On the eve of Donald Trump’s election, Michelle Obama gave a speech in New Hampshire. “It hurts,” she said. “It's like that sick, sinking feeling you get when you're walking down the street minding your own business and some guy yells out vulgar words about your body.” This was about what it meant to hear Donald Trump talk about sexually assaulting women. “I feel it so personally,” she said.
She then placed her personal reflections in a broader political context. She imagined what it would mean to let Trump become president: “We’re telling all our kids that bigotry and bullying are perfectly acceptable in the leader of their country. Is that what we want for our children?”
She concluded with a call to action: “You ready to roll up your sleeves? Get to work knocking on doors? All right, let's get to work!”
It has been called one of the best speeches of the 2016 presidential election. What makes Michelle Obama’s words so powerful is that she starts with the personal, makes it political, and ends with a purposeful inspiration to action.
As an educator, I find that good teaching moves in this way, too: first come individual lives and stories, then a broader social and moral context, and then the realization that there’s important work to be done. Good books can also be like this. Michael Eric Dyson’s Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon To White America, published in the wake of Trump’s election, is one such book.
“Pedagogy of the Problematic”
Dyson’s Sermon to White America is a personal and political exploration, and it ends with a call to action. The book can touch the reader personally because it is told personally. He addresses himself to “you.” As a white person, I belong to that “you.”
Early in the book, Dyson tells me a story about his son, Michael. The boy is in the back seat of their car. The car is stopped by the police, white cops. The father is shoved and shaken. His son is crying and fearful. The book is punctuated by stories like this - about children, about Dyson’s own children, his grandchildren, and his own childhood.
“Nigger.” There are multiple stories recounting the first time a black child hears the word from white lips. Dyson’s daughter, Maisha, is six when she first hears it. “Move, niggers!” a group of white girls yells at Maisha and her friends at a skating party in a Chicago suburb.
There are also stories about Dyson’s students at Georgetown University, including white students just awakening to the dark and lethal power of whiteness. Dyson explores the many forms this power takes. In some forms, it is brutal and explicit, straight as taught rope or the path of a bullet. In other forms, the power is quiet and unconfessed, as insidious as the innocence that wonders: how could our country have elected a man like Trump?
“A pedagogy of the problematic” is how Dyson characterizes his teaching, which works to enable his white students to “wrestle with the burdens and sorrows that honest talk of whiteness brings.” Dyson is a teacher who wants his students – black, brown and white – to “confront the brutal legacy of race with the kid gloves off, and yet respect each other’s humanity.”
How to talk about race in an honest way and yet respect each other’s humanity? Many teachers I know seek answers to this question. But there are no lesson plans in this book, no norms or protocols. Teachers will not find that level of detail. However, the book itself models an essential ingredient of such a pedagogy: getting personal. When curriculum gets personal, as Dyson notes, the abstract becomes concrete:
“The beauty of history, its ornate, or ugly, truths, are distant until we are brought face-to-face with their consequences. History takes shape in the person before me. When it is made personal, history becomes urgent. The neat irresolution of history becomes mess, yearning for an answer now.”
Dyson’s Sermon to White America is a journey – like all powerful learning experiences – that honors individual stories. Teachers seeking to bring potent political topics into their classrooms should take note. For the personal story is a powerful way to establish facts as your point of departure.
There is no “alternative fact” to the story of the child called “nigger.” The simple accounts of growing up in a racist land are realities one cannot question. These – and the other stories Dyson tells about bodies degraded and spirits strangled – establish the truth about the damage white power does. Grounded in these truths, Dyson helps his white readers explore common white questions and assumptions: Why do you have to say “black lives matter” – don’t all lives matter? You use the “N-word” all the time – why can’t white folks say it? Yes, police brutality is a problem – but what about “black-on-black” crime? What do you mean “reparations” – my family never owned any slaves – what does this have to do with me?
“Impatience for Injustice”
Dyson’s book progresses from an opening “Call to Worship” to a concluding call to action. He asks his white readers to become “R.E.S.P.O.N.S.I.V.E.” The R stands for reparations. The first E stands for Educate. The last E stands for empathy, the only water that can truly nurture intolerance for injustice - what Dyson calls “a democratic impatience for injustice,” an impatience for our country’s “cruel disregard for black life.” White Americans will only develop this impatience if we can, as Dyson tells us, cultivate empathy through sharing in the experience of black Americans.
Teachers have a special place in this work – for the work of sharing experience involves reading, listening, visiting, remembering, and self-reflecting. It involves repairing, befriending, marching, speaking up and speaking out. The time is now for this work, as it has been the time for hundreds of years.
“Stay Woke”
In the timeline of Presidential elections, Dyson picks up where Michelle Obama left off. She implored we get to work in the final days before election night. He demands we get to work in the gray hours of the next morning. “Oh God,” he sighs, “the hour is dark.” But time spent with this book is time spent with a good teacher, and, as a good teacher will, he indulges neither ignorance nor hopelessness: “The suffering is great. But we will not give up.”
For white citizens, part of not giving up is to keep voices like Dyson’s close. It is to do as the young black woman bade me, as she left the Vermont auditorium after a viewing of I Am Not Your Negro, Raul Peck’s recent film about James Baldwin. To me and others she whispered as she left, “Stay woke.”