Dealing With Guilt and Resentment
This lesson is designed to help students of European descent move beyond the feelings of guilt and resentment that they sometimes feel during discussions of racism, thereby clearing the way for open discussion and learning on this topic.
Jack C. Straton, Ph.D.
University Studies
Portland State University
Portland, OR, 97207-0751
Background:
Many educators, particularly of European descent, would like to help their students talk about racism but don’t yet have sufficient experience to feel that they can place our ideals into action. Whether our goal is formal classroom instruction or giving our friends feedback, many of us often feel blocked in our ability to articulate what we know in our hearts. We often are frozen into inaction for fear that we won’t know how to respond if someone says something racist in a discussion we are leading, or how to deal with anger that comes up in response to racist sentiments. We often feel ourselves, and see our white friends and students, getting hooked on guilt as a response to information about racism and therefore refusing to learn more about it. We don’t often see how all of us have been damaged in different ways by our racist culture.
This lesson plan is based on an approach that Lauren N. Nile and I developed over a number of years that seems to help the European-American participants in our workshops and classrooms productively engage in discussions of race. It seeks to engage these students directly with their feelings of guilt, proposes productive alternatives to guilt, gives an introduction to what Lauren calls "The Daily Indignities," gives an overview of white privilege (McIntosh, 1988; McIntosh, 1989), and gives examples of micro-revolution that students can engage in as a more helpful response than guilt. Using this approach prior to any other readings or discussion on race seems to make subsequent discussions much more productive.
Preparation:
Although no preparatory readings are strictly necessary to use this lesson, at some point in a teaching module on race, some introduction to racial identity development is often productive. Tatum (1992) is a good overview for students of changes they can expect to see in their own lives, as well as a good introduction to guilt as a typical white response to discussions of race. It is available online at http://www.stockton.edu/~teaching/bildner/TalkingAboutRace.pdf, with the author's last name misspelled as “Datum.”
Implementation:
The article Lauren and I wrote (Nile and Straton, 2003) can be used as a verbatim transcript for a class session of 75-90 minutes on this topic. It may be downloaded at http://rise.pdx.edu/GuiltMultEdNileStraton2.pdf. The only modification I would suggest from my subsequent experience of using this lesson is to acknowledge that some white students don't feel any guilt: it is resentment that makes them unresponsive to real discussions of race. I now use the phrase "guilt or resentment" a time or two in the introductory remarks to help these students try to imagine how they can replace resentment with micro-revolution.
Follow-up:
Once this session on guilt has happened, the landscape for subsequent explorations of race is vast. In particular, I highly recommend showing students the documentary video The Color of Fear, in which nine men of various ethnicities talk about their own experiences of race relations. It is incredibly useful not only because its unscripted reality and honesty is so engaging, but also because the statements by participants are some of the clearest articulations of the issues available on film or in print. And its participants free the students of color in your classroom from having to bear the burden of educating white students about the realities of racism.
The day after showing The Color of Fear, I utilize the Oakland Men's Project's “Stand-up Exercise for Whites” (Kivel, 1992), which helps students to recognize the extent to which ideas about race permeate their early learning. I have expanded the set of questions and also have modified the original wording so that those students whose roots are tied to continents other than Europe, and those who identify as multiracial, feel more free to actively participate rather than just witness the reactions of those in the dominant culture to new self-knowledge. This is a moving 25-minute meditation.
Additional Materials and Resources:
I often use the video Race - The Power Of An Illusion, Episode 1: The Difference Between Us to graphically show that political-social categories like White and Black have no basis in biology.
Finally, however much students benefit from deciding that interpersonal mistreatment must stop, I seek to help them understand that challenging institutional racism must be their ultimate goal. An excellent introduction to this concept is provided by Race - The Power Of An Illusion, Episode 3: The House We Live In.
Adaptability:
One can productively translated the approach presented herein on racism into discussions of sexism or the other oppressions.
Citations:
McIntosh, Peggy. “White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondence Through Work in Women's Studies.” Wellesley, MA: Wellesley College, Center for Research on Women. Order No. 189. 1988.
McIntosh, Peggy. "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack." Peace and Freedom, pp. 10-12 (July/Aug, 1989).
Tatum, Beverly Daniel. “Talking about Race, Learnng about Racism: The Application of Racial Identity Development Theory in the Classroom.” Harvard Educational Review 62(1), 1-24.), 1992.
Nile, Lauren N. and Jack Straton. “Beyond guilt: How to deal with societal racism.” Multicultural Education 10(4), 2-6, 2003.
Kivel, Paul. “MEN'S WORK: How to Stop the Violence That Tears Our Lives Apart.” Ballantine Books, New York, 1992. Pp. 207-210.
Film/Video
The Color of Fear. Lee Mun Wah, Director. Stir Fry Productions, 1904 Virginia Street, Berkeley, CA 94709, 510-548-9695, 1994, 90 Minutes. [Note: Available on DVD, with additional lesson materials, in the Portland State Center for Academic Excellence.]
Race - The Power of an Illusion. Episode 1: The Difference Between Us. California Newsreel, 2003, 56 minutes. Transcript available at http://www.newsreel.org/transcripts/race1.htm.
Race - The Power of an Illusion. Episode 3: The House We Live In. California Newsreel, 2003, 56 minutes. Transcript available at http://www.newsreel.org/transcripts/race3.htm.