MACS Lemon Meringue Pie Recipe
One part: MACS Graduate Students
One part: IAS Professors
One part: Community Business and Organization representatives
One part: White Privilege Readings
One part: Personal Experience
One part: Dialogue
Cooking Directions:
Bake in oven Winter Quarter 2010. Meet on campus for discussion twice a month, MACS students once a month, IAS Professor once a month. Shake ingredients vigorously and wait for filling to thicken. Whip the egg “whites” until firm! Prepare crust out of knowledge gained by repeated trials based on personal life experiences, community work, and collaboration with others. Finally, bring all ingredients together and as Stuart Hall encourages us, “wrestle with the Angels” (Hall, 1999).
As Cultural Studies students, in the process of researching, we have encountered many similarities in our work. The similarities stem from the emerging critical framework of Critical Race Theory (CRT) and white privilege theory that we have encountered. Many times during our academic journey, we have collided with the subject of racism. We have been continuously looking at it from different points of view, attempting to grasp or understand its structural impacts. During this process, we have found that these theoretical lines are significant in our understanding of core issues concerning 'race', racism, racialisation, gender, class, sexuality, age and disability in Cultural Studies. In exploring the topic we have found we have similar questions: What is the place of CRT in Cultural Studies? Should there be a space for white privilege theory? How should we theorize 'race', racism and racialisation? How does 'race' interrelate with other social inequalities? Is the classroom a site for antiracist education? These questions have propelled us into creating a space for conversation.
One thing that seems to be lacking in our education is a space for individuals to talk openly on the subject in order to understand the placement of privilege and access within their daily lives. The MACS Cookbook establishes a place for dialoguing about the institutions of power through the theoretical lens of white privilege. It is a place that fills a void of silence about race, creating a space where individuals can give voice to read, engage, elevate, and explicate narrative. We are calling for a MACS Lemon Meringue Pie.
Specifically, this pie will consist of a CRT and White Privilege Theory reading group in order to delve deeper into the lived realities of voice, privilege, race, access and experience. This will be our recipe for social and cultural change and movement within the institution of education and beyond. As three MACS students, community workers and collaborators, who identify culturally and socially as white women located within a space of privilege and power, we must first understand the placement of “whiteness” within our society. We feel that the location, space and demographic population of UW Bothell and the MACS program calls for our recipe for change.
In White Women Teaching White Women about White Privilege, Race Cognizance and Social Action: toward a pedagogical pragmatics, By Diane Gillespie, Leslie Ashbaugh, and JoAnn DeFiore, three UW Bothell veteran professors came together to approach the delicate and sometimes “sour” topic of whiteness and racism in a mostly white classroom setting. They encountered consistent resistance from white middle-class women, which made up 73% of the demographic in 2002 (pg. 238-239). This study also revealed that many of the students struggled with the conversation within academia and “initial recognition of privilege,” which then led to feelings of “anxiety, guilt, and embarrassment” (pg.239). We all believe it’s imperative to identify these psychological and emotional struggles (the tart and strong flavor of the lemon filling) in order to dismantle sophisticated walls of discrimination, within institutions, built to complicate navigation by the underprivileged and marginalized. Without this recipe, the true nature of collaboration is incomplete.
This collective will also confront the dated and misguided notion of colorblindness. Our hope is to shed light on difference in relation to personal daily experiences, providing a framework to better understand micro aggressions. Using Beverly Tatum’s book, Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?, we aim to address the need to investigate the oppressive nature of white privilege in order to better identify social injustice. Tatum presents to us the notion that being color-blind is a cop out and we need to embrace the process in order to truly have internal growth. Tatum calls for the preface of “allies of allies” and that everyone needs to at some point surround themselves with others they can relate to regardless of their ethnicity. Our collective work will aim to bring greater awareness of the difficulties and problems that people of color face on a daily basis and of the significance of our personal placement within it. By looking at the issues from the micro level the collective will be a place to offer guidance to any person who seeks to use his or her voice to fight the silence and to increase awareness of subconscious and conscious oppressive practices in the greater academic setting.
We would like to collaborate on this issue with other individuals that work in academia, social services, and business. We would formally invite them to participate. This organization is not to be viewed as being exclusive but rather inclusive in the aspect that anyone would be welcome to join. The intended audiences for this work would be on a more personal level due to the nature of the subject, though, we would look to build this audience by having an open invitation to all. Tentatively the collective will be a place where individuals can openly talk about racism without worrying about insulting others. Through the sharing of these personal experiences we hope to further build on open friendly intercourse and engage in creating alliances and support for more equitable points of view. The agenda is collaborative in nature and would require bimonthly meetings. This would be an opportunity to set a cornerstone in the conversations and discussions needed and it would be a place to continue the dialogue even after graduating from the MACS program.
Through Cultural Studies, we have been given points from which to view power and how power is played out within society. We see the groundwork that has been set by our professors. They have given us the insight on the skills needed and desired to look at our own personal power without forgetting the privileged voice we have been given. It is through the integration of power and voice that we envision our group to take hold and help increase awareness of racism within the social constructs of our daily lives. It is through this informed decision process that we realize that whiteness has privilege and assumptions attached to it.
