Education is Pain: Conversations with My Class

What can I say to the boy

My student

A young man

Who grew up privileged

Asian American and surrounded

By whiteness

white kids

white folks

This boy who tells me

He is thinking about racism

For the first time in his life

He tells me that he wishes

He never heard the term micro-aggressions

Because it has given name to something he never wanted to understand.

***

He is giving name now to something he does not want to feel. Racism, of course. But, “more painfully,” he tells me, his own “prejudice against people who are also Asian or Asian American.” Internalized racism, I tell him. He’s not the only one. It happens for many of us who are marginalized. We can work it through.

He asks me if it’s offensive to call someone “white.” And then several other students of color tell me they don’t want to offend anyone by making distinctions between white people and people of color — they don’t want to offend anyone who is “white.” It sounds “rude,” to refer to white people, they tell me. They have been so trained in politeness, so instructed not to offend. White fragility is real and they know it but they are not yet critiquing it. I realize, finally, that they are afraid of offending me, their white teacher. Even though dismantling racism is built in to my class. Or. . . at least I thought so. At least I hoped. And I wonder if I’ve done enough. I wonder what about my own privilege have I been conveying to them? What about my own privilege — or prejudice, even — has been on display? What have I been missing? We are all learning here.

But this student is the same one who last semester told me that Asian Americans should not talk about their own discrimination. In fact, no one should talk about their own oppression because they cannot be objective, he said.

Who taught him to think this way, I wonder out loud. Who has a vested interest in people not speaking out about their own oppression, I ask? Let others talk for you — others with a clearer perspective than your own, he tells me. That makes sense to him. But experience is important, I say. Experience is valid.

Yesterday he confessed that now he’s getting so deep in touch with his own experience and he wishes to go back. And although I hate clichés, when he told me ignorance is a bliss he longs for, I let it stand. I understood.

It’s painful, he said.

It’s painful, they tell me again and again in all kinds of ways.