Permission to share what they think about racism: tutors reflect on encounters with students

Permission to share what they think

The concept mentalisation highlights how tutors attend to the mutually constitutive interplay between inner and outer aspects of experience as they assign meaning to encounters with students. Tutors who self-identify as Black women and coloured women reflect on this enmeshment by configuring students as individuals who cannot be disconnected from wider structures. Such reflections emerged when tutors explained how they stimulate conversation among students:

I get them to participate by asking provocative questions like are characters poor because they are Black or because they are lazy? These questions provoke opinions especially from Black students. I do think the fact that students see me as a Black woman lets me show them they are allowed to share what they think instead of having to censor themselves which I think they learn to do elsewhere on campus. (Letsha)

I ask difficult questions to show students that talking is okay. Because I don’t think that’s true everywhere on campus. For example, why are some characters made to feel like they don’t belong in certain spaces? How does that speak to real life? It takes students a long time to start saying openly that it’s racialised. But I think being seen by students as a coloured woman gives me more legitimacy. (Gina)

Tutors clarify the intended function of ‘provocative’ or ‘difficult’ questions and then engage their own intersectional positionalities. That is, ‘as a Black woman’ or ‘as a coloured woman’, they believe students are more likely to accept them as authorities on racism because they can speak from experiential knowledge. This approach contrasts sharply with participants in Kennedy and Young (2019), who leverage a discourse of racial innocence, which disconnects interpersonal interactions from broader sociopolitical issues affecting South Africa. The tutors’ reflections on how to actively involve students in creating knowledge locates the exchange in a wider, institutional context. They foreground the likelihood that students’ experiences ‘elsewhere on campus’ might have predisposed them to ‘censor themselves’. This observation aligns with extensive CRT research suggesting that students often learn that deliberations about racism should be avoided or kept superficial (Adonis and Silinda, 2021; Hawkman, 2022).

Mindful of this contextual embeddedness, these tutors respond by proactively venturing into potentially uncomfortable terrain, using ‘provocative’ and ‘difficult’ questions intended to stimulate students into responding. Given their authority as tutors, responsible for setting the tone and direction of the conversation, venturing into these questions might help to normalise candid engagement with topics that could be censored outside tutorials. Moreover, they aver that their intersectional positionalities might encourage students to consider them receptive to critical views on racism. Said differently, instead of decontextualising and depoliticising students’ initial silence, they appreciate that students might need permission to openly discuss racism owing to institutional arrangements that discourage candour.

This is the first module where students are allowed to link personal experience with texts on racism, so I need to show them it is permitted. It took until the middle of the semester for students to believe that I really wanted to hear their honest opinions. (Letsha)

In some of their writing, students do say how they know what the characters go through is real because similar things happen to them. I did encourage them openly to elaborate on those links, but only if they are comfortable sharing because sharing might be too intense in some cases, I think. I don’t think they would have done if I had not invited it. (Gina)

In terms of mentalisation, tutors’ emphasis on giving students permission and encouragement to discuss racism reflects a recognition that individual students work under structural impediments. In response, tutors attempt to model critical candour. Their responses evince a dual awareness that the tutor–student relationship is impacted both by such structures and by the positionalities from which tutors speak, including racialised and gendered subjectivities. As such, these tutors acknowledge that students may have been enculturated to accept self-censorship, and they attempt to mitigate the stifling impact of this censorship. Individual students are thus understood in relation to external structures.

However, tutors also encounter resistance in relation to the intersectional subject positions from which they speak. In what follows, I explore these problems as broached by tutors who identify as Black and female, since they were the only tutors whose groups did not consist exclusively of Black-identifying students.

But that advantage of being a Black woman who says provocative things only comes with my Black students. White students don’t take so well with the way I go about discussions. They find me exhausting and go silent. (Atile)

During the interview, this tutor (and those she represents) discussed the vulnerability she feels when white students ‘go silent’. She also acknowledges the vulnerability students might experience, thus positioning herself as both affecting and affected by them. Subsequently, she interprets this affectively charged response as follows.

It’s difficult to mediate between Black students who are a majority in my groups and who respond as if I have given them permission to finally share what they are thinking and white students. It’s unnerving for me when they go silent, but I think they feel like they can’t participate because they don’t think or feel what Black students do so they think they won’t be heard. I don’t know how to bring them out of that because I do want to hear from them. (Atile)

Here the tutor expresses vulnerability about the challenges involved in prompting white students to collaborate with Black peers. She frames white students’ predilection to ‘go silent’ as impelled by their inability to ‘think or feel what Black students do’. On the one hand, proposing that white students struggle when encountering knowledge about racism certainly accords with CRT, even if she does not invoke that theory here. On the other, in terms of mentalisation, her meaning-making efforts around white students show less nuance than her insight into Black students’ reactions to provocative questions, since she does not embed white students’ silence in a richer context that accounts for white privilege.

