It is not easy to teach students about injustice. This can be especially true when matters of inequality, domination, and violence are everyday and present tense—not mediated through fiction, nor distanced by history. In my Writing 101 course, “Land of the Free: Liberty, Justice, and Imprisonment in the United States,” students grapple with controversial issues like the contemporary legacies of slavery and convict leasing, racial inequality in the U.S. justice system, and the casual use of solitary confinement in contemporary corrections. To critically examine these issues and come to their own conclusions, my students draw upon political philosophy and social theory, which provide some degree of abstraction from the controversial practices we study. Nevertheless, at the end of the day, students are expected to closely and deeply examine issues that many people would rather ignore. This is difficult work, especially when students—for myriad reasons—have an interest in viewing their society as a fundamentally just and fair place.
Several times last semester, I noticed students pulling back from the material we were discussing. They weren’t disengaging or shutting down, exactly. Rather, they would suddenly redirect sophisticated and challenging discussions of injustice toward easier, more comfortable truisms. These weren’t moments of conflict or duress and, as far as I could tell, the conversations hadn’t put anyone in an excessively vulnerable position. But it was as if some of the students suddenly declared, “Alright, that’s enough critical thinking! Back to the shallow end of the pool.”
I couldn’t figure out what was going on until I read Kim A. Case and Annette Hemmings’s work on the “distancing strategies” that students commonly use to dissociate themselves from the inequality, violence, or oppression that they study in class. The authors outline three general forms of student distancing: remaining silent, social dissociation, and separating from responsibility. When students remain silent, they disengage from class conversations. When they dissociate, they attempt to convince others that they do not participate in the injustice under discussion. When students separate from responsibility, they attribute responsibility for injustice to anyone but themselves and the groups to which they belong.
In my own classes, the second and third distancing strategies have been the most common. For instance, my students have occasionally dissociated from discussions of racism by invoking the problematic discourse of “color-blindness,” claiming not to “see race” and to treat everyone the same. And they have separated from responsibility by placing the blame for today’s racial inequality entirely on previous generations who “didn’t know better,” or on backwards “good old boys” who cling to explicitly racist views. With both strategies, they remove themselves from discussions of injustice, presenting it as something that only other people do.
I do not believe that my students intend to use these strategies to remove themselves from the scope of our critical discussions. Rather, distancing channels socially sanctioned and “appropriate” ways to talk about injustice. Much like etiquette, distancing operates in a largely unconscious manner.
To this extent, the pedagogical literature on student distancing has helped me understand what is going on in my classroom. However, I quibble with that literature in one important respect that—I hope—has relevance for how teachers treat matters of injustice in their classrooms. According to Case and Hemmings, and others like Barbara Applebaum, students use distancing strategies to deny their complicity in systemic injustice, and thereby protect their self-conceptions as moral individuals. This is likely true, but I think there is more going on here. If we focus too tightly on denials of complicity, we risk missing the wider stakes of student distancing.
In a paper that I am currently revising, I argue that students (and others, including professors!) engage in distancing in order to protect, not merely their self-conceptions, but also their familiar understandings of the social world itself. When we employ distancing strategies—for instance, when we use historical narratives of progress to excuse ourselves from confronting contemporary oppression—we are consciously or unconsciously refusing to consider the ways that injustice shapes our social world, our experiences, our relationships, and our identities. What is at stake in student distancing, then, is not simply a denial of complicity, but a more thoroughgoing refusal to examine the realities that condition society, knowledge, and self.
To me, this makes distancing a significant pedagogical problem, insofar as it blocks critical inquiry into the very things—self, society, and knowledge—that the liberal arts aim to illuminate. To clear this blockage, Case and Hemmings suggest a “meta-dialogic” approach—calling attention to the ways that students talk about injustice (or, more to the point, talk around it). This has prompted me to stop class discussions when I notice students distancing, so that I can have them reflect out loud or in writing on the discursive choices they’ve made, the ways these choices illuminate or obscure the matter at hand, and how they might enable or disable us from hearing other analyses.
This meta-dialogic response to student distancing is, of course, just one step toward resolving the difficulties that students (and teachers!) have when discussing injustice. In my previous post, I suggested that if higher education really hopes to prepare students for lives of active citizenship, we need to help them become more sensitive to matters of in/justice, more able to hear the needs and grievances of others, and more willing to ask questions about how things ought to be. That work will take whole communities of committed teachers and students. However, one important step we can take in our own classrooms is to notice when students—and we ourselves—rely upon distancing strategies to relieve us of the necessary burden of self-reflectively learning about injustice and its effects.
IMAGE CREDIT: Photo by ashishacoway is licensed under CC0 Public Domain.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Matt S. Whitt uses political theory and philosophy to examine the acts of inclusion and exclusion that democratic communities use to define themselves. At Duke, he teaches two first-year writing seminars: “‘We the People’ and the Boundaries of Democracy,” and “Land of the Free: Liberty, Justice, and Imprisonment in the United States.”