JAC Volume 16 Issue 2

In the aftermath of the O.J. Simpson trial, it would be an understatement to say that racial difference—especially between whites and blacks—remains a salient feature of American culture, one that is complex, baffling, and seemingly resistant to change. By "difference" I mean, not just the real statistical differences in white and black standards of living, nor the differences in white and black cultures, as members of those cultures would define them, but the perception that whites and blacks in this country see things differently, and the conviction that this difference in perception is somehow irrevocable. In "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man," Henry Louis Gates argues that differing reactions to the Simpson verdict (and differing reactions to those reactions) mark a racial divide that many (whites) would overlook or deny. As someone who grew up in a virtually all-white world—white working class neighborhood, white suburban high school, white fundamentalist Christian church, white liberal-art college—I have seen for myself how white denial of racism is perpetuated. Because there were no black people in my life and because those people closest to me were not overtly racist (nor anti-racist), racism simply did not exist for me until later, when I became interested in racism as an intellectual issue closely related to my feminist interests.

In spite of the fact that many Americans wish to ignore or deny the continuing impact of racism in this culture, talk about race permeates American public discourse. Radical educator bell hooks calls this discourse "the vernacular discourse of white supremacy." In one version, says hooks, we are repeatedly told "that blacks are inferior to whites, more likely to commit crimes, come from broken homes, are all on welfare" (4). This kind of discourse perpetuates ideas of white superiority and black inferiority in the minds of both blacks and whites. In another version of American race talk, blacks are depicted as having achieved equal status with whites in proportions not reflective of statistical reality. Although potentially inspiring for black people, fictional images of successful blacks in positions of authority send the message that racism has been overcome, that American society does not need to change, and that blacks who are not successful according to white middle class standards are somehow individually to blame. Gates describes a third way in which public discourse undermines the communication and coalition-building needed between the races. As Gates illustrates in his analysis of the Simpson case, the media has a penchant for depicting blacks and whites as unified in their difference and as necessarily opposed to one another. The consequence of this media construction is that "we remain captive to a binary discourse of accusation and counter-accusation, of grievance and counter-grievance, of victims and victimizers . . . a discourse in which everyone speaks of payback and nobody is paid" (65).

Given the sorry state of American public discourse about race and the simultaneous recognition that racism is a far from resolved issue in this country, educators committed to social change struggle to find ways to help students engage productively with issues of racial difference and social (in)justice. My own pedagogical struggle began a decade ago when I was teaching at a predominantly white liberal arts college whose new president had begun actively recruiting black students. The first time I taught Richard Wrights "Library Card" to a mixed race class, the room was unusually silent. Once talkative white students glanced nervously at their black peers who responded by staring blank-faced at their desks. A similarly surprising discomfort—this time mine—arose when I taught Toni Morrison and found myself hesitant to generalize about black women's experience when there were black women present who knew more about the subject than I did. Those teaching moments and others like them initiated for me a sense of moral and ethical obligation—a need to find a way for my students and I to talk about racial difference as a force that can divide our classrooms and campuses and thus hinder everyone's education.

Eventually, like many teachers, I came to depend on a collaborative pedagogy—assigning small groups of students to discuss course content, share writing, and orchestrate group projects—as a means of providing students with the opportunity to initiate conversations about cultural difference. Although early theories of collaborative learning emphasized the degree to which students working in small groups can help each other come to a common understanding of course content, more and more educators are attempting to harness the power of student collaboration as a means of raising students' "critical consciousness," to use Paulo Freire's term for the process of becoming aware of a culture's structure of domination and oppression. As John Trimbur sees it, the goal of student collaboration ought to be a recognition of differences within the group, the classroom, and the culture as well as an understanding of the hierarchical organization of those differences (603). Extending this connection between classroom collaboration and the "real world," Marilyn Cooper, Diana George, and Susan Sanders add that "arguments about collaborative learning are not just arguments about what goes on in the classroom. They are arguments about how people might conduct themselves outside the classroom. . . . It is about how people live and function in a democratic society" (41).