CRT projects in South Africa and elsewhere have documented how institutions of higher learning tacitly prioritise the affective comfort of white students by means of institutionalised whiteness (Adonis and Silinda, 2021). It is therefore possible that some white students only encounter such candour around racism during these tutorials. Moreover, some of these encounters between white students and theorisations of racism are facilitated by Black women tutors who pose ‘provocative’ questions. Under such conditions, silence can be a power-evasive strategy, and yet such considerations are absent from interviews with the three tutors who identify as Black women. However, to account for this the interview context must be implicated, as explained next.

As Kennedy and Young (2019) stress, interviews constitute sites where knowledge is discursively co-produced, which mediates the capacity to mentalise. As the interviewer, I could have supported deeper exploration, prompting the tutors to weigh more nuanced accounts for white students’ silence. This, in turn, could have sharpened insight into white privilege while concurrently resisting a homogenised reading of white students. Instead, my interviews with these tutors concentrated more heavily on their experiences with Black students, since tutors were keen to discuss these students’ initial hesitation. Fortunately, the three tutors who identify as Black women pointed this out during post-interview debriefing sessions and, in response, they broached a series of more textured readings. These are discussed below.

Reflecting on resistance

Some white students may fall silent because learning about racism threatens their sense of individual, moral selfhood by revealing how individuals are embedded in unjust social structures. Silence, thus understood, is not an innocent disagreement or epistemic aphasia, but instead reflects white fragility and a subtle collusion with racism. As Adu-Gyamfi et al. (2022) put it, these racially evasive silences from white students are ‘the surface responses [or] the outward expression of an underlying white emotionality such as shame’ (p. 74). Nonetheless, some white students may, over time, come to comprehend that ‘provocative’ pedagogic techniques are needed, since they model the candour and vulnerability that is exigent for naming oppression and enriching knowledge.

Finally, some white students may remain silent during tutorials owing to the dynamics involved in speaking to fellow students and to tutors who possess experiential knowledge about racism. To clarify, some white students might consider their own contributions superfluous or even offensive, as a means of recentring whiteness in a space where lived experiences of marginalisation should be prioritised.

In short, tutors showcased a capacity to reflect carefully on encounters with white students, and specifically for reading students’ silence as emanating not only from discomfort in the moment, but also from racist stratification, which sustains white fragility. Doing so is necessary since tutors might encounter these enactments of white fragility in future tutorials and in their professional futures more broadly. However, white fragility must also be meaningfully problematised by the institutions that employ tutors, instead of foisting this labour on tutors exclusively.

Speaking versus writing

The tutors cited below all identify as white and female. CRT interrogations of whiteness have uncovered multiple discourses that enable white-identifying subjects to downplay the severity of racism and/or to construct racialised others as deficient (Hawkman, 2022; Kennedy and Young, 2019; Vachon, 2022). Given this danger, the discursive resources that shape mentalisation among white tutors warrant study. This section maps how white-identifying tutors make sense of interactions with students.

My sense is that they know that systemic racism exists, but they won’t acknowledge it openly during sessions or discuss how it affects them. They will mention how some Black characters are poor or feel alienated, but they won’t tie this to racism even though some students probably experience something like this. (Eva)

Students are very careful and very awkward talking about racism as anything more than micro-aggressions. When they talk about poverty in the texts, they don’t link it to racism. Only the most obvious forms of racist name-calling are called racist. (Amanda)

My students are very reluctant to talk about anything more than name-calling and individual prejudice in the texts. They seem wary to talk about racism as systemic as it affects characters or as it personally relates to them. (Cindy)

None of these white-identifying interviewees assert that students lack the academic aptitude to theorise racism as systemic. Instead of framing students as inadequate, tutors report a willingness among students to discuss the hardships endured by characters, but a commensurate reluctance to read these privations as fundamentally and systemically racialised. However, ten of the 14 tutors who self-identify as white and female observed a disjunction between students’ verbal participation during tutorials and the writing projects they submitted for assessment.

