'But You Aren't White:' Racial Perceptions and Service-Learning

Much of the writing on service-learning has documented how service-learning affects students' perceptions of "the other. " Service-learning, it is argued, makes students more "ethically committed" and interested in democracy (Cooper & Julier, 1997), provides students with an opportunity to explore multiculturalism (Rhoads, 1998), and engages students in the work of the "public intellectual" (Cushman, 1999). These are all important and thoughtful goals for service-learning, but much of the writing focuses on the abstract and the ideal, what happens in our service-learning classes on our best teaching days with the students who "get it. " In arguing for service-learning, we often gloss over the difficulties that students have performing service in places where they are uncomfortable, where poverty is not pretty or idealized. The service-learning student can feel disconnected, angry, frustrated, and recognize, for the first time, that service-learning is not an experience that immediately makes one "feel good. " The faculty member teaching service-learning can also feel angry and frustrated, and if she is committed to multicultural education, recognize, for the first time, that finding ways to talk about race and class is in some ways more difficult when students are confronted with lived race and class differences than when facing race and class differences as represented in textbooks and readings. This article explores one aspect of what can make my students uncomfortable--race. While talking about race is always uncomfortable, particularly for white people, it is absolutely crucial that race be addressed in service-learning courses, and especially in service-learning courses where mostly white students perform service among mostly people of color. Well-intentioned white people, both students and faculty, must learn racial awareness, and middle class people of all races must think about how class affects the service situation. It is absolutely important to talk about the intersections of race, class, and service in order to prevent service-learning from replicating the power imbalances and economic injustices that create the need for service-learning in the first place. In what follows I unpack how race and class affected some of my service-learning students, and discuss how teaching about race, particularly whiteness within the course, made it easier for students to talk with one another about race and class and to problematize their own agendas for social justice. In the fall of 2000, through a small grant, our Writing Center began reaching out to the community through intensive work with a local, Catholic middle school, Our Mother of Sorrows (OMS). This work continued the long history with OMS that our Faith/Justice Institute began. (1) In my class, rather than tutoring in the university Writing Center, each tutor worked on a weekly basis with a fifth or a sixth grader at OMS on his or her writing. The tutoring class had 14 students: 4 students of color (3 African American women and 1 Filipino American man) and 10 white women. Each week, the tutors took field notes on their experiences at OMS, and during the second half of the semester, I went out with the students to tutor and observe the tutoring. OMS is located in an inner city, urban community, a five-minute drive from our university. The OMS brochure provided for prospective parents states that it "provide[s] hope and quality education for hundreds of disadvantaged youth in our . community. " 75% of the students who attend OMS are at or below the poverty level. What the OMS brochure does not say is that virtually all of the students who attend are African American. The local Jesuit University where I teach has a long commitment to social justice work and the Jesuit ideals of "men and women for others. " The University students, in contrast with the students who attend OMS, are 92% white and 2.4% are African American. The average income of families who send their children to my university is $73,000 per year. …