18 - Death Can Be Clarifying: Considering the Forces That Move Us

Summary

Introduction

Emotions always do things. They may move us and prompt uncomfortable, if necessary, social change. Equally, they may crystallize in ‘affective numbness’ (Rogers, 2021) – the impulse and capacity to say or do nothing, which is facilitated by race privilege. As Machado de Oliveira (2021: 52) says with respect to those of us who enjoy the relative (if differential) privileges born of modernity, ‘despite our transgressions and rebellions and our ideals of revolution, our struggles do not structurally jeopardize our survival: we have a choice to show up or not’. Within the context of Australian higher education, affective numbness manifests most fluidly around and through those of us who are white. It may surface as the failure to raise difficult if necessary workplace conversations which challenge racial bias; to initiate ‘taboo’ conversations around race with majority white, often resistant learners; or to fail ‘to emotionally or “affectively” engage with nondominant experiences’ (Zembylas, 2023: 2). Research and teaching on race in white Australia is emotional – especially within teacher education, where most preservice teachers are white. Indeed, Australian teachers frequently report being ‘scared’ (Maher, 2022) if not ‘paralysed’ (Memon et al, 2023) in their efforts to embrace this discomforting terrain. Yet working with racialized emotions is a part of effective, ethical teaching.

This chapter reflects on the relationship between emotions and race. Specifically, I consider two emotional incidents as a backdrop to my work as a ‘white’ academic in Australian teacher education. Both incidents invoke death: the first involving a Kenyan village where I was a volunteer teacher – or ‘voluntourist’ – and the second involving the more recent deaths of my parents. Extreme incidents that surface emotions/ affects categorized as exceptional can shift our perceptions to elicit ‘deeper analyses of the practices in which we live and work’ (Lowe and Galstaun, 2020: 93). Emotional encounters are thus one vehicle for exploring how we are affectively governed, and how racial literacy education may usefully co- opt the body's sensory capacities to engage students in ‘affective’ learning. The following section starts with a theoretical discussion of the relationships between emotions and race. The chapter then explores the two personal narratives and is offered overall as a resource for racial literacy education that floodlights the emotionality of race.