I think students are nervous with complex issues like racism where finding words to express yourself honestly and sensitively is hard, but what I noticed over time is even though they say little during tutorials they write about racism in more depth. Writing is where students link personal experiences of poverty with racism as more than prejudice. They make arguments about how the texts depict racism and substantiate their arguments by using personal experience. (Amanda)

In writing students developed a formula. First they discuss how primary texts treat racism. Then they explain how the texts engage the world as they experience it including poverty as racism. So, in writing they are more comfortable compared to speaking to an audience, even when its writing for assessment, which can be intimidating. (Cindy)

When requested to elaborate on this dichotomy between verbal participation during tutorials and writing for assessment, tutors attempt to situate individual students within the interactional contexts and structures that mediate how students engage the texts.

I read a bunch of touching and even heart-breaking essays about students or their families experiencing systemic racism. It looks to me like students were more comfortable sharing such stories in essays that only I will read. In feedback I told them that I would like to see who they are as students in relation to the texts if they are comfortable sharing like that. (Amanda)

I can understand why students might not want to speak up during sessions with other students around. I think a lot of students are really hurt by what happens to them. When they start writing, some of them seem to forget about the assessor, as if they are allowed a sort of safe space to voice things. (Cindy)

It’s as if writing makes them feel like they are not just student numbers but people in ways that don’t work with an audience listening. That’s my impression from assessing their writing. (Eva)

Viewed through the lens of mentalisation, these attempts by tutors to account for students’ responses show promise in some respects, while also remaining problematic.

At one level, tutors demonstrate some critical reflection by carefully marking their accounts with uncertainty. Hedges such as ‘It looks to me’, ‘I think’ and ‘That’s my impression’ are common. Stronger qualifying statements are also present, including ‘This is what I think but I don’t know as much about my students as I’d like’ or ‘There is so much about them I don’t know, but I think’. For Kennedy and Young (2019), uncertainty can reinforce healthy mentalisation if it signals an openness for further exploration beyond the explanations that are immediately felt to be reasonable or true.

More strikingly, the tutors attempt to situate students’ responses in a broader socio-historical context – certainly to a more advanced degree than participants in Kennedy and Young (2019). Students are not castigated as academically deficient, which is noteworthy, since deficit discourses surface regularly in research on whiteness and its imbrication in neoliberal ideologies that frame universities as race-neutral bastions of meritocracy (Adonis and Silinda, 2021; Hawkman, 2022). Nor is it suggested that students do not talk about racism because we live in a post-racial world in which students no longer experience racism – claims that have also been reported in studies on whiteness (Adu-Gyamfi et al., 2022). In short, tutors do not individualise students. Instead, tutors acknowledge the structural character of racism by actively considering the likelihood that Black students’ lives are marked by injustice. Relatedly, they attempt to recognise the likelihood that uncovering and discussing the impact of racism on their lives is a painful, face-threatening process for students, prompting them to devote more energy to analysing racism as both structural and personal in writing rather than in group interactions.

Premised on these considerations, the tutors’ most common discourse for understanding students is to see them as uncomfortable with an overhearing audience when attempting to read racism as both systemic and personally relevant. Moreover, tutors cite some evidence to support this interpretation by asserting that students showed a stronger aptitude during writing compared with speaking. In writing, more students linked the texts under study with systemic racism and with personal experience. This prompts tutors to postulate that writing yielded a comparatively higher degree of freedom from anxiety.

Another level at which tutors frame students’ behaviour as impacted by the interpenetration of inner and outer worlds is by recognising the value of encouragement and permission.

In feedback I told them that I would like to see who they are as students in relation to the texts if they are comfortable sharing like that. (Amanda)

I did invite them to keep doing this in writing if they were comfortable, telling them that it is perfectly acceptable. (Miranda)

I am not sure whether they would have kept doing it if I did not say it was okay. (Sophy)

Such moves to explicitly grant permission proved common among all tutors, regardless of racialised and gendered identifications. Its pervasiveness suggests a capacity for mentalising about students in relation to structures that necessitate explicit encouragement to explore racism and to link the literary texts under study with lived realities. Put differently, tutors assert that students need such encouragement because they do not necessarily receive it elsewhere on campus. However, the modes of mentalisation that are facilitated by the above-mentioned discourses also reflect potential shortfalls, as argued next.

Interrogating positionality

In addition to the above-mentioned dichotomy between speaking and writing, most of the tutors, regardless of gendered and racialised identification, also aver two additional explanations for students’ difficulty with openly discussing systemic racism during tutorials.

One is that online interactions necessitated by the Covid-19 pandemic stunted the development of a sense of community and solidarity needed for collaborative knowledge production around racism.

I asked and most of my students have never met each other in person because of Covid. Talking about racism like this is potentially painful. Why would students share something so personal and painful with people who even by the middle of semester are still strangers? But when they write, maybe it’s different. (Miranda)

Here tutors reflect on the contextual factors that shape student participation and they focus on the value of nurturing community among students. The value of community is then linked to observations about module design.

