Teach me today: finding the censors in your head and in your classroom - We're Here: Gay and Lesbian Presence in Art and Art History

3. However, using a consent model does not mean letting students off the hook every time they feel uncomfortable with material. In fact, I want to challenge the notion, present among some students and faculty, that they have the right to be comfortable wherever they go. This sense usually comes from privilege, from people who might actually know what it is like to have comfort as a default position, and is attended by the presumption that it is the job of other people to provide that comfort. At Bates, for instance, it's primarily white people who say that talking about race makes them uncomfortable, with the implication that this is enough reason not to engage. And feelings of discomfort, or impending danger, are often based on dubious presumptions that should be a class topic.

A series of discussions in my 1994 course "Women and Modern Art" will illustrate this point. As always happens when course material hits a personal nerve, this course had always included moments of great tension, expressed either in open conflict or in those big silences when the air is thick with comments that no one will speak. But in 1994 things got so bad that after a class on lesbian culture of the 1920s during which no one would say much, and a class on Gauguin when no one would talk about skin color, I abandoned the syllabus for two days to discuss with students why they had stopped talking. Besides naming some usual sources of tension, many students cited a demonstration that had occurred during the previous year, when a group of students called the Multiethnic Empowerment Initiative (MEI) had taken over the admissions office and demanded that Bates more actively recruit students of color and deal with campus racism. As a result, I learned, many white students - the vast majority at Bates - were afraid to speak when race came up, out of fear of dire consequences. Students of color, meanwhile, had been met with hostility for airing their concerns in class. Many of them were sick of it, and of being tokenized - by being expected to be the educators and the talkers if race was the subject.

The white students' fear of dire consequences, also a concern of some faculty, had, I think, a racist component. It has other sources, too, including the very real problem that what you say in class at a small school follows you from class to the food line, and from one year to the next. Many white students expressed concern about being marked "for life" by an ignorant comment. But where did the fear of unbearable retribution come from? It wasn't as if the MEI demonstrators had burned down the building or even burned campus authorities in effigy. To the contrary, in a gesture of solidarity with the maintenance staff, they actually vacuumed the building before they left. The occasion hardly suggested impending violence; that sense came, I think, partly from prejudice. (Think here of the television coverage right before the O. J. verdict, which was filled with speculation about whether a guilty verdict would generate violent black protest without a matching concern about whether the opposite verdict would generate violent white retaliation.)