A number of recent studies have shown, however, that student groups do not always function as teachers would like; some even consciously subvert their teachers' expectations. In an earlier essay, I described an African American literature course in which, in spite of the fact that the instructor and almost all of the students in the class were black, one white woman vocally discounted the black students' experience-based responses to the literature because they didn't emphasize "universality," thus subverting the teacher's goal of valuing non-traditional approaches to literature. In a related example, Tom Fox describes a white male student who asked to be moved out of a group with two black women. Convinced that such a group would have much to teach this student, Fox insisted that the male student stay in the group, only to find that he did so reluctantly, participating as little as possible. Fox concludes that "hierarchies in student groups roughly match social and political hierarchies" (113). Thia Wolf agrees, explaining that by virtue of being positioned within a hierarchically arranged institution, collaborative learning within classrooms "leads almost necessarily to a reproduction of institutionalized values and conversations" (2).

If student groups can't help but reproduce the dominant discourse, and if the dominant discourse about race reinforces ideas of black inferiority, perpetuates denial of racism, or serves to maintain a forced binary opposition in which blacks and whites are depicted as occupying enemy camps, then what can we expect student groups to talk about when we ask them to talk about race? bell hooks admits that she has been reluctant to "talk race" because as a black woman committed to social change "it hurts. It is painful to think long and hard about race and racism in the United States. . . . These days, white racism can let it all hang out, hold nothing back. The anti-black backlash is so fierce it astounds" (3). In contrast, hooks suggests, whites are reluctant to talk about race because of their denial of racism. "After all," hooks argues, "if we all pretend racism does not exist, that we do not know what it is or how to change it—it never has to go away" (5). Shelby Steele concludes that race talk among blacks and whites is often unproductive because when such talk occurs, both groups struggle to maintain power by maintaining their innocence. As Sharon Welch explains it, "For some, sharing power seems like death, a loss of self rather than the invitation to explore an alternative structure of selfhood" (97). If power and self-image are at stake in discussions about racism, it should not be surprising that student groups who are asked to talk about race not only replicate the unproductive race discourse prevalent in this culture, but resist talking about it at all.

In the remainder of this article, I want to look closely at the workings of one collaborative learning group that I studied as a participant observer in a required writing-intensive course entitled "The American Experience." The course, taught at a large urban university, was designed with the express purpose of acquainting students with issues of American cultural diversity, including the issue of racism. After examining this group's explicit "race talk" during a course unit on The African American Experience as well as the implicit race talk that emerged as the group worked together throughout the 10-week term, I have come to think of this group's talk as a complex rhetoric of evasion. Unlike Tom Fox's student who refused to work with group members who were "different," the group I studied maintained a semblance of working together by evading the issue of racial difference within the group and as it related to course content. Although the desire to maintain a position of innocence, perhaps even of denial, might have led to the evasions I observed, I believe these students were also influenced by a history of schooling that taught them to value consensus rather than multiple (conflicting) perspectives and "objective" knowledge rather than knowledge based on personal experience. The degree to which this group avoided what they rightly sensed were potentially explosive and painful conversations about racial differences suggests that pedagogies based on the assumption that students will benefit by sharing their differing (racial) perspectives need to work against the constraints imposed by the absence of productive discourse about race in this country as well as the constraints created when discourse about difference happens in the institutionalized space of the classroom, where racial difference is not supposed to matter.

The goal of my study was to explore how students working in small groups dealt with their differences in the context of a class in which race, class, and gender differences were highlighted, a goal that grew directly out of my own teaching experience. Denise, the instructor of the course, was like myself an avid proponent of small group work. Students were assigned to groups at the beginning of the term, and they did most of their work in these groups. For example, student groups gathered at the beginning of almost every class to discuss assigned readings and to generate questions or issues they wanted the whole class to discuss. They also read and talked about each other's written responses to readings, brainstormed topics for writing assignments, responded to each other's drafts, and wrote a research paper as a group. Denise explained the connection she saw between her use of these groups and the course focus on diversity in this way: "I do want to get them out of that individual competitive type of thing that I don't think works in this society but is just a myth . . . it's also because of the issue of this class . . . they can learn as much from each other [as] they can from me in terms of opinions about the readings . . . . they can all add a different perspective."

After asking students to complete a brief survey, Denise assigned students to groups that she hoped would be composed of members with different (but complementary) writing strengths, different leadership preferences, different majors, and different genders and races when possible. (Like the majority of classes at this institution, most of the students were white, with only two black students, both women, in a class of 24.) Although groups constituted on the basis of difference rather than similarity might seem ripe for conflict, Denise admitted that she hoped for conflict within the groups but feared that students would avoid it. According to Denise, "one of the benefits [of working in groups] is to be pushing each other's thinking. Well, they can't do that unless they are willing to argue with each other to some extent, and I'm afraid they'll run away from that."