Although the module in which this study is situated explicitly invites students to examine systemic racism by setting prescribed texts in conversation with experiences, the other modules students have completed to date do not openly welcome this practice. Even tutors who relied on ‘provocative’ and ‘difficult’ questions, as mentioned earlier, insisted that most students showed a stronger aptitude for linking systemic racism with lived realities in their writing, and they aver that this difference is impelled by the lack of broader institutional support for this kind of thinking among students.

In other modules I tutor, working with personal views on the texts and how it links to personal experiences are not part of the deal. (Cindy)

In other modules there is no space for connecting texts with personal and community knowledge. Students are not invited to relate to the stories at that level. (Letsha)

The argument is that students have not been rigorously acclimatised to this pedagogic approach. Interventions from those invested with the institutional authority to optimise the conditions under which tutors work are thus needed. Read through the lens of mentalisation, these reflections suggest that tutors have developed an appreciation of the collective and individual barriers students must overcome to undergo the discomforting and even painful process of exploring racism as a force that structures their academic and personal lives. While literary texts can provide perspectives on such realities, using them to teach about systemic racism cannot be done effectively without attempting to mitigate the complications that tutors and students experience together.

However, across the interviews, an omission became evident from tutors who identify as white. In contrast to those identifying as Black women and coloured women, reflections on intersectional positionality and its possible impact on teaching were muted. When asked, white tutors admitted a degree of risk.

I do tell my students that I am a white woman. That is my experience in life. I do know that not everyone is going to relate to me. Some of them will feel that I do not understand. (Cindy)

I do think there is a risk that some of the Black students might feel that as a white person I would not understand them when they link the texts with their own worlds. (Miranda)

These portions of the interviews saw tutors deliver brief responses, even when encouraged to elaborate. What emerges is not a fully-fledged version of the discourse of racial innocence as documented by Kennedy and Young (2019). Participants do not fully disconnect themselves from racism, but their capacity to situate themselves in a wider context is truncated. Mentalisation is thus compromised by closing it down beyond a certain point. Put differently, there is a danger that white tutors might treat the process of teaching about racism to predominantly Black students as sufficient on its own, allowing them to circumvent further critical work on the self. Listening to and reading about students’ lived realities is then framed as an end point. Analysing these sections of the interviews using a CRT approach to mentalisation surfaces how white tutors struggle to reflect substantively on the subtle operations of whiteness at both individual and institutional levels, and the entwinement between the two.

To clarify, tutors admit that racism is systemic. They also express value for the experiential knowledge offered by students, especially students who confront racism in everyday life. They accede that being white might hinder cooperation with students who face racism. Although these observations cohere with recommendations from CRT and are important steps towards critical consciousness, more penetrating implications for future pedagogic exchanges prove difficult to explore and to articulate during the interviews.

A wealth of CRT scholarship explicates how white educators must move beyond simply expressing awareness of institutional racism. What is necessary is a critical engagement with the danger that their own teaching practices can reify prevailing inequities. To decentre whiteness in education, white educators are encouraged to undergo an ongoing learning process. This includes rendering themselves open and vulnerable to the epistemic positions from which students speak, especially if minoritised students expose white educators’ embeddedness in oppressive systems – as students might in the module under study (Hawkman, 2022; Rolon-Dow et al., 2022; Vachon, 2022). It seems unlikely that training procedures have rigorously equipped tutors to delve into these complexities. From the perspective of mentalisation, this limitation is disclosed by a sparse range of discursive resources helping tutors to envision and untangle the relationship between their own, subjective experiences of tutorial sessions and institutionalised whiteness.

However, the interview context must be implicated here, again. Tutors were fully apprised of the researcher’s scholarly interests. For white tutors, this could heighten anxiety by highlighting the risk of being called racist, thus aggravating their difficulties with reflecting critically beyond simply mentioning that ‘not everyone is going to relate to me’. Additionally, considering tutors’ liminal position and lack of power to produce change beyond the circumscriptions of their immediate pedagogic interactions with students, it is also possible that tutors were uncertain about how to reflect more substantively on their own whiteness. Nonetheless, this result pinpoints how training procedures might be improved. Mentalisation reminds scholars about the complexities of affect, and that tutors’ capacity to frame their own positionality in relation to broader systems must be supported more robustly, possibly by using anonymised case studies from CRT research including the present study.

Although Kennedy and Young (2019) address a markedly different context compared with the present study, specific tangents of their argument are nevertheless relevant, as discussed next.