I spoke to Dr Thandi Loewenson, a teacher at Royal College of Art about practical resources for learning about race. A couple weeks after our conversation she sent me this from Ruha Benjamin’s ‘Race after technology’:
‘Every year I teach an undergraduate course on race and racism and I typically begin the class with an exercise designed to help me get to know the students while introducing the themes we will wrestle with in the semester. What’s in a name? Your family story, your religion, your nationality, your gender identity, your race and ethnicity? What assumptions do you think people mke about you on the basis of your name? What about your nicknames – are they chosen or imposed? From intimate patterns in dating and romance to large-scale employment trends, our names can open and shut doors. Like a welcome sign inviting people in or a scary mask repelling and pushing them away, this thing that is most ‘ours’ is also out of our hands….
Ususally many of my White students assume that the naming exercise is not about them,. “I just have a normal name,” “I was named after my grandad,” “I don’t have an interesting story, prof.” But the presumed blandness of White American culture is a crucial part of our national narrative. Scholars describe the power of this plainness as the invisible “centre” against which everything else is compared and as the “norm” against which everyone else is measured…. Invisibility with regardsto whiteness offers immunity…
As a class then we begin to understand that all those things dubbed “just ordinary” are also cultural, as they embody values, beliefs, and narratives, and normal names offer some of the most powerful stories of all. If names are social codes that we use to make everyday assessments of people, they are not neutral but racialized, gendered and classed in particular ways. Whether in the time of Moses, Malcom X or Missy Elliot, names have never grown on trees. They are concocted in cultural laboratories and encoded an infused with meaning and experience – particular histories, longings and anxieties…’