“My Feelings Are Not About You”: Personal Experience as a Move of Whiteness

Abstract

The concepts of personal experience and speaking from experience have figured prominently in a number of educational practices oriented toward social justice (Chor, Fleck, Fan, Joseph, & Lyter, 2003). Anti-racism work within teacher education, for example, has traditionally proposed guidelines for class discussions and dialogue. These guidelines, intended to foster a climate in which a range of perspectives can be affirmed, often consist of confidentiality, the practicing of critical self-reflection, and a consideration of multiple perspectives. One guideline addresses the practice of personalized knowledge, in which students speak for themselves and from their own experience. This guideline is meant to prevent students from universalizing their perspectives (for example, “Everybody knows that…”), and to encourage awareness of positionality and the racialized locations from which we each speak. History has taught us, however, that any resistive practice can come to serve the very interests it was developed to oppose. For example, affirmative action discourse is now being used to support white males; men who hold jobs previously held by women are characterized as having “broken a glass ceiling” (The Dailey, 2005). This paper examines one situation in which a resistive practice has come to serve the interests it was designed to oppose: In interracial discussions of racism, the practice of speaking from experience was used by whites (and primarily white women) to inoculate their claims against interrogation or critique. We refer to this strategy as the discourse of personal experience (as performed by whites) and have not seen this discourse discussed in the whiteness literature within the field of education. In this paper we will explore how this discourse of personal experience, as performed by white participants in our study, functioned in an interracial dialogue about race with white student teachers and students of color. Our goals are twofold: to explicate how the discourse of personal experience functioned to hold white racism and privilege in place, and to unsettle the discursive authority that this discourse offers. After briefly reviewing the theoretical literature, we analyze the results of one study of interracial dialogue, using a post-structural and discourse-oriented methodology.