The group that I chose for close study certainly exhibited the teacher's desired range of perspectives. Betsy, a junior Animal Sciences major, was a full-time student in her early twenties who had recently married and was commuting an hour to this urban campus from the small farm-town where she had grown up. Bob was in his early forties, married with two children, and was returning to finish the degree he had begun twenty years earlier. While enrolled in the class, he was also working full-time as a woodworker/laborer for a large insurance company that was financially supporting his completion of a college degree. Gloria, one of the two African American students in the class, was also returning to college part-time after ten years in the work force. She was in her late twenties and worked part-time at a downtown department store. Although Gloria had originally been pursuing a Marketing major, she was now considering a major in either Journalism or English. Tim and Dan were in their early twenties. Both were single and lived on campus, but that was about all they had in common. Tim was a junior honors student majoring in Aeronautical Engineering, whose interests included computer programming and role-playing games. He was the adopted only child of middle class Anglo parents. Dan, the grandson of Italian immigrants, also in his junior year, was a self-described "punk" and "fraternity guy," who worked part-time as a roadie for rock bands while trying to maintain his status in the College of Architecture. In spite of what the teacher perceived as a rich potential for productive conflict within this group over issues of real consequence—like racism—the group cleverly avoided conflict by constructing a rhetoric that allowed them to maintain some semblance of engagement without risking face-to-face disclosure.

During a peer response session when groups were asked to respond to each other's essays defining "racism," this group did not question each other or push each other's thinking as the teacher hoped they would. Instead, they offered almost no response to group members' drafts, preferring to make jokes or engage in social talk. A number of circumstances likely contributed to this group's seeming evasion of the assigned task. First, Bob and Dan did not bring drafts of their papers. Gloria had a partial draft, but her work schedule forced her to leave class twenty minutes early. (Sixty minutes of the two-hour class was set aside for peer response.) Given that some group members were unprepared, Dan, the self-appointed leader of the group, suggested that instead of writing responses to each other's drafts, they should read their drafts aloud or talk about their ideas and respond orally, a response format that requires less accountability to group members and to the teacher, especially given that the teacher had not asked for any kind of report from the group, nor was peer response formally evaluated. Still, the group interactions that occurred during this peer response session, such as it was, suggest that the students' awareness of their differing perspectives on racism also constrained the ways in which they responded to each other.

At the beginning of the hour set aside for peer response, Gloria left the room to take a break. (Denise routinely gave students a five-minute break in the middle of the two-hour class.) While Gloria was out of the room, Bob began to talk about the paper he was planning to write—on Affirmative Action as reverse racism. First, Bob showed the group the stack of books he had checked out of the library, something that was not required of this assignment which asked students to construct their own extended definition of racism. Bob explained that he also intended to include a personal example—he had taken the test to become a city fireman but felt he was not hired due to pressure on the fire department to hire and promote minorities. Before the group could respond to Bob's ideas for his paper, Gloria came back into the room and Bob stopped talking, mid-sentence. As Gloria sat down, Bob leaned toward her, smiled a big smile, and complimented her on her earrings. Discussion of Bob's paper was not resumed.

Gloria was the next group member to share her draft, which began with a strongly rhetorical depiction of racism as a dangerous disease. Prior to reading her draft aloud, she turned sideways in her chair, away from her group members and towards me, who was sitting next to her. When she finished reading, she addressed questions directly to me, questions primarily about the effectiveness of what she called her "flowery" style. When I asked Gloria if she planned to include any examples, she told a story of working at a bank and discovering that a younger, less experienced white woman was being paid more than she was. Unfortunately, while Gloria talked to me about her paper, the rest of the group continued their small talk in the background.

