Page 104 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

98 CULTURAL STUDIES

should be structured. But the standard representations of diversity and pluralism
in this country, especially in matters of race and ethnicity, need to be abandoned.
This is not an easy task to accomplish. It means candidly recognizing,
confronting and contesting negative stereotypes and general misrepresentations
of people of colour from commercial films to the news media. And it means
formulating pedagogical strategies to repair the damage done to all students from
the cumulative effect of this silent violence. This brings us back to the issue of
conceptualizing the format, content and practice of teaching cultural encounters
and, more to the point, the target audience.
It is important to personalize this: take a moment and think about courses you
have offered and ask yourselves if you considered the following three questions
when you were designing the syllabus: (1) To whom were you speaking (that is,
to which body of students in the classroom were the texts directed)? (2) For
whom were you speaking (that is, who was being represented by the selected
texts)? (3) Against whom and what were you speaking (that is, what were the
underlying political messages which the course was meant to convey)? In other
words, whose histories are excluded, distorted or misrepresented? Whose
identities are negated and at the expense of whom?
Parenthetically, this is rather tricky and not a solicitation for a relativist notion
of sensitivity. For instance, I would vehemently protest the inclusion and
presentation of white supremacist and Nazi perspectives as legitimate cultural
points of view. This of course raises the issue of how to tread the thin line
between revisionism and falsification. Specifically, a firm effort should be
undertaken to arrest the Holocaust denial propaganda which has insidiously
penetrated the academic arena as though it were entitled to the benefits of free
speech and the privilege of being incorporated as conscientious scholarship. 8
And here one can turn to Franz Fanon’s insightful comment:

At first thought it may seem strange that the anti-Semite’s outlook should
be related to that of the Negrophobe. It was my philosophy professor, a
native of the Antilles, who recalled the fact to me one day: ‘Whenever you
hear anyone abuse the Jews, pay attention, because he is talking about
you.’ And I found that he was universally right—by which I meant that I was
answerable in my body and in my heart for what was done to my brother.
Later I realized that he meant, quite simply, an anti-Semite is inevitably an
anti-Negro.
(Fanon, 1967:122)

It cannot be overstated that the invisibility of whiteness, as a raceless subjectivity, 9
is reproduced and reinforced when persistently ‘the Others’— those about whom
one reads in a course of study—not only include those already marked by the
language of marginality (as in the word ‘minorities’) but the texts about ‘the
unequally empowered’ often reinforce the very stereotypes which should be
under target. For instance, law professor Randall Kennedy points to