsettling. I think underlying all these readings is a push to be more reflective and introspective and question our own gaze, our own motives, our own desires….which is usually uncomfortable, as Gene reminds us so beautifully in his piece. What does it mean to be reflective? How do we examine our own ideas in a way that goes beyond simply stating it in three sentences at the start of a paper? How do we use that examination to shift our later behavior?
In reading Gene’s piece, I once again thought about what it means to be a scholar of color working with (mostly) kids of color. While Gene uses his artistic talents and ways of seeing / understanding the world to examine his role as a White man (though complicated by being part of a terrorized group), how am I doing this work as a woman of color? Especially as a woman of color who occupies this in-between space of being ethnically ambiguous to most people, as not part of the “dominant” communities of color in the U.S., as not being marked as being Arab or African or Muslim at first glance? I am intrigued by Gene’s collages and the intuitive choosing of images; this reminded me of our conversation when Noor shared her work. What does it mean to choose quickly and from “our gut” rather than create a list of images that become sanctioned or governed by something that is probably external to us? How does this help us dig deeper into what we are seeing and what we are producing as researchers? I am excited to try these techniques for myself…though also a bit nervous, I admit. But that is the point, right?
In reading Cole, I kept thinking about what my own consumption of painful images does…why do I do it? In fact, I really try to avoid it as much as possible – watching videos of people being hurt or killed or abused – because it feels not only painful but so utterly disrespectful. Who am I to get to watch someone’s pain over and over again? I also wonder what those images accomplish? Do we, as individuals and as a society, feel more compelled to take action when we see those images? Are we bearing witness (and then what do we do with that) or just consuming someone’s experience? Is it a way to feel better about our own lives? I have so many questions here…I would feel “better” if I knew those painful images caused people to make some sort of change…
In reading the essays by hooks, I was first moved by the idea of “…not just critiquing the status quo. It is also about transforming the image, creating alternatives…” This always feels (at least to me) to be a missing part of the “hammer of critique” that lives so intensely in academia. We focus so much on critiquing and deconstructing that we can forget that the same hammer can be used to build something different. I won’t say brand new because our tools, our ideas of what is possible, our dreams and schemes are still informed and shaped by who we are now and the contexts in which we live. I am often disheartened when I watch academics critique the oppressive structures of the academy and then a few years later not only embody it but use it to measure the worth of others….it makes me fearful of my own future.
I was interested in her quotations by Stuart Hall on cultural identity as a process of becoming. This has always fascinated me, the way we are never still…that our identity is less a noun and more a verb that is constantly shaped and reshaped. Within this, of course, live the past and present, but there is always room for shifting, for redefining (for ourselves), for more discovery. This feels a lot more hopeful to me…even when larger structures feel insurmountable, there lives this glimmer of seeing ourselves for ourselves as hooks points out…the gaze in the mirror (though shaped by everything outside us also) vs. the male gaze, the White gaze, the gaze of power in general…
My discomfort grew when I kept thinking of the role of Black women amongst both Black men and White women. Though none of this is new, it still settles horribly in my body. The idea of something to be consumed – as a sexual being, as labor, as the sidekick who gives great advice (the modern chick flick version)…I know this idea lives with other women of color as well but it does not feel as intense. In thinking about how Arab women are portrayed in Western media, it is always as a subject – to be abused by Arab men, to be rescued by White women. Rarely do they have the agency to define their own image. However, as Arabs we have a very large media in our “home countries” – movies and endless television shows that show the complexity of Arab women…Arab women frustrated with Western depictions can take comfort in the access to other options, even when they are still problematic.
My other sense of discomfort came with what I felt was a subtle piece in the essays by hooks. There felt to me a sense of the enlightened academic talking about how others need to “be awakened” and learn to look differently. I am thinking specifically in how she felt such horror watching Boyz in the Hood and seeing the pleasure other Black viewers got from the movie. I felt torn reading this part because my feelings align with hers – I feel sorrow when I see girls of color not question their depictions as sexual beings to be consumed in different music videos, album covers, party fliers and so on and so on. But I also wonder whether I am engaged in some sort of class colonization that says, “I know more than you do. You are not as enlightened and I will help you learn what you need to know so you can believe as I do.” That may sound dramatic but do we not engage in some kind of “savior” like behavior when we think thoughts like I have or write as hooks does, ” Unless we transform images of blackness, of black people,
our ways of looking and our ways of being seen, we cannot make radical interventions that will fundamentally alter our situation.” I am really struggling with these thoughts so please push back!
This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.
Hi Dahlia,
I think you clearly articulated the troubling aspect about possible misapplications of the “hammer of critique,” and the troubling practice by the “enlightened academic” of critiquing perceived failings of others.” Your point is well stated, I think. The essay does at certain points have the whiff of the academic possessing some sort of “privilege,” or as you state it, a stance that presumes that “I know more than you do…”. I think your reflection is quite sensitive, and modest, in wondering if you yourself do this while at the same time raising this concern about what you at times observe in others. I like to think I am just as guilty, and wish others might think they are too. I think sometimes that we are all guilty of practicing both the good and the bad that we as academics critique in “society” or in others, and your point in your reflection, if I understand it correctly, reaffirms very similar thoughts I’ve had for some time about my ability or right to locate the culprit(s) for the problems I see as existing somewhere else, beyond me. Maybe the culprit is me, right? Thanks so much.
Hi Luis! Yes…this is such a concern for me as I wonder about how social justice education can get taken up. I was at one session at a conference and I couldn’t shake the feeling in my body of how similar it sounded to missionary work. Nobody actually said the word “saving” but it was right there underlying the whole session. “We” had the answers. “Others” were not “woke.” There seemed to be a complete lack of reflection of our own goals and desires and motivations to teach in a certain way…and an assumption that kids were just waiting for us to show them the “right” way to learn and to be in the world…as if kids don’t have their own goals and sense of agency.
I have so much work of my own to do – in reflecting, in thinking about my own choices and how I might be oppressive to others – before I can start telling others how to act. Thank you for thinking with me!