Notes on Teaching Systemic Analysis

By Niall Twohig

The following is a narrative of how I teach this curriculum. It is not meant as a map to follow from points A to B. Rather, I simply offer one example of how these teachings were conveyed to students in a particular historical context. Hopefully, in seeing my example, you can come up with your own ways of sharing these teachings in your context.

The Story of the Course

I tell my students that teachers are storytellers. We tell stories through our syllabi, though we don’t often state it that way. This is as true for a cellular biology course as it is for a humanities. The story I tell is woven together from stories told to me by my teachers. The result is, for lack of a better word, a progressive story about struggles to form a more perfect union in and beyond the United States.

There are three units— or chapters—in this story:

• Unit 1: The Historical Formation of Contradictory Social Systems: In which we explore how social systems are constructed along inequitable lines of race, class, gender (hierarchies) that concentrate power and resources in the hands of an elite class.

• Unit 2: Systemic Revolutions: In which we explore how social movements exposed systemic contradictions and struggled to build a democratic society by reforming or transforming social hierarchies.

• Unit 3: Counter-Revolutions and Continued Revolt: In which we explore how elite power blocs reclaim systemic hegemony and how grassroots movements continue the struggle for democracy.

Another way I describe these units:

• Unit 1: The atomization of the multitude

• Unit 2: The reuniting of the atomized multitude

• Unit 3: The re-atomization of the multitude

This story has its villains and heroes. The villains are not evil people in themselves. They are ideologies that separate us, and the violent structures and practices that grow out of those ideologies. The heroes are those who practice solidarity, who see it as a guiding principle that can lead us back to each other and past manmade crises.

Why do I tell this story? This story has given me a sense of my place and purpose in history. It has helped me put my experiences in context. It can be a hard story to hear, but it has not bred despair. It has given me a substantial, historically grounded, hope. And, like my favorite novels, it has shown me a deeper reality about myself, the world, and my connection to it. So far it’s the best story I’ve heard, so it’s the one I choose to share.

One important note before I move on to my day-to-day teachings. I tell my students not to accept this story as a final Truth. They should question it and see if it holds up to their experiences. They should compare it to other stories they have heard. They should see what, if anything, the story awakens in them, what effect it has on them, what it helps them to remember.

Day 1. What is Analysis?

Looking Deeply and Communicating those Depths to Others

I start class by introducing myself and having students introduce themselves. Sometimes I ask them, “where, who, or what is home for you?” In a class of 20, this takes about 30 minutes because I try connecting to what they say. The next 50 minutes is spent answering the question “What is Analysis?” I tell them my definition of analysis and analytical writing: Analysis is the practice of looking deeply at an object. Analytical writing is the practice of sharing those depths with others. I then introduce two practices to help students with analysis.

Practice 1. Mindfulness and Mindful Reading

Mindfulness is the practice of being aware and alert to the present moment. There’s so much that pulls students out of their bodies and out of the present moment. My goal here is to bring them back to their bodies and the present. I see this as essential to analysis and writing.

To bring us back, I project a photo of the pale blue dot on screen. I ask them to tell me what they see. Dust? A star? A piece of dandruff on a strand of hair? After recounting the story of the Voyager Mission, I project a passage written by Carl Sagan in which he reflects on that far off image of Earth (see slides). I read the passage aloud or play Sagan reading his words. I ask them to put aside their worries and thoughts for a moment as they listen. After, I ask them to reflect on the effect his words had on them. What did they feel? What sensations went through their body? Did their feelings change throughout the passage? What about Sagan’s words made them feel that way? This always leads to remarkable conversations.

I then segue into a discussion of mindless reading versus mindful reading. Mindless reading, which I did a lot of in high school, is reading with the sole purpose of meeting a future goal: to write the perfect paper, to get the material necessary to pass the test, to move on to the next task. When we read mindlessly, we can often produce quantitative results in an efficient way, but we don’t form any substantial connection with writing and the writer.

When we read mindfully, we are present and the author is present, even if they died decades or centuries ago. We are reading, not to bank knowledge for some future goal, but to listen and expand our awareness. The beauty of the pale blue dot passage is that it does just that: it brings our awareness to a higher place. It pull us beyond “the static and noise” as one student said. That awareness becomes part of our awareness.

A few final thoughts about this exercise:

Even shallow or misguided views, I note, are worth incorporating into our awareness. If we know what those perspectives are, we can unpack them to understand why people see the way they see.

Building on this first exercise in mindful reading, I encourage students to start with their visceral reactions as they read, watch, or listen to syllabus materials. What is your body telling you? Take note of that. Dig into those areas that caused you to react viscerally. You’ll likely find something worth investigating.

