Nurturing the Nepantlera Within: Working in the Borderlands of Our Prejudices

In the early 1980s, I hired a team of diversity trainers to help the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Boston State College work on racial tensions within the department. I had recently participated in a series of racism-awareness workshops for white women and hoped that a racism-awareness workshop would help the department. As part of the diversity work, Dr. Jean Griffin (1) and the late Dr. Clara Mayo (2) gave us a homework assignment: We were to keep a journal documenting our first, unedited reactions to people of races/colors different from ourselves. That assignment proved very effective in helping me identify and own my semi-conscious reactions and I decided to use a version of it in courses, focusing on a broad range of differences. At the time that I began using it as a pedagogical tool I didn't have a conceptual rationale for the assignment; I simply knew that it had helped me and I hoped that it would help students. Indeed, the vast majority of students find the exercise very useful. I regularly use this exercise, which I have come to call the "differences journal," in a senior internship course that focuses on social services, multicultural issues, and trauma. (See Appendix for a description of the assignment.) Students work 10 hours per week in a social service agency and spend 3 hours per week in class. Most plan careers in social services. My pedagogical approach is based on the contact hypothesis of prejudice reduction developed by Gordon Allport (1954). This approach argues that prejudice is likely to diminish when 4 conditions are present: (1) equal status between the parties involved (i.e., students have generally equal status and are hopefully treated equally by the teacher); (2) cooperative activity among group members focused on common goals (i.e., there is a task to be done; go for it); (3) opportunity to get to know each other (i.e., enough "down" time to chat informally); and (4) Support for contact among diverse individuals by legitimate authority (i.e., the teacher expects diverse teams of students to work together productively). To Allport's approach I add a component of self-awareness in the form of the differences journal, which is where Anzaldua's ideas apply. Although I did not have Anzaldua in mind when I started to use this exercise, I find it to be an excellent fit with the concepts of borderlands, conocimiento, and nepantla/nepantlera. Anzaldua asks us to deepen our awareness of what we know about both ourselves and others by exploring the borderlands within ourselves, between people, and between groups. The exploration of this space leads to greater awareness: conocimiento. This knowledge can then be used constructively by those who want to help bridge the rifts between people and groups by becoming nepantleras--those who work toward understanding and healing in this tough border space. In applying some of Anzaldua's ideas in classroom practice, I make a few assumptions. First, I agree with Anzaldua that most white people have choices about whether and when to address racism and I assume that many will choose to avoid addressing it unless supported to do so: The refusal to think about race (itself a form of racism) is a "white" privilege ... Though many understand the racism perpetrated by white individuals, most do not understand the racism inherent in their identities, in their cultures' stories. They can't see that racism harms them as well as people of color, itself a racially superior attitude. Those who see don't feel prepared to deal with race, though they do "feel bad" about it, suffering the monkey on their backs--survivor guilt, the guilt of privilege that, unacknowledged, breeds greater guilt. (2002: 564) The differences journal eliminates the option to refuse to think about race/color since that is a required category of difference that needs to be addressed to successfully complete the assignment. …