The remainder of the peer response workshop went similarly, with group members summarizing plans for their papers or reading drafts aloud but getting no response except jokes or social talk. Although such evasive behavior is not uncommon in student groups, as studies like those conducted by Robert Brooke, Rick Evans, and Ruth Mirtz have shown, this group's reluctance to respond substantively to each other's ideas about racism is likely to have been exacerbated by a sense that they were dealing with "touchy" subject matter, made more touchy by the fact that one group member was black. Bob clearly did not want Gloria to know what he was planning to write about, and he seemed to cover his fear of being found out by being overly solicitous—I did not observe Bob flirting with Gloria or any other women in the class at any other time during my study. In an interview, Bob admitted that being in a "racially mixed" group made him think about the effects of what he said. In Bob's words, "You have to be real careful when you're in a racially mixed group. Some things you might say and not say. I mean, it's sad, but it's true because you might kind of make a comment and think well, how are they gonna take that?'" In a response he later wrote regarding a series of readings on the Los Angeles riots—a response he did not share with his group because he was on vacation—Bob expressed this view of minorities: "Minorities have come to expect welfare, to be given everything they need without doing anything in return . . . . The women stay home all day to care (if they cared this ongoing cycle could change) for all the children. The men can screw off all day and screw all night." If this is the view of blacks that led Bob to define Affirmative Action as reverse racism, it is not surprising that he did not wish to express this view in front of Gloria.

Gloria also admitted that her membership in this particular group affected her willingness and ability to participate fully in the class. According to Gloria, her group was "very closed-minded," very "naive," and thus "didn't contribute much in the way of new perspectives." At the end of the semester, Gloria confided to me that she did not like working in groups because "too may people think they know it all and they are not really willing to listen. Everybody is too busy trying to, too busy thinking they are right." Gloria admitted that her sense of discomfort in the group did have a racial component. In her words, "I feel like whatever I do, and it's not my imagination, whatever I might do wrong is focused on, [it] really [is] because I'm different . . . . Maybe it's also due to my personality, too, because I might stick out more than other persons. I don't know if it's necessarily because I'm black or it is also my personality . . . . I don't like to cry racism' or any of that stuff, but I'm telling you, being black in an all-white environment does create things, problems." Although no one in her group said or did anything overtly racist during the time I studied them, Gloria's sense of being treated as "different" did seem validated by Bob's admission that being in a mixed race group made him think twice about how he said things. Thus, in addition to the classroom constraints that often inhibit productive peer responsedistrust of peer advice about school writing, for example—this group's response to each other's papers defining racism was also constrained by their discomfort with the subject of racism in the context of this group's racial differences. Although from a teacher's perspective, it seems a shame that Bob and Gloria did not take advantage of the opportunity to share their different experiences of racism in the work place, from an observer's perspective, it is difficult to imagine such a conversation actually taking place between these two justifiably self-protective students.

A second way this group evaded their differing perspectives on race was to shift the focus of discussion from personal perspectives and experiences to something more objective—and thus, less risky. The most stunning example of this evasive strategy occurred during the group's discussion of, presumably, each other's written responses to several texts about racism. Instead of discussing their responses to the readings, they engaged in a reconstruction of the history of slavery that completely evaded the issue of race. Somewhat surprisingly, these students were able to disclose their feelings about racism in their response papers, which suggests that they were not simply resisting the teacher's assignment. For example, in her response to a chapter from Shelby Steele's The Content of Our Character, Betsy agrees with what she sees as Steele's contention that blacks have been oppressed and that whites should feel guilty about what they did to blacks in the past. But Betsy also complains that although blacks now have the same opportunities as whites, they still want more. According to Betsy, racism comes from the perception by whites that "blacks keep fighting for more rights' [and] the whites see them as having a better chance at getting some jobs and college money than they can." In her final paragraph, Betsy asserts her view more explicitly: "The fact that the innocence of the black man has brought him power is true in my eyes. I agree that he deserves the better half of it too, but I think that he may be getting a little greedy."

Although Bob's response paper is less revealing than Betsy's, he does offer insight into why racism is difficult for him to discuss. Bob opens with this statement: "The ideas that the word racist encompass seem to be very hard for people to speak to. For most people their public image of racism is very different from the views that they would share between family and close friends." Bob does not say specifically what views people would hesitate to share publicly, but he does admit in his response that while growing up, racism was openly expressed in his family. He explains, for example, that his parents refused to rent the inner-city property they owned to minorities, and he admits that they conveyed to their children "the notion that races of color are in general, of low class, of low intelligence and with no motivation, self-esteem, or desire to better themselves." Although Bob begins his response paper by pointing out that "One's attitude toward race would generally represent those of our parents and family or the people closest to us," he concludes by saying that he has overcome his racist upbringing "through college and business" where he first had contact with "upwardly striving minorities."

