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What role does patriarchy play in racial fascism?

Photo Credits: Socialist Alternative

In “Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases,” Ida B. Wells details the brutalization of the black body that characterized Jim Crow. In it, Wells discusses how accusations of rape were the primary justifications for the multitude of lynchings perpetrated by white mobs against black men. Wells grounds her rebuke of the Southern lynch law with a discussion of the high rate of lynching occurring in Memphis, Tennessee. Specifically, Wells’ account focuses on the period between May 17 and May 24, 1892, wherein eight black men had been accosted, abused, and brutally hanged after accusations of criminal conduct. Of these eight men, five of them were accused of rape. The truth of these accusations mattered not to the severity of the punishment. Discussing the case of Mr. Stricklin, a near victim of the South’s self-righteous racial vitriol, Wells identifies how the young Stricklin would have been lynched on the basis of his occupying the same room as his supposed victim for whom he was installing curtains. All this despite the notable lack of an “outcry of rape.” Had the woman not vouched for Mr. Stricklin, his body would be left beaten and bruised hanging from a poplar tree. Undeniably, the charge of black men raping white women has been used to legitimate the anti-black violence endemic to the Jim Crow South and whose legacy has metastasized into the fascist outgrowth that has brought American democracy to its knees.

This rhetoric is not isolated—the weaponization of gender-based violence as a call to action against targeted groups is a tactic endemic to racial fascism. To understand the function of patriarchy within a racial fascist order, it is first important to establish that race and gender do not operate within separate spheres, much less as parallel forces. A key insight proffered by an intersectional analytic lens is that identities and structures are indivisible. This framework attunes us to the inextricable nature of race and gender. So long as there exists a thing called “racial” fascism, there exists a distinctly gendered dimension that upholsters the racial dynamics that are brought into being. One cannot have race without gender or gender without race because they are co-constitutive and mutually reinforcing. Thus, patriarchy—the ideological and material structures which coalesce to privilege real men and subordinate everyone else—is itself a fixture of racial fascism, so-long as our understandings of race are contingent on our constructions of gender.

The imposition of a racial fascist order necessitates the proliferation of an ideology within which hierarchy and subordination must be naturalized and therefore justified. The creation of the subaltern as a distinctly denigrated class requires that the dominant ideology conceptualize the marginalized as barbarous and uncivilized, thereby authorizing the domination of said class by those who occupy the top of the racial hierarchy. Through the eyes of racial fascist ideology, then, the visceral acts of violence perpetrated against the oppressed body becomes the fated discipline of the brutes. The differentiation between the upper and lower races and the subsequent domestication of the latter within the racial fascist order is accomplished through a variety of means. Bible in hand, Western missionaries infiltrated the continent of Africa with a divine mandate to save the Native from himself, demonizing indigenous religion and enculturating the continent in the Western religious tradition. Alternative expressions of sexuality by colonized populations were denounced and considered evidence for the elimination of indigenous culture. Using the language of disability, British colonists would malign the desire for liberation in Kenya as the desire of madmen, stating that those who espoused whispers of revolution were mentally unwell and in need of rehabilitation. Evidently, then, religious extremism, homophobia and ableism, amongst many other systems of normatively-potent difference were used to substantiate the civilized-savage paradigm that legitimated and still legitimates the violence of various racial-fascist orders.

Patriarchy functions similarly here. For those who occupy the position of dominance within a racial hierarchy, the concept of the savage and his civilized other is bound up within traditional Western understandings of gender. Within a societal framework constructed upon patriarchal ideologies, to perform civility is to perform gender as properly construed. Within a racial fascist order, such notions of the proper are themselves constructed around the norms of the dominant race and in direct contention with the subordinated. For instance, in a white supremacist system, narratives of innocence and purity are inherent to whiteness. Such characteristics are personified through white womanhood wherein the civilized white woman is fragile, demure, and submissive, with an agency that is only fully expressed within the domain of the home and contingently expressed everywhere else vis-à-vis her husband. White manhood, free, rational, and domineering, is, above all, characterized by the duty to protect his own and police/defend the borders of the white family.

