Chapter 12 of “Unbalanced: Memoir of an Immigrant Math Teacher”: The Caucusing
(This is part of my memoir as a high school math teacher, after working for twenty years in the U.S. as a software engineer at Microsoft and an investment manager battling Wall Street. If you are interested, please go to the for all available chapters.)
CHAPTER 12 THE CAUCUSING
The “lived experience” theory was behind a course we were required to take each semester, called “caucusing,” which grouped students according to various aspects of identity: race, gender, sexuality, etc., “in a facilitated exploration of positionality, privilege, and structures of oppression.”
In the first caucusing discussion of the students of color group, someone asked a seemingly innocent question: “Why are the white students singled out from students of color instead of hearing our perspectives?” The instructor’s face turned red, his voice rising indignantly as he answered in a state of agitation: “These are our lived experiences, which white people could never fully understand. If white people want to know our perspectives, they must earn the right to it. It is not our obligation as people of color to share our experiences with them!”
Later, when I was teaching as an apprentice in a public school, all teachers were required to attend similar caucusing sessions. An article titled “Why People of Color Need Spaces Without White People” was the required reading for one caucusing. The author echoed the sentiment of our instructor: “I’m breathing deeply as I write this… It’s an intensity that’s frustrated that these words must even be written… People of color need places where we can get off the treadmill of making white people comfortable and finally realize just how tired we are.”
According to our caucusing material, meritocracy was nothing more than a lie invented by the power structure to deprive the oppressed of equal opportunities. I thought that while meritocracy could be imperfectly designed or poorly implemented, the issue was more nuanced. As a beneficiary of meritocracy in both China and the United States, I believe it deserves a place in society. I forwarded the instructor an article from the New Yorker, “Is Meritocracy Making Everyone Miserable?” and made an appointment to discuss it in detail.
During the appointment, the instructor didn’t show up. Instead, three twenty-year-old teaching assistants took turns eagerly trying to convince me of the theories taught in class. They insisted that I was struggling to grasp a difficult concept because I was too blinded by my own narrow personal experiences to accept the irrefutable evidence from the experiences of other people of color.
At one point, one of them compared me to her father, who was also a first-generation immigrant who worked hard to settle here. She said her father was naïve, just like me, and our understanding of this country was shallow because we hadn’t grown up here. She added that our knowledge was not systematic like those taught in this class. Hearing this, I fell silent: Would my children be talking about me like this after going through the education system?
One day, I was chatting with my friend Zena, who helped me get my first job, when she mentioned her son’s many affinity group choices in kindergarten. She said: “I used to think that the United States is a melting pot. Now it seems more like a sorting machine that put people in different groups based on identities.” Afterward, I talked to my children and found that their school was similarly dominated by identity-based student clubs.
Since the 1970s, faculty and staff of color at Evergreen State College in Washington have been observing a “Day of Absence,” in which they voluntarily left campus to make their presence and importance felt. In 2017, the organizers asked white staff and students to leave the campus instead. A dissenting white professor expressed his opinions in an all-faculty email group and was first attacked relentlessly online, later cornered and berated by a large group of student protestors outside his classroom. The protesting students occupied the administration building, bullied the college president, and drove the police force off the campus.
Things turned ugly after the incident was featured on Fox News. The campus became a target vandalized by right-wing activists who intimidated the students and their supporters. Student protestors were reportedly harassed “with hundreds of phone calls, anonymous texts and terrifyingly specific threats of violence that show they know where we live and work.” The dissenting professor won a lawsuit against the school but ultimately resigned.
I couldn’t help noticing that the mandatory “Day of Absence” for white staff and students, which triggered this whole event, was just another form of caucusing. Intrigued, I looked up the word “caucus” and found that “the term originated in the United States, where it can refer to a meeting of members of a political party to nominate candidates, plan policy, etc.” Suddenly, I understood its political undertone. But why did future teachers need to learn through such a political tool as caucusing? Was learning political in our program?
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