In Tim's response paper, he critiques Steele's essay, complaining that Steele fails to come up with concrete solutions to the problems he describes. Tim then launches into a larger critique of the way race and racism are talked about in America, remarking that "the entire American population enjoys deluding itself on the issue of race. Whites refuse to admit that they might be repressive to racial minorities, but at the same time those racial minorities feel compelled to cry Racism!' at almost any situation which does not go in their favor or which they feel could be construed as offensive." In his conclusion, Tim remarks, "What it boils down to is that people aren't willing to accept those that are different than themselves."

Gloria's response paper begins with a surprising understatement: "The subject of racism has always been of particular interest to me." Gloria then describes her personal experience of having been the object of race prejudice. She laments that "Being black has definitely put some walls between some potential great friendships with some people who are white. Barriers that can not be overcome because I couldn't change the color of my skin have left me wondering why?" Instead of taking whites to task for their racism, Gloria admits that she has the desire to "convert a racist" by being the first black they have a positive relationship with. In Gloria's final paragraph, she attempts to explain—or explain away—the oppressive behavior of whites when she attributes "the White Man's' actions throughout history" to the spirit of Manifest Destiny and the desire to "spread western religion and culture around the world as the will of God expected."

A closer look at these students' response papers reveals not just their attitudes toward race and racism, but their attitudes towards talking about race. This characteristic of their responses can be attributed to the fact that Shelby Steele's essay dealt explicitly with the difficulty most Americans have discussing race relations in mixed race groups. Still, given that students had been assigned four readings, it seems significant that most of them focused on or alluded to Steele. Both Bob and Gloria framed their very different response papers by referring to the discomfort people feel when talking about race. For Bob, that discomfort may be traced to his desire not to be considered racist. Although in his introductory paragraph Bob admits that racism is a difficult subject to discuss, he does manage to write about it by constructing himself as someone who has overcome his family's racist attitudes. Keep in mind, though, Bob's remark that what people say publicly about race (which might include a response paper that will be read by other students, one of whom is black) and what people say privately are often two different things.

Gloria refers to the discomfort people feel when talking about racism in mixed groups by commenting, "It seems as though people immediately react in a sort of stunned and inhibited manner, not quite knowing what to say or how to say it for fear of either offending someone or even causing the conversation to inflame." Gloria does not refer to blacks or whites specifically, implying that both groups are reluctant to talk about race. Given Gloria's admission that race prejudice has caused real pain in her life, it might seem strange that instead of blaming the perpetrators of this prejudice, she instead emphasizes what she hopes to do to curb racism. It is possible that Gloria's non-condemnatory tone may be evidence of her concern with how her group members would respond to her text—and to her as a black woman. In an interview, Gloria admitted feeling keenly aware of her position in the group and in the class: "I always see my role as a black girl in an all-white environment as, you know, [Denise] said I can't feel this responsibility, but I usually end up feeling like I'm representing . . . the black race or something to someone who's never, never been exposed to black people." Gloria saw her collaborative learning group as a place where she felt called upon to play this role. As Gloria understood it, the purpose of the group was "so that we can exchange ideas and . . . kind of be forced to deal with each other at least in thinking. Hopefully, to encourage better thinking, better understanding. Like hopefully [Betsy] will have a better impression of black people because I get the feeling she's never ever dealt with any." Perhaps Gloria's response paper on racism was intended to educate her group members without alienating them. Gloria's sense that she is representing the black race in her efforts to maintain positive relations with whites may have led her to steer away from open conflict with her group about racial issues.

Gloria was right about Betsy's limited experience with African American. According to Betsy, there were only two black students in her small rural high school, and one was killed in a car accident. Given her lack of experience and the attitudes toward racial difference she has revealed—her feeling that maybe blacks have become a little too greedy and whites are justifiably resentful—it is easy to imagine that she, too, might feel uncomfortable discussing these issues. Although in her response paper Betsy acknowledges that blacks were wronged and that whites were responsible, she also believes that those wrongs have been made right and that it is pointless and destructive to continue to make whites feel guilty. One way to avoid being made to feel guilty of racism is to avoid talking about it.