As we attune our focus to the systemic weaponization of gender-based violence in systems of racial fascism, it is important to note that the depiction of the ideal feminine and masculine run in direct opposition to the racialized other. The men of the subaltern class are not afforded the label of real men by virtue of their supposed inability to naturally conform to the dominant gendered and racial social norms. In some instances, this can manifest as the emasculation of men belonging to the subordinated group. Such a movement is evidenced by the proliferation of emasculating characterizations of East Asian men which were used to justify the exclusion of Chinese immigrant workers in the 19th and 20th centuries. In other instances, the refusal of real manhood can manifest as hypermasculinization. Here, men of the subordinated group are perceived in excess wherein they are characterized as too strong and tooviolent.

Let us return back to the case of the Jim Crow South as elucidated by Wells. The mobs of white men indiscriminately lynching black men in response to accusations of rape justified their violence by appealing to the ideal of feminine purity that inundated the concept of white womanhood. The dynamic here is twofold. Not only are the presuppositions that are attached to white femininity invoked, but those which characterize black masculinity are similarly revealed. Blackness is hypermasculinized through characterizations that emphasize the physical traits of masculinity without the so-called higher order cognitive qualities of discipline and rationality that are inherent to white (read: real) manhood. Body without mind, the black male expression of masculinity is necessarily dangerous because it lies beyond the bounds of self-regulation. Unable to control itself, the white man rationalizes his legal, political, and social confinement of the black other. It is this presupposition of unregulated masculinity that is the locus of the threat that has supposedly risen against the purity of white womanhood.

It is important to note that the depiction of ideal womanhood necessarily excludes the women of the denigrated class. These women are not real women and are therefore not afforded the same luxuries of protection that are experienced by said real women. Black women, for instance, are hypermasculanized and are therefore placed beyond the bounds of the proper performance of gender. In the Jim Crow South, this manifested as the lack of moral vitriol levied against the accused rapists of Black women despite the protection of the purity and innocence of womanhood being the primary motivator behind the extrajudicial death sentences threatening their male counterparts. Wells details the following case of the brutal assault of a young black girl by white assailants:

Last winter in Baltimore, Md., three white ruffians assaulted a Miss Camphor, a young Afro-American girl, while out walking with a young man of her own race. They held her escort and outraged the girl. It was a deed dastardly enough to arouse Southern blood, which gives its horror of rape as excuse for lawlessness, but she was an Afro-American. The case went to the courts, an Afro-American lawyer defended the men and they were acquitted.

Put simply by Wells, “when the victim is a colored woman it is different.” Ultimately, we would be remiss to forget that gender influences our conception of race inasmuch as race influences our conception of gender. Walking hand in hand, the two function to create a realm of ideals which upholster the dominant and dehumanize the dominated. An adequate analysis of racial fascism, then, must place constructions of the gendered self under patriarchy as central in understanding how the constitution of the racialized subject operates within such systems of denigrated difference.

#us politics #ida b wells #black women #black tumblr #politics #philosophy #essay

Mind and Matter: Comparing the frameworks of decolonization found in Tuck & Yang and Thiong'o

Photo Credits: The Guardian

“The loss of a language translates into the loss of an entire system of knowledge, communication, and beliefs”

– Bolanle Ayokoyo, A Nigerian linguist based in the University of Ilorin in Nigeria

The twentieth century was a time of great uncertainty for the Portuguese empire. A period rife with clashes between indigenous resistance and colonial repression throughout the African colonies of Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, the Cape Verde islands, and São Tomé and Principe, Portugal sought to cling hard to it territorial conglomeration that was slowly breaking at its seams. In an attempt to manage and tranquilize the growing—and oftentimes violent—native dissatisfaction, in 1911 Portugal established the Ministry of Colonies which spearheaded the creation of distinct colonial governments constructed to respond to the sociopolitical conditions of each population’s “state of civilization” (Harrell-Bond & Forer, 5). Existing within the backdrop of the rapidly deteriorating imperial hegemony, however, the economic and political ineptitude of the Portuguese government confounded to make the efforts of the new colonial governments ineffectual. Because of this, attempts at the exploitation and expropriation of native’s land and body were haphazard and easily thwarted by even the most disjointed of resistance movements.