I like starting with Sagan for another reason: He is a model of the kind of writing I appreciate most. He says profound things in straightforward language. He is also extremely gracious: he writes to share his cosmic vision, not just with specialists, but with everyone. There’s also hope and joy in his writing: he looks into the abyss, gets us to feel it, yet he also reminds us of the pearl. These are qualities I hope to cultivate in students.

Practice 2. Looking Deeply

Before this first class, I email students and ask them to find a fallen leaf and bring it to class. They probably think I’m a little crazy, but that’s okay. We will use that leaf to practice looking deeply. To introduce the practice, I first show them the calligraphy of Thich Nhat Hanh, noting how different this practice is from rushed texting or typing!

What does it mean to look deeply? An iceberg image is one way of visualizing it. That image is also good for thinking about the consequences of not looking deeply. But that’s a bit abstract. To ground the practice in something real, I take out a piece of paper and ask the students to tell me what they see. A blank piece of paper. Yes. But there’s more here. I read them what Thich Nhat Hanh sees in a blank piece of paper (see slides). After that, I ask students to put this into practice with their leaf. They then share the depths that their mind’s eye saw.

I end class by asking the students to think of a deeper angle on themselves to share with the group. Many students find inspiration in the assigned readings from Ronald Takaki’s A Different Mirror, especially his Author’s Note at the end of the book. There, he speaks of his family and his unlikely path into higher education.

Day 2. What’s Going On?!

Looking Deeply at the Present

The first part of this day is spent connecting with students (30 min). We do this by returning to the practice of looking deeply. Moving beyond the leaf, we look deeply at each other. To do this, we share an angle on ourselves that is not visible. Just as the leaf has component parts invisible to the eye, so to do we. I don’t rush this activity, and I don’t pressure students to share anything they’re uncomfortable sharing. I give everyone the time they need by spreading it across 3-4 classes (20 min or so at the beginning of class).

I am the first to share. I recount my family’s journey. I tell them about my Da who was an Irish Catholic missionary priest. I tell them about my mom, a Filipina nurse. I tell them about how they met and fell in love, i.e. how my mom “stole my Da away from the priesthood” for another path, equally spiritual. I tell them about my family’s immigrant journey, how it began with my mom dreaming of living in the Empire State and dancing in the Windows of the World. I tell them about how she achieved her dream through hard work, helpers, and historical circumstances. Hers was a familiar immigrant tale: landing in the big city with $50 in her pocket and working hard to pave the way for her family. I tell them the other side of her story: a story of knee replacements, second mortgages, a house flooded by Hurricane Sandy, her eldest son lost to Covid. I then show them a photo of my mom in her full PPE, taken when NYC was the epicenter of this global pandemic.

As a child, I’d watch my mom applying her makeup for 30 minutes prior to her night shifts. I vividly remember the careful way she applied her eyeliner to her tired eyes. It amazes me how she kept doing this ritual in a plague! I tell students that I see it as her warrior makeup. She is a warrior! I end by showing them a photo of two other warrior women in my life: my wife, with her shaved head as she battled cancer. My daughter who carries the same fire as her Lola, the same gentleness as her Grandda.

In showing my deeper side, I’m not being vulnerable for vulnerability’s sake. I’m modeling the most important lessons of the course: Your stories are part of history. Don’t leave them at the door. Your experiences matter. Don’t leave them at the door either. Your stories and experiences can point you to the type of writing and work you need to do, the communities you need to serve. I try to be an example. I wouldn’t be teaching “my” way without my parents and my experiences. Takaki is another example; he wouldn’t have written the history he wrote without his mom who sacrificed so much and his mentor who guided him to a path where he could do the work he needed to do.

After sharing my story, I open space for them to share. They share mundane facets of themselves and profound traumas and joys. When they go silent, I sit with it. Don’t be too afraid of that. It’s necessary. I sometimes break the silence by asking them about Takaki’s “Author’s Note” to see if anyone connected with his story. This helps pull out their stories.

We then turn to the slides for the rest of the day (50 min). I begin with the reading practice from Day 1 by reminding them to start with their visceral reactions: What elicits a strong reaction as you read/watch/listen? Another way of saying this is: What resonates with you? I tell them that the word “resonance” means in physics (simplified, I know): when a vibrating object causes another object to vibrate. To carry that over to reading: What in these materials shook you? What stirred up feelings that weren’t there prior to reading? Note those moments and what you felt. Those are areas worth investigating.

I give an example that resonates with me when I read Takaki’s “Author’s Note”. It’s that moment when he recounts feeling out of place after he has moved from Hawaii to Ohio. He writes,

“I was extremely homesick. Almost weekly, my mother sent me beautifully written letters. In one of them, she described her day: “It’s 8:00 P.M. as I sit writing to you. About 1 A.M. in Ohio and I imagine you are snug in bed. We are still down at the store since Dad has to catch up soaking the teriyaki steak, etc. This week has been very busy and I am exhausted.” In another letter, she wrote: “I never went to school much and you can say that again. What I do know is from reading. In my small way I am trying and doing my best (working) so that you being an exception can and must be above our intellectual level. At times I yearn for rest (6 years without a vacation).”