When we go to the grocery store we are not followed, when we see our physician our ailments are not assumed, and when our children attend schools they are not tracked into lower classes. We can arrange to meet with anyone we like, we can move to anywhere we like with the option that neighbors will be pleasant or neutral. We can go shopping without being followed, and when we watch TV or read books we will find information about people that look, talk, and act like us. Posters, post-cards, picture books, greeting cards, dolls, toys, children's magazines activities, food, texts, academic materials, arts, music, language, academic courses and institutions reflect our own personal views and experiences. Financial reliability will not be in question when using checks, credit cards or cash. Teachers and employers often tolerate us or our children if we fit the norm. If we talk with our mouth full, if we are late, if we dress in second hand clothing, if our body odor is strong or if we swear, we feel that these issues will have little bearing on people of our race. We feel that we might not be required to speak for others and if we chose to be oblivious to other customs or criticize the government, this will not be a strike against our race. When talking to a teacher, police officer, a manager, an official or an IRS auditor there is a large possibility we will speak to someone of our race and we are less likely to be isolated, outnumbered, unheard or feared. When pursuing professional, social, political or imaginative options we rarely question whether we will be accepted. Even further, when in need of legal or medical help, it is probable that our race will not work against us.
Stuart Hall’s (1985) article on Gramsci "helps us understand one of the most common, least explained features of "racism": the subjection of the victims of racism to the mystifications of the very racist ideologies which imprison and define them” (pg 27). Racism and racist ideologies are a multi-layered onion. The components of racism are seen as power plus racial prejudice (Tatum, 1997). Hall (1985) opens up the various ways that these components can be seen and played out within societies. The political framework leads us to understand the underpinnings of racist ideologies. In Hall’s summarizing argument it reflects that “every fluctuation of politics and ideology can be presented and expounded as an immediate expression of the structure” (1985, pg 12).
If read farther down in the journal page it also expounds how in ‘social formations’ one is dealing with complex structured societies where the ideologies rarely coincide with each other (economics, politics, and ideological relationships) (Hall, 1985, pg 12). We can add education and health care to the complex ideologies. This adds another dimension of the subjection of racism on victims. Laurie Olsen (1997) reiterates that in these institutions, especially educational, youth encounter lasting images and determining factors that ground the frameworks.
In this country, race, language, and culture are categories with a long history of meaning and centuries of relegating people to differential experiences steeped in racist, linguistic, and nationalist relations of inequality. We are stratified according to the language spoken, the color of our skin, as well as the income of our family. People live these relationships and create these relationships, and they do so wherever they encounter each other. Because schools are one of the few public arenas in which established residents and immigrant newcomers engage in regular, sustained, interactions, the school site is an essential point in that negotiation (pg 15).
By helping individuals become aware of the racial underpinnings we can in turn understand and undue racial ideologies and find ways to challenge the racial status quo. Racial privilege is hard to see for those born in access to power and resources, yet it is visible for those who don’t have it. It is fundamental to the building of authentic relationships to think about race individually. By framing personal experiences and relationships and the way we each see the world we can begin to make headway in the struggle for racial justice. To do this we must confront white privilege and its implications and collectively find ways to bridge the chasm. In this view reflection does not mean elimination of difference, but, implies toward viewing sociohistorical contexts within which categories and ramifications are arranged, contexts that define and assert it. Sites of linguistic and visual representation, sites of institutional positions, and built environments are vested with power by virtue of the meanings associated with particular places and vested in power that circulate through articulations and practices.
Political language, speech acts, written communication, paintings, photographs, and electronic media, churches, courthouses, monuments, memorials, stadiums, shopping centers, highways, gated communities are some of the places where the concept emerges. Some of these sites are independent of individuals and some depend on such claims as democracy (majority rules), which place whiteness at center and protect its privileges, or depend on discourses associating whiteness with positive connotations like orderliness, sanitation, purity, and beautification. So, part of the collective work will be in assessing particular sites and locations, including from which white discourse emanates and gets propagated, including trying to grapple with questions of how racialized bodies convey meaning, how institutions propound race as a category through the practice of naming origins of persons, how these categories work within the centrality of whiteness, and how the structure of race is reproduced through our daily practices and through built environments. Let us move even a bit further to state that these new analytical and political frameworks can work both ways through the acknowledgement of the processes that maintain and subvert whiteness. One can also enlighten and help relieve personal racist views, which in turn would eventually spread to impact the broader racist institutions.
Works Cited
Hall. S. (1985) Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity.” Journal of Communication Inquiry 10(2): 5‐27
Olsen, L. (1997). Made in America: Immigrant Students in Our Public Schools. New York and London: The New Press
Tatum, B. Daniel. (1997). Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? New York: Basic Books.
Hall, S. (1999). Cultural studies and its Theoretical Legacies. In L. Grossberg, C. Nelson, & P.A. Treichler (Eds.), Cultural Studies (pp.277-294). New York: Routledge.
Gillespie, D. Ashbaugh, L., & De Fiore, J. (2002). White Women Teaching White Women about White Privilege, Race Cognizance and Social Action: Toward a pedagogical pragmatics. Race Ethnicity and Education, 5 (3), 238-253.