It was only after the military coup of 1926 that the colonial system of exploitation became frighteningly systemized, resembling elements of the antiquated system of slavery that had been abolished in the last century (Harrell-Bond & Forer, 8). Two years following his appointment as the Minister of Finance, Dr. Antonio Salazar reneged the former decentralized colonial administration and instituted a policy of unification wherein all power would emanate from the heart of the Portuguese empire—Lisbon. This policy simultaneously legalized a new division within the African colonies: indígenos, a category that included the majority of the black population, and assimilados, or those select few Africans who had reached the threshold of civility that would qualify them for partial citizenry. To become an assimilado, one would need to prove that they have fulfilled a variety of requirements, including being over the age of 18, being employed with significant earnings, attaining a high level of education, and having a fluent grasp of the Portuguese language (Minter, 23).

Evidently, then, aside from being in possession of material resources, the penultimate marker of civility was the complete surrender to the colonial life-world as indicated by one’s willingness to forsake their native tongue in favor of that of the oppressor. The colonial violence imparted upon indigenous populations did not just stop at their bodies. In the classroom, Portuguese colonial education did little to attend to the preexisting epistemic and value systems of the colonized. Instead, the primary aim of childhood education was to “teach the Portuguese language, to inculcate Portuguese values and to develop in the pupils a conscious identification with Portugal in order to strengthen national unity” (Minter, 30). Writing in lament of the ideological stagnancy of postcolonial African nations, Kenyan author Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o in Decolonising the Mind writes that “the physical violence of the battlefield” is always transmuted by “the psychological violence of the classroom” (Thiong’o, 9). School, then, has always been the primary site of cultural warfare. Calls to civilize through education became the immediate means of repression and elimination. Time and time again, the cultural institutions of education and language have been fashioned as sites of contention, where the interests of colonial indoctrination and liberatory consciousness raising are in a perpetual state of war. Some, like Thiong’o, recognize the urgency of this warfare and argue that the battle cry of freedom must ring in the minds of the colonized as much as it does through the land. Others, like indigenous scholars Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang argue that to focus on such is to commit the crime of a settler move to innocence, wherein the real work of decolonization is occluded by the ideological work of liberatory pedagogy.

This paper functions as a clarification of the theoretical debate between Thiong’o and Tuck and Yang, where the former believes that decolonizing the mind is necessarily primary to the process of decolonialism and the latter believe that its prioritization is an insincere move towards the imperative of decolonialism. In what follows, I begin by clarifying the position of both sides, reconstructing the decolonial ideal that each camp is beholden to. While Thiong’o holds that decolonization is functionally and importantly incomplete without the seizing back of one’s mind, Tuck and Yang argue that decolonization, as a process of unsettling the settler, requires that one prioritize the more material process of land relinquishment and indigenous reacquisition—to sideline the material objective is to impede upon true decolonial practice. From here, I go on to answer which ideal captures that which is most fundamental to decolonialism. I argue that the recognition of the dual importance and mutual reinforcement of both the material and the ideological that is present in Thiong’o and absent in Tuck and Yang transforms mere practice into the liberatory praxis that better fulfils the goal of ridding the subjugated of their colonial chains.

Thiong’o’s Decolonising the Mind functions as a love letter to the wave of African nations who had recently won their material freedom from the West. Despite the lack of their formal chains, Thiong’o recognized that the Achilles heel of the decolonial quest for self-definition was the inability for such definition to occur within the cultural and linguistic arenas of the indigenous lifeworld. Thiong’o reflects on his experiences within the colonial education system. Here, the use and teaching of his native tongue Gikuyu was prohibited. The force of this prohibition was not only mediated by the cane of the white man, but through the ridicule of his very own brethren. “Children,” Thiong’o writes, “were turned into witch hunters and in the process were being taught the lucrative- value of being a traitor to one's immediate community” (Thiong’o, 11). Intellectual progress was measured through the acquisition of English and through one’s ability to articulate white western values. Put succinctly by Thiong’o, education became “determined by the dominant language while also reinforcing that dominance” (Thiong’o, 12). The implications of this linguistic and ideological imposition were manifold. This is because, as Thiong’o identified, language is not merely a means of communicating with the other, and the cultural self is not a purely translatable entity. Instead, language is the medium through which culture is expressed. On the relation between language and culture, Thiong’o writes the following:

“…Communication between human beings is also the basis and process of evolving culture. In doing similar kinds of things and actions over and over again under similar circumstances, similar even in their mutability, certain patterns, moves, rhythms, habits, attitudes, experiences and knowledge emerge. Those experiences are handed over to the next generation and become the inherited basis for their further actions on nature and on themselves. There is a gradual accumulation of values which in time become almost self evident truths governing their conception of what is right and wrong, good and bad, beautiful and ugly, courageous and cowardly, generous and mean in their internal and external relations. Over a time chic becomes a way of life distinguishable from other ways of life. They develop a distinctive culture and history. Culture embodies those moral, ethical and aesthetic values, the set of spiritual eyeglasses, through which they come to view themselves and their place in the universe. Values are the basis of a people's identity, their sense of particularity as members of the human race. All this is carried by language. Language as culture is the collective memory bank of a people's experience in history. Culture is almost indistinguishable froth the language that makes possible its genesis growth banking, articulation and indeed its transmission from one generation to the next” (Thiong’o, 14-15).

In this way, language and culture exist as both mutually-reinforcing dimensions of the social self. The colonial project works to dictate the way that its victims relate to the world around them. If decolonization is the liberation of the subjugated self from the hands of the colonizer, then it is Thiong’o’s position that the practice of liberation must attend to all aspects of the self—the physical, the mental, and the spiritual.

Tuck and Yang center their discussion around the settler-colonial state. Colonialism is often theorized in two forms: externally and internally. Under the framework of external colonialism, the world is separated into first and third, where the empires of the “first” world exploit and expropriate the resources found in the Indigenous “third” worlds for the purpose of fortifying the wealth of the colonizing empire. This is opposed to internal colonialism wherein the colonizer engages in strategies of the biopolitical management of people, land, and other aspects of the natural world within the so-called borders of the imperial nation. Settler colonialism involves the intricate interplay between the external and internal modes of colonialism, as it perceives Indigeneity as both enemy and ward of the state due to the lack of spatial separation. At the center of settler colonialism is the issue of “land,” not only because it constitutes the basis of wealth-making for the settler, but it also sits at the center of Indigenous epistemology, ontology and cosmology. The call for decolonization under a settler-colonial context, then, becomes fraught due to the lack of spatial separation between the colonized and the settler—empire, settlement, and internal colony occur simultaneously. Instead of genuine approaches to the project of decolonialism, however, Tuck and Yang argue that educational advocacy and scholarship have made insincere attempts to engage in said projects.

The term “decolonization,” according to Tuck and Yang, has been coopted by the logic of settler-colonialism, stripping the term of its action-oriented specificity and replacing it with a more vague and rhetorical nature. For Tuck and Yang, then, the core to decolonization is encapsulated by the oft-repeated slogan “land back.” For these thinkers, it is only through the repatriation of land back to its original stewards that decolonization can truly take root. Decolonization, then, is steeped in materiality. Settler-colonialism, which is constructed upon and within an enmeshed system of settler-native-slave, serves to complicate the roles and desires of various non-white groups in relation to the Indigenous communities upon whose land they occupy. Thus, the metaphorization of decolonization lends the term to being amalgamated into the greater rhetoric of social justice or human/civil rights causes in a way that often sustains narratives stemming from settler-colonialism.

Further, the metaphorization of decolonization allows settlers to make a claim towards innocence by falsely reconciling their guilt and complicity while simultaneously framing the conversation away from the colonized native and around the survival and futurity of the settler. Generally, settler moves to innocence are “those strategies or positionings that attempt to relieve the settler of feelings of guilt or responsibility without giving up land or power or privilege, without having to change much at all” (Tuck & Yang 2012, 10). Settler moves to innocence as characterized by Tuck and Yang are insincere. They are those actions that make a false claim towards accountability yet maintain the dominant logics which antagonize the Native. Tuck and Yang categorize attempts at decolonizing the mind as one such move to innocence. “Another settler move to innocence,” the two write, “is to focus on decolonizing the mind, or the cultivation of critical consciousness, as if it were the sole activity of decolonization” (Tuck & Yang 2012, 19). Granted, Tuck and Yang acknowledge the power of consciousness-raising practices:

“…curricula, literature, and pedagogy can be crafted to aid people in learning to see settler colonialism, to articulate critiques of settler epistemology, and set aside settler histories and values in search of ethics that reject domination and exploitation; this is not unimportant work” (Tuck & Yang 2012, 19).

