Speaking to / Speaking for

When I went back to school post-college to earn my teaching certification, I was in a class called Human Relations I (how's that for specificity?!). One of the major assignments, in addition to doing fieldwork (mostly tutoring and classroom observations in a nearby elementary school), was to participate in several interactions or events where we would be in the racial, socio-economic or religious minority. The point was to go outside of our comfort zone and report back on our experience. We weren't gathering ethnographic notes or data, or collaborating on a creative or service endeavor, or interviewing anyone or studying anything beyond our own reactions to being there. My professor surprised me by suggesting that for one of my experiences I go eat dinner at a shelter that served free meals every evening. I said, "You mean volunteer there?" She said, "No. Go eat there. Stand in line, receive your meal, and sit at a table and eat it." She reassured me that my partaking of the meal was not going to deprive someone else of food. She said that one marker of privilege is to adopt the role of provider and server, and she was encouraging me to notice that, and be aware of my own discomfort in being the recipient vs. the giver of sustenance. It was a weird and dissonant experience, brought to mind nearly a decade since living it by reading Cantwell's piece on the cognitive act of stereotypes and Ritchie's piece on ventriloquist folklore.

I think the most uncomfortable facet of eating at the shelter was not being able to label and place the experience. I didn't have a place to cognitively store the unfamiliar. I couldn't label my own role or position in relation to these unfamiliar people in an unfamiliar place doing something I'd never done before: accept food I wasn't paying for from people I didn't know. I was trying to see myself and didn't know where to look or how to define what I saw. (Cantwell: "The moments of cognition and figuration that form the stereotype form also, in relation to it, the many incarnations of self whose right name is perhaps 'identity'" (184).)I found myself stereotyping and generalizing (in many instances, the stereotypes were directed at myself, almost as a kind of mental defense against what I feared other people eating there would think of me: oh, how like a 20-something liberal college kid to wear x or think y), and then trying to repress the stereotypes and generalizations. I felt embarrassed and awkward. I prayed no one would ask me why I was there because I was ashamed to say that it was for course credit. Of course, the men at my table asked me why I was there, and I said it was for a class and explained what I understood to be the point of the assignment. Some of the men laughed and launched into stories; some men left and went to different tables; some men ignored me; the man on my right asked me some more questions. Then I finished eating and cleared my place at the table and went home.

It occurs to me now that the experience at the shelter was strange to me because I was in the habit of privileging what Ritchie calls ventriloquist folklore. I wanted to be of use, to be serving others or collecting stories that would "give voice to the voiceless." That night, I'm sure I would have felt legitimized if I'd had a clipboard and tape recorder in hand and had been collecting stories over the meal. I had no understanding that to perform and depend on such ventriloquism has the effect of preserving, not disrupting, hegemony.

I still don't think I understand what Ritchie proposes we do about it. I hope we can talk about this in class.

- Esme Schwall