We’re not Going Anywhere: Performing Race
In teaching an annual course on language and discrimination, I found that
arguments rarely escalated past the usual soft-voiced and apologetic
differences of opinion. One exception came during a class discussion on
English-Only. A Mexicana student raised the subject of the growing Latino
population in California and what that meant to a majority-rule-based
electoral system and language rights. The tension in the room was
immediate.
Another student said to her, quite defensively, “WE settled California”
to which she responded with a short, concise history of Spanish
settlements in the Southwest that predated Anglo settlements by a good
margin. There was an awkward silence.
Then the other student said, “We’re still the majority.”
To which she said, “We were there first, and we’re still there and we’re
not going anywhere.” She might have added, and it won’t be so long before
we’re the majority, bucko, but she withheld, quite sensibly, that obvious
fact.
Another student, quiet until that point, raised the question of individual
liberties, the Bill of Rights, and language, and the conversation veered
away. It is my practice to allow such conversations to run their natural
course without interruption or manipulation, though in this case I was
sorry the discussion ended so quickly
This kind of exchange repeats itself daily, in all kinds of communication
acts in every possible setting and tone. One way to look at such
interactions is by means of performance theory.
Human beings are by nature performers; we project our identities again
and again to ourselves and everyone else, in an act that that provides a
kind of psychological cultural grounding. In our everyday lives we
“simultaneously recognize, substantiate, and (re)create ourselves as well
as Others through performance ... performance becomes a ubiquitous
force in our social and discursive universe” (Madison 2005: 73–74).
In a classroom where societal racism is discussed and confronted, the
performance of race and ethnicity can become emotionally extreme. In
such situations there is more than factual knowledge at stake, there is also
the individual’s sense and understanding of self. The exchange in my
classroom was immediately fraught, because by asserting herself, the
Mexicana student was challenging the conventionally taught history of the