And yet, Tuck and Yang assert that, despite how liberatory this practice might feel, the “front-loading” of critical consciousness building more often than not acts as a barrier to decolonization (Tuck & Yang 2012, 19). Here, it is critical to recognize that—at least, at the outset—it is not the act of conscientization itself, but its front-loading; the prioritization of critical consciousness building at the beginning of the process of decolonization. The basic assumption here is that the psychological and the physical exist as two distinct and separate domains, with one—the physical—taking preeminence. Under this framework, then, the act of decolonization should primarily be physical: a genuine move to innocence must primarily act on the world and not on the mind. This sits in slight opposition to Thiong’o’s characterization of decolonization, which posits the two realms as mutually-reinforcing equal counterparts.

I take issue with the ordering upon which Tuck and Yang’s discussion is premised and argue that such framing ultimately hinders the project of decolonialism. Beginning in 1819 with the Indian Civilization Act and culminating in 1869 with the Peace Policy, the United States adopted an ethic of cultural retribution against Indigeneity through the means of education. Together with several denominations of the Christian church, the US authorized the construction and operation of multiple Indian boarding schools across the nation. For almost an entire century, Native youth were either voluntarily or forcefully stripped from their lands and were subjected to what can only be called torture in the name of assimilation. These institutions, epicenters of cultural genocide, had one goal in mind. Encapsulated by Captain Richard H. Pratt, founder of one of the most notorious boarding schools in the nation: to have “kill[ed] the Indian,” was to have “save[d] the man” (1892). “Theorizing citizenship into people is a slow operation,” spoke Pratt at an 1892 convention on the effectiveness and necessity of Indian boarding schools. “They must get into the swim of American citizenship. They must feel the touch of it day after day, until they become saturated with the spirit of it, and thus become equal to it” (Pratt 1892). As was the case with Portugal, Britain, and all colonial empires, the dissemination of the ideology of division and colonial superiority that began in the classroom is the first site of warfare. Without subjugating the soul of the colonized, the colonizer would remain unable to consume the land for which he craves.

In his most famous essay “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” the late historian Patrick Wolfe argues that the logic of elimination that underpins settler colonialism is both negatively and positively manifest. Negatively, the logic of elimination aims to eradicate the native through the “liquidation of Indigenous people” (Wolfe 2006, 388). Positively, this logic seeks to replace what was once native culture with the culture of the settler who fashions himself as the neo-native. The positive dimensions of the logic of elimination are accomplished through a variety of means, but notably through re-education initiatives such as the boarding schools. These strategies serve as a means of epistemic imposition, or the supplanting of settler epistemologies and ontologies onto native ones. For a settler to decolonize their mind is for them to deprivilege the dominant epistemic structures which reify the logic of elimination that sits at the core of settler colonialism. It is to win the battle of the soul. It is to finally regain the right to define the self according to one’s own terms. In this sense, I believe Thiong’o gets it right. Through an education that cultivates critical consciousness and through a language that encapsulates the history, values, and culture of the colonized, as the oppressed learn about the world and what a liberatory future might look like, they simultaneously transform the world into structures that serve their liberatory ends. This is the true sense of decolonization.

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Harrell-Bond, B., & Forer, S. (1981). Guinea-Bissau: The Colonial Experience. American Universities Field Staff. https://www.icwa.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/BHB-18.pdf

Minter, W. (1972). Portuguese Africa, and the West. Penguin Books.

Pratt, R. H. (1892). Kill the Indian, and Save the Man. https://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/4929/

Thiong’o, N. W. (1986). Decolonising the Mind. Zimbabwe Publishing House.

Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. (2012). Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1(1), 1–40.

Wolfe, P. (2012). Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native (2006). Settler Colonial Studies, 2(1), 226–252. https://doi.org/10.1080/2201473x.2012.10648834

#essay #decolonization #decolonize your mind #philosophy

Eros in the Classroom

Preamble: I wrote this essay a few years ago (maybe 2021) for a class taught by the illustrious Moya Mapps titled "Feminist Ethics". To this day, this is one of my favorite pieces of writing, and I found it absolutely necessary to memorialize it. Posting this in 2026, I have slightly edited it, specifically the ending, to read a bit more timelessly--but the message and sentiment remain the same!

