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Where
Are You Comin' From, Where Are You Goin' To:
Implications for Future Research As critical theorist Stuart Hall (1992) explains:
The research presented here illustrates some of the creative ways in which Blacks have resisted the Black/White, insider/outsider dichotomy, and also the ways in which they have consented to it. Critical scholars might explore other ways in which communities create, maintain, or consent to the dominant order. As members of an academic community, scholars could also begin to address the ways that they place themselves and their subjects, too. I recommend that further research address how scholars enact placing and whether it reproduces dominant ideologies or challenges them. What specific, local forms and strategies are used at a conference, for instance, or in the classroom? I encourage scholars to reflect upon and analyze their own community memberships and how they negotiate their placing and placement within them. In the classroom, professors teaching Black students can recognize their potential role as people "in the know." By reaching out to students and letting them voice where they are from--what territories and communities inform their ideologies and identities--teachers and professors can discover what territories they do share with Black students, if not race. Black students want to take off the mask, but in order to do so they must be provided with a classroom, if not a campus, in which they do not have to anticipate being contained in a restrictive, fixed, and often stereotyped place. Professors can learn something from the organizations and departments where Black students already find people in the know, such as MBP, BBA, BSU, and Pan African Studies. Through collaboration with such organizations, teachers at all levels might help extend a sense of community into the classroom. In addition, students of all ethnicities and races might benefit from recognizing how they may place others (and themselves) in fixed territories, without realizing that placements are not natural but always contested and in process. Whites in particular need to acknowledge and identify how they may name others' territories and "protect" their own -- whether by writing people of color out of history books or by constructing "fortress communities" where people of color are not allowed without a "pass." Both Whites and people of color can examine the ways in which they may migrate across territories, always negotiating placement relationally and in context. When individuals resist placement in territory named by
others, they create a fault line in the dominant order. They begin a struggle
for places where they are not fixed or contained in an essentialized territory,
and where they are not considered separate from the larger community that
includes people of many ethnicities and cultures. When Whites resist placement
in privileged, reinforced space, then they, too, are breaking down the
artificial walls that try to contain identities that are fluid, contingent,
and negotiated. Only then do we free ourselves to remember where we are
from, and to know where we're goin' -- across many borders and margins
in our daily, never-ending journey.
Next> Endnotes
Placing and Black Students' Discursive Construction of Community Copyright (c) 1996, Corinna J. Moebius |