A review of "Taking it Personally"

Multicultural Education, Summer 2002 by Gilliland, Kay

BOOKS

I just finished reading Taking It Personally by Sekani Moyenda, an African American teacher, and Ann Berlak, a white professor of sociology. For those of us who are white teachers, Taking It Personally provides a long, hard look at our own racism, our own defensiveness, our own blindness to the realities of life in a racist society. This review is my sharing with you of my own reactions to reading the book. Moyenda and Berlak provided me with one more opportunity to examine my own beliefs, root out a little more of the racism, and rededicate myself (to the best of my current ability and understanding) to antiracist living.

Moyenda was invited by Berlak to address preservice teachers taking Berlak's course on Cultural and Linguistic Diversity. The students had just seen a powerful film on racism entitled The Color of Fear. They appeared to have understood and empathized with the film. Moyenda told her audience some of the incidents of racism that had affected her. The students reacted against what she told them. They tried to defend themselves, saying that race was not the important factor. They compared oppressions, saying they, too, had experienced difficult conditions. They said Moyenda had a chip on her shoulder. They were unable to credit a Black woman with her own reality.

Moyenda devised a role-play activity (based on a Black inner-city classroom situation) that caused these preservice teachers to question their ability to work in a classroom that included Black children. Some of the future teachers were unable to handle this idea. As a result of the encounter one White student ended up shouting, others shed tears, and one walked out of the class.

It became clear that many of the White members of the class believed that the reason for differences in achievement between the poor Black and Asian children Moyenda taught and White middle class students resided entirely in the children and their parents, not in the society and its major socializing institution, the schools. Many of them took for granted the prevailing explanations for racially differentiated school success: class and race differences in achievement were the result of parents' limitations, their irresponsibility, their low levels of education, their apathy toward their children's schooling.

These preservice teacher education students believed all they needed to do to teach these children was to care for them. They did not recognize the essential ingredients of "kinship, connectedness, and solidarity" (p. 105) essential to the teaching of African American children and other children of color in the United States. They could not envision themselves joining the fight against the unjust social arrangements of the broader society that powerfully influence these children's lives' They had never seen this as a part of the obligation of teaching Black children and they were not about to accept it now.

Moyenda spoke forcefully from the depth of her anger and the students reacted to her delivery as a way of avoiding her meaning. The role play was set up so the teacher would fail, and then the students could learn from the failure. After Moyenda interrupted the role play, the white male playing the teacher engaged in a heated argument with Moyenda about how the situation should have been handled and many of the students were unwilling to give credence to Moyenda's views. At every turn, the students appeared to defend themselves, make excuses, think of ways in which race was not a factor, smooth over the incidents, so they would not have to face the awful reality of institutionalized racism and their own participation in that system.

Neither Berlak nor Moyenda had anticipated the eruption of feeling the presentation elicited. They analyzed carefully the responses of these preservice teachers, both during the visit and from the journal entries that followed. They found evidence that directly confronting racism upset the students' worldview. If they accepted the fact of institutionalized racism, they could no longer accept their own privileged position as earned. If they recognized that the treatment of Black people is severely unjust, what did that say about their own status? If Moyenda, a Black woman, was a skilled professional teacher, what did that mean about their own preparation for the profession they were entering? Further, if she questioned their ability to work with Black children, where did that leave them? Rather than recognize all these threats to their self-esteem, they attacked Moyenda personally, discounting her method of delivery and her ideas.

A certain understanding began to dawn on students as the weeks went by and Berlak sensed "powerful feelings that were so deeply buried that they were never spoken of. These were feelings of profound loss, grief, sorrow, and despair.... One source of the sorrow flowed, I think, from the immense distrust and disconnectedness the encounter brought to the surface between white people and people of color, and between Latinas and Asian, Filipina, and African Americans, as well" (p. 125).