Photo Credits: The New York Times

Sitting in the middle of the tenth-grade debate classroom, I stared blankly at the board. The room contained a myriad of voices—most of them belonging to white men—engaging in a clash of ideas about the US immigration system. This month’s resolution written clearly in white chalk read as follows: “The United States federal government should increase its quota of H-1B visas.” In a room full of individuals whose only exposure to immigration was mediated through the insensitive voice of Ben Shapiro (“He tells it like it is,” one of my teammates would say), I decided to step out of my comfort zone and engage the room in the only way I knew how—through my own experience. Coming from the standpoint of the daughter of Nigerian immigrants, I explained to them how their comments were harmful and how the language they used was dehumanizing and objectifying. With a snicker and slew of sheepish, pitiful gazes, the conversation continued as members of the team reoriented the conversation back to “strategy.” In that moment of embarrassment, I was deterred from ever writing myself, in my entirety, into any of my cases. In the words of Kate Manne, down, girl.

For almost the entirety of my career, I could only describe my academic self as fragmented, disembodied. Stepping into the classroom setting, I would continually be expected to leave my emotions at the door. In an almost Sisyphean struggle, I was left with the impossible task of separating the emotional—the irrational—from the logical. For a long time, the classroom, at its core, was the place where the vibrancy of the passionate self was beaten, berated, and ostracized. For marginalized bodies in particular, this task of emotional disassociation is oppressive: it assumes our existences as excessive and coerces us to reduce and reformulate our beings so that we may fit within the mold of the acceptable academic. In her paper “Love and Knowledge: Emotion in Feminist Epistemology,” feminist philosopher Allison Jaggar critiques the mind-body distinction that has emaciated the role of emotions in the production of truth. “Emotions,” writes Jaggar, are the markings of “whole persons” and “are ways in which we engage actively and even construct the world” (Jaggar, 159). The myth that emotions are not only irrelevant but obstruct the production of knowledge plays an ideological role that “bolsters the epistemic authority of the currently dominant groups” while simultaneously subverting the knowledge claims of the marginalized. This, of course, is because certain claims about reality might sometimes presuppose our emotional responses. That is, some emotions arise in response to our observations of how things are.

My discomfort around my teammates was presupposed by their use of inconsiderate language in discussing issues that I had direct and continuous exposure to. Acknowledging the validity of my response would directly incriminate their behaviors, thereby undermining the supposed objectivity of the dominant social group. These kinds of “outlaw emotions,” as Jaggar calls them, “are distinguished by their incompatibility with the dominant perceptions and values” (Jaggar, 166). When coming from the oppressed, these outlaw emotions can help to reveal aspects of reality that have been otherwise silenced by the opposing epistemic claims of the oppressor. Ultimately, Jaggar argues that we must reconcile human emotion with the pursuit of knowledge—they are co-constitutive and indispensable to one another.

I want to approach this last claim from a place that I am most intimately familiar with: the classroom. Some of my peers have raised valid objections to the outlaw emotions purported by the oppressed—namely, that there exists no singular identity of the oppressed, and that the expression of varying outlaw emotions from groups stratified on the basis of class, race, gender, and others might produce an emotional clash that further obstructs the path towards the creation of more just epistemic resources. While I agree that the universalization of the oppressed does a disservice to the project of liberation and understanding, I believe that Jaggar’s concept of outlaw emotions holds a radical power, especially when applied to pedagogy. As I continue, I hope to reveal the practicality of outlaw emotions within the classroom, focusing specifically on how embracing both passion and emotional reactions can help foster a more inclusive and epistemically fertile environment for those participating in the project of real-time knowledge production.