Dan's response paper focused not on Shelby Steele but on the relationship between the ideas of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X. Dan also tried to place both Ralph Ellison and Steele in relation to King and Malcolm X. Instead of addressing the conflict among these African American leaders' perspectives (in the Malcolm X excerpt, he expressly criticizes Martin Luther King's assimilationism), Dan offers instead this proposal:

Tim's response reproduced two of the forms of public discourse that hooks argues inhibit productive talk about race—the assertion that everyone is guilty of racial prejudice and the accusation that blacks are too quick to claim victim status. In addition, his contention that everyone should simply be more accepting of people who are different places the responsibility for racism within individuals rather than within institutions or cultural commonplaces. If individuals are responsible for racism and those individuals deny that they are racist, then what amount of talking will change that attitude?

The students' concern about discussing race in their small group was vividly demonstrated when they were asked to discuss the response papers I have just summarized. The first act of evasion performed by this group occurred when Dan, the group leader, suggested that the group not read each other's papers but talk instead. There are many possible reasons for Dan's suggestion—his own admitted laziness, his preference for talk over reading and writing, boredom with the routine. (This was the fifth time they were asked to read each other's responses.) But it is also possible that Dan feared how group members might respond if they read what the others had written about racism. Whatever Dan's reasons, his decision meant that the group's collaborative learning about racism happened exclusively through face-to-face interaction, a move that seemed likely to increase the group's reluctance to be self-disclosing, especially in light of Bob's unwillingness to share his Affirmative Action paper with Gloria. As Shelby Steele argues in the essay all of the students had read, a discussion of race is enough to kill an "integrated" dinner party (348).

In spite of the risk of face-to-face conflict, several group members did attempt to get the group talking about their different responses to the readings, further evidence that the group was not simply being resistant. First, Dan tried to initiate a discussion of Malcolm X's criticism of Martin Luther King, only to be cut off by Bob, who commented, "But see, I'm, that's not really around my interests." Gloria then tried to talk about the Shelby Steele essay, which so many in the group had responded to, focusing especially on the anecdote Steele used to illustrate the difficulty whites and blacks have talking about racism:

In this discussion, both Bob and Gloria refer to the story Steele tells about when he was twelve and first met a friend's uncle whom he had been told was a racist. But Bob and Gloria interpret this story very differently. Bob argues that Steele was wrong to assume that someone he had never met was a racist. For Bob, the fact that this person treated Steele politely is evidence that the man was not racist. From Gloria's perspective, the point of the story is that racism can take many guises, including public politeness.

In spite of (or perhaps because of) the fact that Bob's and Gloria's differing interpretations of Steele created conflict—the kind of conflict Denise saw as productive—Dan steered the conversation away from Steele and toward a consideration of what the authors of the assigned readings had to say about who was to blame for racism, a subject that sparked another conflict within the group. As Steele argues in his essay, continuing to make whites feel guilty of racism exacerbates racial division by causing reactions such as the one Bob expressed during this discussion of blame:

Perhaps the most curious feature of this group's discussion was that by focusing almost exclusively on the economic factors that drove the slave industry, the group managed to bypass any consideration of race. Tim contributed to this shift in focus by bringing into the discussion his knowledge of slavery in Ancient Greece and of feudalism in medieval Europe. Gloria, too, argued for the economic rather than racial basis of slavery: "You know what I think, I think it was all economics. I mean, it wasn't completely economics but it was very much economics because, you know, black people were too poor, just like Mexicans." Later in the discussion, Gloria further minimized the relationship between racism and slavery by reporting:

In choosing to discuss the "related" issue of the history of slavery, this group was able to evade the issue of their differing perspectives on race relations in America, as revealed in their response papers. Given that these students were required to work together for the rest of the term, it is understandable that they wanted to avoid the possible negative consequences of openly confronting their personal differences. So instead, they conducted an "academic" discussion, one that valued impersonal historical knowledge over personal opinion and one that appealed to school-based authority—Tim's and Gloria's knowledge of the "facts" of history—rather than the authority of experience, such as Gloria's experience with racism. I have been arguing that the school context—which led to the reproduction of the dominant culture's unproductive rhetoric of race—and a wish to avoid social discomfort inhibited what might have been a productive discussion of these students' differing perspectives on racism. I would also like to posit one other less obvious constraint: the absence of a shared goal that would have made it worthwhile to take the risks and do the difficult work of collaborating with people one sees as different. Marilyn Cooper and her colleagues make a similar point when they cite examples of collaboration that have led to social change—diverse faculty members unite to pressure the provost to make changes in tenure requirements; a grassroots group of citizens joins forces to work against the building of a new paper mill in their community, though they have different reasons for doing so. Sharon Welch, from whom I borrowed the headnote to this essay, argues that solidarity rather than consensus is a necessary prerequisite to productive talk about difference, and she characterizes solidarity as "granting each group sufficient respect to listen to their ideas and to be challenged by them" as well as "recognition that the lives of the various groups are so intertwined that each is accountable to the other." Of course, solidarity—and the productive conversation that can result—is not enough, according to Welch. Behind these conversations, Welch reminds us, must be an assumption that the participants are "working together to bring about changes in social practice" (95).

For bell hooks, the battle to end racism is worth it only if coalitions of diverse people—black and white—share a vision of a "beloved community," one where "loving ties of care and knowing bind us together in our differences" (264). A similar sentiment was expressed by a black woman teacher who participated in a forum I attended a few years ago on multicultural pedagogy. When the white male teacher who was leading the forum argued for the importance of teaching students to recognize their inherent racism, the black teacher responded emphatically, "I just want peace." Although calls for love and community and peace may seem like naive throwbacks to the hippie era, for students like Gloria who have suffered the loss of friendships because of racism, such idealism can be forgiven. Unfortunately, the other students in her group had no personal investment in interrogating racism—in fact, they may have had an unconscious investment in not interrogating it. For Bob, Dan, and Betsy, all students from working-class backgrounds, belief in the American myth of equal opportunity was a primary motivating factor in their pursuit of a college degree. They needed to believe that anyone who worked hard enough could achieve the American dream—a middle class lifestyle. Thus, these students read and wrote and talked about issues of racial and cultural diversity not because they wanted to work together to bring about social change, but because they were required to do so by the university and their course instructor, and meeting requirements is part of the game of earning a college degree. Though they may have learned something about their own attitudes toward these issues and about the attitudes expressed by the published authors they were assigned to read, the group learned little from each other, because in their opinion, they had little to learn. Dan described the group discussions as "busy work" that helped the 8:00 a.m. class go by quickly. And though Bob acknowledged that "no matter where you are employed at, you're gonna be relating, or need to relate to a group of persons in some form," he also admitted that he was a "loner" who would "just as soon go up to Canada, Winnepeg, way up in the boonies" except that it was impossible to make a living there.

If the goal of multicultural education is to raise critical consciousness and equip students to work for social change, then more than mere exposure to differing perspectives is needed. As hooks argues, before racism can be overcome in the country, both whites and blacks must undergo a "decolonizing of the mind" which means acknowledging that we have been inscribed in a white supremacist discourse and actively working to resist that inscription (257). As someone who is continuing to work through this process of reeducation, I think it is obvious that such a process cannot be required. And yet as a teacher who has the privilege of teaching students from diverse cultural backgrounds, I am unwilling to conclude that we ought to simply give up our efforts to teach students to talk about subjects like racism. Instead, I would like to reconceptualize the constraints that inhibit productive discourse about difference as places to begin educating for critical consciousness. If differences within student groups impede the learning experience for students, then they need the opportunity to reflect on that fact. The students I studied were quite articulate about what they did and didn't learn from Shelby Steele; what might they have said if they had been asked to write about what they were (or weren't) learning from each other? And what might they have learned if they had been asked to imagine material consequences for their group discussions, actual projects that it might be to their benefit to work on together? Would Bob and Gloria and the rest of their group have been able to construct an Affirmative Action policy for a workplace they might all inhabit? Surely, not all students would take seriously such opportunities for reflection, and some might simply tell the teacher what she wants to hear. Nevertheless, we need to continue thinking of ways to bring home to students the consequences for each of us of reproducing discourse that perpetuates denial and division in our classrooms and in our daily lives—the least of which is the loss of educational opportunities. And we need to acknowledge that in the absence of acceptable models, we have an obligation to work with our students to construct, together, a discourse that engages rather than evades the issues that divide us.