Writing & Teaching Race--With Vulnerability and Generosity
Bee feeding on a Helenium bloom in my garden; white stevia blooms in the back distance.
Three weeks ago I started teaching a new class, Writing the Short Story. My class is a mix of American and International students from various countries. I have a French student, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean students, and also a student from the Netherlands. The age range is from late teens to late fifties, with students representing all decades between.
In some way, I have been teaching for the past eighteen years. My first teaching position was as a GED Instructor at an adult charter school when I was twenty. There I fell in love with teaching adults and seeing people eager and motivated to learn. Some years after that position I entered the AmeriCorps VISTA program and spent my year working in two different projects. First, I worked at a middle school teaching/facilitating an after school arts project, but also working to get the school funding for a school garden. With my second project I worked with Riverside County and helped create a free professional clothing bank for job searchers. A large part of my job included creating and giving workshops on job searching. I led workshops on dressing for success, how to interview, and basic job searching tips. My VISTA position turned into a permanent position and I stayed there until one month before our first child was born. As a mother, I’ve homeschooled my children since birth. They are now fifth graders, and we are still thriving as homeschoolers.
Throughout all these experiences of teaching I’ve grown to believe two things are essential: vulnerability and generosity. As a teacher and leader you must be willing to be open and giving of yourself.
I define or understand vulnerability as a willingness to stand without walls, airs, or barriers between my authentic self and my students. This doesn’t mean I have no boundaries, but what it does mean is that I do not allow boundaries to get in the way of my students’ and my own growth. Simply put, it means I am willing to be human.
Generosity builds on vulnerability in some ways. It requires a level of openness, but it takes it a step further and asks that I teach with abundance. We should give ourselves over to the process, the moment, the goal and follow through with what our students and the process needs.
Last night I was put to task.
Three weeks into a ten-week class my students are still shy. Either that or they have started to relax and take a passive role in the classroom. A few brave students are willing to raise their hands and speak up, but the majority was still hanging back. I teach with energy and movement, so I need their energy as much as any performer on stage would. After seeing the majority choose not to speak up, I switched it up on them.
I made them write out their responses (which was to describe someone important in your life), not telling them that they would be swapping it with the person next to them and that person would have to introduce and describe their important person to us.
“Oh…wait…what,” was their shocked responses once they were told to switch. “I didn’t write…I didn’t know someone else would read this…” came next.
Exactly. Often times we write for ourselves and filter out information the reader does not know, but we know. We fill in the blanks and don’t go deeper into our work of taking our reader there with images and descriptions.
What they soon realized was that they didn’t write enough. They didn’t describe things well enough. They didn’t fully sketch their important person so that their partner could know this person well enough to describe them to us. How did they know this, because they had to explain. They had to add more. Their partners had questions.
Exactly the point of the day’s lesson.
Once everyone was done sharing and describing, the partners introduced each other and we listened as a class. What images did you see? What do you remember? For each important person I wrote those things on the board, the recovering artist in me often times drawing little white board pictures.
Everyone got a chance to shine, to speak, to have their person seen, to see what descriptions were strong and which ones were weaker, and to learn from their peers.
But that was not where the magic happened. No, there was more.
As we began to discuss the necessity of seeing people as they are we naturally begun discussing race. We begin to explore how can we see people from other races, cultures and describe them not as clichés, but as unique people. What about people from our own races with terms that are cultural norms for us but not for others—how do we take those outside of our race and culture and bring them inside?
One Japanese student described her person as having “eyes that look like half moons when she smiles.” The Dutch student didn’t understand this. At some point I spoke of Black hair and how Black women refer to the hair at the nape of their neck as a “kitchen.” No one in the class, except for the French student whose Grandmother (which you would never know by looking at him) was half Black, knew this term.
What unfolded was a discussion about Black hair and all of the students, except for the French guy who knew a lot about Black women’s hair, were interested and had questions about my locs, the process of straightening Black hair, etc. That conversation lead to deeper conversations about race and how we must really look and not assume we can describe what a person of “x, y, z” looks like. Everyone knew someone of their race who didn’t fit the “stereotype."
I didn’t even have to say, “When we fail to look at a person who is different from us we are being lazy writers, lazy observers,” because a student said it for me. Exactly in those words.
Yes. That.
Failing to see someone means you are failing as a writer, an artist, an observer, but also as a fellow human.
When I asked them to think of what a Black man looks like, then showed them a picture of my brother and my uncle, none of them pictured these two men. We looked at pictures from my phone and then went about the task of really describing them. They saw that my brother wasn’t just a black man, but that he was brown with red undertones, the color of rich, clay soil. They saw how black and shiny his hair is, like the Korean student in our class.
Then they looked at each other. How could they describe themselves and each other in ways that side steps unoriginal, lazy descriptions. Everyone agreed that the Japanese girl who described her father as “like Shriek” had hair the color of semi-sweet chocolate. We looked at the Dutch girl’s rich, red hair and truly tried to define the color of red. She was more than a strawberry blonde. One guy didn’t have blue eyes, but brown-blue eyes. The French student’s hair wasn't dirty blonde or dark brown, but gel darkened blonde.
The point is we saw. And in seeing they understood the power in taking time to craft writing with rich images.
None of this would have happened, however, if I would not have been willing to be vulnerable and generous.
I’ve often heard Black people say they don’t want to feel like they are on display, in regards to their hair and how it is different. I fully get that. I also have heard others complain that Blacks are not fully described and depicted as we are. Often we are not.
I have come to believe that if we are not willing to be vulnerable and to share how we are different, we cannot ever expect for others to see us and appreciate our differences. If you do not have kinky hair, how would know how to describe it, understand it, appreciate it, and love it? If you have never sat between your mother’s lap getting your hair pressed, or watched your sisters, cousins do it how would you know?
I never pass up the opportunity to educate someone and to celebrate what makes me Black. I love my Black experiences. I love everything about being a Black woman, including the struggles, so I choose to share and celebrate it.
This is vulnerability and generosity. This is teaching. This is erasing color lines. This is sharing what it means to be a Black American woman human. This is helping others grow. This is important.
By the time class ended my students walked out telling me thank you. They learned more than how to write an image. They learned the value in seeing and yes, that will make them better writers, but it will also make them better humans.
As writers we should always strive to be better humans because that is what writing is—a means to share our humanity and share in others’ humanity.
If you are writing without vulnerability and without generosity, without openness and authenticity, without seeing people, including yourself, as they and you really are—you are failing to understand what writing really is.
There should be humanity in writing.
And if you are blessed to teach, I pray you do so with a full heart of vulnerability and generosity. That you realize when you teach others, they teach you back. Already I am filled with such gratitude and love for my students. That does not mean you should ignore healthy boundaries, but it does mean to let go of some unhealthy confines that prevent you from connecting your humanity with your students’ humanity. When you do that, you are not just changing their lives, but also yours.
Peace, Love and Blessings,
Kiandra