In her 1994 work Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, bell hooks outlines her philosophy of education. Education, according to hooks, has the power to elevate us beyond the artificially constructed social boundaries that keep us in a perpetual state of separation. hooks argues that we must have a pedagogy that resists the expectations of conformity which produce regurgitators rather than critical thinkers. For hooks and many revolutionary thinkers before her, dominant models of education produce apathetic students who are unable to obtain the zeal necessary to transform their world. For me, the uptake here is that change does not and cannot happen without emotional grounding. How, then, are we to transcend the predominant banking concept of education—an education system where teachers merely deposit content rather than encourage students to critically engage with it—and achieve a liberatory pedagogical praxis? For hooks, the answer lies in allowing eroticism to flourish in the classroom. In her chapter “Eros, Eroticism, and the Pedagogical Process,” hooks writes that when we enter the classroom “determined to erase the body and give ourselves over more fully to the mind, we show by our beings how deeply we have accepted the assumption that passion has no place in the classroom” (hooks, 192). Instead, hooks argues that it is crucial “that we learn to enter the classroom ‘whole’ and not as ‘disembodied spirit’” (hooks, 193). It is this acknowledgment that lies at the center of hooks’ conception of eroticism:

Understanding that eros is a force that enhances our overall effort to be self-actualizing, that it can provide an epistemological grounding informing how we know what we know, enables both professors and students to use such energy in a classroom setting in ways that invigorate discussion and excite the critical imagination (hooks, 194).

Put rather beautifully by the Cuban Marxist Che Guevara, “the true revolutionary is guided by strong feelings of love. It is impossible to think of an authentic [revolution] without this quality” (Gerassi, 398). Further, it is through this dialectical love that the self and the other acknowledge their inherent and reciprocal value, readying the ground for transformative dialogue. If education is to be a site of revolutionary praxis, if it is to be a place where we learn to recognize the humanity of the other, this liberatory education must first posit its subjects as whole by allowing them to feel, and feel themselves in their entirety. Further, it must allow them to recognize the validity in the passions of others: the observations that precede their emotions reveal aspects of reality that must be seriously considered when attempting to both understand and transform the world together. If such a dynamic existed within the walls of my tenth-grade debate classroom, I would not have been ridiculed for speaking up. Rather than the condescending down, girl, I would have been uplifted by my peers, encouraged to vocalize how my experience witnessing my family’s own turmoil with the US immigration system gave me a unique standpoint to be acknowledged and further explored rather than dismissed. True, authentic knowledge can only be produced when epistemic agents are in communion with each other.

I acknowledge that the image that I am attempting to paint might be considered too idealistic for some: as the original objection stated, people are not monolithic, and clash is inevitable. Under an educational system predicated upon emotional suppression, I might be inclined to take this position. Perhaps these “bad” emotional clashes come from the inability to properly analyze and consider one’s emotions. This reaction, which occurs under the status quo, is not representative of the ideal that I subscribe to. Instead, I want to argue against the negative connotations of properly channeled emotional confrontation. Rather than being harmful, I believe that these collisions can be epistemically fruitful. Dialogue suggests the existence of at least two interlocutors. So long as we are not simply talking to our own reflections, when we participate in conversations, we are aware that the other participants approach the topic from their various standpoints. While the shared ground may exist, each participant comes with a unique set of experiences, values, and observations that might differ from one another. In approaching dialogue as whole persons by allowing the unrestricted expression of matured emotions in the classroom, we create a ground of understanding that enables each participant to critically evaluate the reasons for such differences and uncover the underlying causes for emotional clash. Why did I react this way? What aspect of their identity informed their perspective? How are our standpoints compatible? How are they irreconcilable? We can reveal an onslaught of questions that can help us further complete the shared epistemic puzzle.

I think a wonderful example of this form of emotional and ideological communion in the classroom exists between the very peers in the class for which I write. Almost seven years following the incident in my debate classroom, I still remain forever grateful for the allowance and even celebration of my vulnerability. I am honored that my peers have allowed me to fellowship in the presence of their whole selves, both mind and body. I am grateful that, in their eyes, I do not exist in excess. And I am forever indebted to the teacher who encourages us to come as we were.

Freiere, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Place of Publication Not Identified: Penguin Education, 1972.

Gerassi, John. Venceremos! The Speeches and Writings of Ernesto Che Guevara. Edited, Annotated, and with an Introd. by John Gerassi (First Printing ed.). MacMillan, 1968.

Hooks, Bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York, NY: Routledge, 1994.

Jaggar, Allison. Love and knowledge: Emotion in feminist epistemology. Inquiry, no. 32 (1989): 151-176. doi: 10.1080/00201748908602185.

#essay #philosophy