Law like love

[rivkat]

popfantastic’s post was really helpful to me, as a distillation of other things I’ve seen around. I have been having many of the standard white woman’s reactions to the recent discussions and fights about race in sff. I’m becoming inured to the use of “fail,” but I still cringe a little at it. And this is connected to what I’ve been trying to think about, which is how I can try to be better at my day job on issues of race. Here, my responsibilities are those of a citizen. Out there, I’m a teacher, and I don’t know how to be an ally in that role, or even how to avoid being an active part of the problem. I’ve read Beverly Tatum, which I felt helped me some, but I’m still searching for more help with graduate-level teaching.

Substance-wise, property and IP are chock-full of situations in which race, class, and gender are outcome-determinative, sometimes blatantly and sometimes less visibly, and I try to talk about those, but where I really fall down is knowing how to teach students who don’t share my background. Historically I’ve focused on increasing class participation by students of color (I’m likely to overestimate how often they participate if I’m just guessing), and it’s uncomfortable to think about other work I need to be doing. Property (the class) generally begins with conquest: Johnson v. M’Intosh, in which the U.S. Supreme Court justified the dispossession of natives on a variety of grounds. This is a big truth of property (the concept), but I taught it badly this time, and probably in ways that silenced people differentially. What I heard was students reaching the cynical conclusion “it’s all about power,” and the cynicism feels like my failure because I want them to see possibilities for change, even if it is all about power and even if pessimism is often justified. I have no idea what I didn’t hear from students who didn’t speak. I really appreciate what I've learned here, and I only hope I can figure out how to learn more in class.

Comments

[rivkat.livejournal.com]

Yes; so a big chunk of my cringing was resistance: I didn't want to be failing. And also I need to think about "fail" differently when I'm in my teacher role: it's a bad idea for me to think about failure intransitively when I teach. Whereas here, where the power relations are very different, it can be useful to talk about failure intransitively.

[franzeska]

Given that "POC don't owe it to you to be your teacher!" is one of the major points that comes up in discussions of racism, it seems rather apt to me to use 'fail' intransitively. It seems appropriate specifically because it's a bad idea to think of it that way when you are legitimately in the teaching role. That's my take on it anyway.

[rivkat.livejournal.com]

Right, though one could (as Mely does above) use it transitively: white sff fandom is failing fans of color. But that doesn't quite seem to capture all of what's going on, especially since another version is that white sff fandom is failing itself, in terms of how human beings ought to behave. This isn't a teaching moment, and yet I want to think more about how to change my teaching in light of what I've seen.