Ha! I Found You!

Many years ago I attended a colloquium on multiculturalism in the classroom. It was run by an expert from Midwestern State University, an African American professor of education who was probably in his mid-fifties. At one point the professor asked a question about how best to deploy multicultural perspectives and offered a menu of four possible responses. Then he went over each response, one by one, and asked us to raise our hand when he mentioned the one that sounded best to us. I didn't listen carefully enough, didn't realize the menu was loaded, and raised my hand at one of the "wrong" responses. In fact, it happened to be the worst of the wrong responses.

The professor pounced. He asked me what I taught. History, I said, and when he asked what sort of history, I said military history. He began to explain to me, in pretty heavy-handed fashion, about the deficiencies of the response I'd chosen. It was clear to me that it never entered his head that I might have chosen the response from anything less than a deliberate, committed, reactionary position. His tone of voice became mocking. He addressed me as "General" several times. All in all, he did the best he could to make me feel like a fool. And he really seemed to enjoy doing it.

Other than the way he treated me, I thought his presentation was useful, and when I ran into him afterward I made a point of thanking him. I don't know that I was being gracious so much as I wanted to indicate that he had been wrong about me and I was really on his side. He could barely bring himself to grunt at me in response. I had the distinct impression he didn't want me on his side. I had the impression that although he had spent his life struggling against the bigots of the world, he rarely had the chance to unload on one. He had enjoyed unloading on me, and that was the value I had to him: someone to unload upon.

I could easily multiply examples of this. And since we tend to generalize most freely from our negative experiences, I could easily forget the numerous times I have spoken to proponents of multiculturalism who were as gracious as this professor of education proved malignant.

Still, a great deal of writing that deals with colonialism, sexism, racism, and the like--particularly some of the earliest and most seminal work in the field--is politically very charged. It has an adversary, the white male, and usually it assumes that all white males are alike. If it leaves me as a white male feeling insulted and invisible, both at the same time, I might consider that it is often written by people who have felt insulted and invisible their whole lives. I can suck it up for the time it takes to read a book or an article.