Unmasking Whiteness

This lesson introduces students to the notion of race as white, as opposed as a constructed trait only belonging to people of color. The lesson focuses on colonized people in the South Pacific Islands, specifically Native Hawaiians. Students hear one individual’s story of growing up in two worlds with two stories–native/colonized and white. Through her words as an adult, the students mayl begin to understand how the telling of a story has all to do with who is telling it.

Jamie P. Ross, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
University Studies
Portland State University
Portland, Oregon 97201

Background     
Oregon’s dialogue about race is different than those about other diversities, i.e. sexual orientation. Oregon’s long political history of anti-gay initiatives has encouraged much dialogue about sexual orientation that is at timess insightful, at times hurtful, most often difficult, and not always productive. Yet, these kinds of conversations have not been heard at all with regards to race. Talking about race can be difficult. Generally we struggle with at least two frameworks of thought in order to foster fairness and equality. We want to appeal to a universalistic notion of what it means to be a person, worthy of respect; at the same time, we want to appeal to those “differences that matter.” We also struggle with the notion of race as a social construction as opposed to race as a biological category. Finally, many of us are just beginning to understand what it means to be white as a race. This combination of motivations and issues makes it all the more important to foster and to sustain conversations that allow for “teaching moments” about race.

My lesson plans, hopefully, allow for insights and mistakes to occur in the classroom where conversations are based on taking in and processing new information. As a philosopher, I focus on what kinds of questions are asked about race, what assumptions those questions entail, and the variety of ways that answers can be articulated. A teacher in any discipline can be skilled in this type of strategy. These early lesson plans lead up to a culminating lesson about the documentary, The Color of Fear.

Two learning objectives for this initial lesson can be stated as follows.

• To analysis what it means to know and not know something
• To understanding how we create “masks” (assumptions) of knowledge - of ourselves and others

                       
Implementation
The students are assigned to watch the film, “Queen Liliukalani.” This is a one-and-a-half hour film on the history of the annexation of Hawaii told through the voice of the last queen of the islands. It is a fictionalized version with actual footage and written excerpts by her and others of her life and the times. The students should be provided with a set of questions (see below) that address several issues concerning:

• How stories about people are constructed,
• How truth depends on what stories are told, and
• How stories are a mixture of truth and myth both of which depend on who is doing the talking.

In class, after viewing the film, a foundation for discussing these issues and specific questions is set by drawing predominantly from a complimentary reading (Haunani-Kay Trask, “From a Native Daughter”), a first-hand, contemporary account of growing up in a colonized land known as the State of Hawaii.

I use a direct one-on-one pedagogy to stay focused on each student in order to elicit the students’ initial impressions while helping each one to articulate simple and clear thoughts about complex issues. Viewing the film, discussing it, and analyzing the Trask article takes two to three hours. Discussion of the Trask article should move from an initial analysis of why the author wrote this article to the crux of the issue of whiteness as a race, by focusing on several questions that are posed by Westerners and reinterpreted by Trask in the middle of this article. This will require the students to:

• See different interpretations of the same question,
• Analyze what assumptions are being made by the very asking of those questions and,
• Anticipate what the implications are of asking those kinds of questions.

Those insights are challenging for the students and instructors should allot a half hour to an entire hour to help the students through this section. The instructor should explain why Trask thinks it is necessary to reinterpret the questions of the Westerners and how she actually does the interpretation. For example, Trask says, “When historians wrote that the king owned the land and the common people were bound to it, they were saying that ownership was the only way human beings in their world could relate to the land, and in that relationship, some one person had to control both the land and the interaction between humans.” What she is doing is answering the questions: What kind of person would make that kind of statement? What are the ethical values of someone who focuses on ownership? What are the values of someone who focuses on hierarchical control of their people?

The instructors can ask the students what kinds of question they have been asked regarding their own identities, and have them reinterpret the meanings, intentions, and implications of those questions. For example, some students of color may report having been asked, “What country are you from?” or “What is your citizenship?” When people of color are American citizens—born outside of the United States but raised here, or born and raised here—the meaning of this question might be that the person who asked expects only white people to have been born and/or raised in the United States. The intention of the question may imply that only people of color come from someplace else and the implication of the question may be that these individuals only partially belong here.

Follow-up
The instructor might create an assignment that requires the students to write a letter from Trask to someone in the film with a responding letter. The students can try to stay true to the person’s character and then analyze how much of the dialogue is really their own voice and not the voice of the character.

Materials/Resources
Preparation in advance by the facilitator could include some background reading about American concepts of private property, the Calvinistic work ethic, and the Christian notion of salvation. Discussion questions about the film include the following.

• How does what is valued create special distinctions about what is important to different people?
• How does what is valued at different times determine how history is told?
• How can we distinguish between truth and myth in the construction of an identity of a people?
• How does that identity sometime mask who someone is or a group of people are?
• How is personal identity tied to different ways of having power over land for the Westerner? For the Hawaiian”
• How is personal identity tied to different ways of having power over ideas?
• What kind of masks do the previous two questions construct?

Websites on the annexation of Hawaii include http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/hawaii/ from “PBS-The American Experience”.

Adaptability
The instructor should impress upon the students that this film and article show but one example of race conflict and that the focus of their understanding should be on how issues of difference have been handled historically and how similar strategies are currently in use, not on this example as unique. At the college level, even with freshman, the effort should be on using an example as a jumping board to abstract to patterns of behavior that are similar in a variety of situations.

The lesson’s success does not depend on the disciplinary expertise of the instructor, the size and configuration of the physical space, or the number of students in the class. Its success may vary given the students’ diversity or homogeneity. If the class composition is not diverse, students may be able to think hypothetically to explain why Trask’s reinterpretation of questions might be necessary, expedient, or helpful.

The lesson is adaptable to large lecture classes, although individual student input may be compromised. In a large lecture class, as in any class, instructors will have to guard against using people of color as token representatives and stress to the students that not all people of color share the same experience. Instructors will also have to offer white students an explanation of how race is always present, not just when a person of color is present, and be sure to explain that fair-minded people can make mistakes about race.

In a science lecture class, the teacher can discuss the distinction between race as a biological category and race as a social construction, drawing on work in their respective fields.

Author’s Reflections
Instructors who use this lesson have to be ready and willing to make mistakes, to admit them when they are made, and to learn from their students.
           
Citations/Bibliography

Trask, Haunani-Kay. “From a Native Daughter.”  Rereading America. Colombo, Cullen & Lisle, eds. Boston: Bedford of St. Martins Press,1995.

“Queen Liliukalani.” From PBS-The American Experience. 1997/1998.Available at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/hawaii/. Visited 9-1-08.