(I moved this to the eduhonesty.com blog but left it here, too.)
“You can’t go wrong if you keep silent,” the woman said.
She was telling white people not to insert themselves into the discussion spaces of other, non-white groups. Save your great opinions and listen, she tried to say. She made good points about cultural sensitivity. White Americans are programmed to leap into the protest march, shouting and waving their signs while vigorously speaking up for the less-fortunate, whoever those poor people might be.
That said, I’ve heard this narrative before. The call to silence white people has gained traction in the recent past. Another part of the same discussion extended that call to silence.
“‘I meant well’ is no excuse,” the speaker said. “Yes, you meant well, but you brought it right back to you.”
Her audience was listening attentively. I expect some of those listeners will actively try to be quieter, will intrude less often into unfamiliar cultural spaces. Less whitesplainin’ will decrease awkwardness and annoyance.
But I have growing reservations about the recent calls to silence. Social anxiety besets many of us. In any staff meeting of teachers, one finds fearless talkers — teaching favors extroverts — but also silent colleagues with their eyes mostly on their notes. These note watchers and takers speak up rarely, mostly when the spotlight falls on them against their will or a huge injustice appears to be underway. I worry that the quiet people especially will simply begin to avoid nonwhite spaces and will cease to be allies in the fight to provide equal education and equal opportunity to all. A call to silence can be a relief to someone who would prefer not to speak in the first place, a justification for avoiding awkward and potentially painful conversations. At what point does that relief become permission to drop issues of social equality in favor of less frightening topics? One reason so many health teachers of the past described anatomy in excessive detail was that putting parts into a puzzle allowed a teacher to avoid the topic of how those parts might be used.
Here’s a vote for inclusivity, one that allows for a little whitesplainin’ and bumbling — because we all have those bumpy, bumbly moments, along with a reminder to my white readers that, in fact, you cannot know what it’s like to be African-American or a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation.
Here’s a vote for silence, kindness, compassion and communication as we gather together to fix historical wrongs.