I have a little sad face in the margins next to this passage. That’s the feeling it stirred up in me. Why? Because it brings to mind mom, the sacrifices she made, the years of work without a vacation. That makes me sad, but I also feel less alone when I read Takaki. I see that I can honor my mom in my work in the same way Takaki honors his. “Can anyone relate,” I ask. Many can. I tell students that if I were journaling, this is what I would journal about.

The next part of the class turns to the title of the lecture: What’s Going On?! The goal is to show students the visual and statistical glimpses of the crises surrounding them in the present moment. There are so many, sadly. After I show these slides, I ask what they felt seeing these images. Again, I’m getting them to practice this reader reaction method. Anxious. Depressed. PTSD. What’s it all for? I agree. It can be hard to look at these crises. It can be easier (and sometimes necessary) to bury our head in the sand and focus on what’s in front of us.

I can understand that impulse to ignore, but it’s a dangerous way of being when the house is on fire. The flames are touching us, or will touch us soon. If we are to save ourselves and the house, we have to understand what causes the flames. We have to look deeply to understand clearly. This is when I begin introducing the course project. Over the next weeks they will find an urgent social problem that they want to look at deeply.

This is also an apt time to acknowledge the material on an energetic level. This is heavy stuff to encounter, especially when we are living in crises. I promise them that there is hope and joy in this material as well. When we look into crisis, when we confront it and look into its depths, we find a substantial hope. One of my daughter’s favorite musicians reflects this hope with a song also titled What’s Going On.

So, how do we look deeply at the crisis-filled present?

Well, it helps to first look at shallow views. Some look at crisis and say “That’s just how thing are. We can’t do anything about it. It is what it is.” These shallow views naturalize manmade crises. By treating them as natural we fail to see that these crises are shaped within a particular social context with a given set of material conditions. But that social context, like a house, has been built over time. We can’t see this because we are born into an already-built structure. We mistake it as natural.

To deepen our view, we will look back at the history, to see how the house has been built. Takaki will be our guide. He’ll help us to see:

• Who builds the house?

• What ideologies shape the way it is constructed?

• Has the house been built to keep all secure? Who benefits from the way it is constructed? Who falls through the cracks? What effect does this house have on the land upon which it is built?

In a way, I am introducing them to is social construction theory (see Keywords).

I end by showing them a shallow view of history, what Takaki calls the Master Narrative. This narrative is clearly depicted in John Gast’s American Progress.

I ask them to describe what they see. An angelic figure carrying the light. Nature giving way to new technologies and agricultural methods. Nature and “savagery” giving way to industrialism and “civilization.” The dark gives way to the light. I then ask: What is left out of the painting? Takaki helps us. He helps us see the immigrants who were used as cheap or slave labor. He shows us the people, cultures, and practices displaced or destroyed by the violent march Westward.

Note 1: At some point I tell students that we can see Takaki’s method of looking deeply in his Author’s Note and first chapter: To look beyond the master narrative, Takaki will turn to those left out of history: His mom. His son. Irish and Polish maids. Chinese and Irish workers on the railroad. Mexican fieldworkers. Members of the “giddy multitude” who lived history but were kept from writing it. Their voices help us see a deeper story, more troubling and more joyous, than the one told by the masters.

Note 2: Takaki’s anecdote about Carol’s father offers students a good window into racist ideologies, how they flatten out the complexities of a human, how they can be countered by bringing people together in spaces or on projects where they get to know one another.

Day 3: What is the Social Matrix?

Seeing how Hegemonic Social Systems are Built, and Hidden, in Plain Sight

This day revolves around four key concepts: hierarchy, hegemony, ideology, and contradiction. I tell students that I want them to leave this class with a working understanding of these concepts, one that they can apply to their lives rather than just to an exam or research paper. I appreciate this approach to learning because it treats knowledge as a tool to be used in the world, whereas the old banking-models of education treat knowledge as data to be accumulated to prove one’s ability. This is a carryover from my high school days as much as it is from Freire. I went to a Marist school in Queens, NY. Our motto was non scholae sed vitae. Not for school but for life.

The goal of the lecture is to give students tools to see how the social order we take as natural is, in fact, built over time, and in ways that benefit certain groups while constricting and damaging others. The Matrix helps us get there. It dramatizes the dawning awareness one has of society as a built structure, the hidden forces and codes that give it shape, and of the deeper realities that lie beyond the constructed order.

I begin by describing how this cyberpunk story, already dated, is an updated version of an older story: Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. According to Plato, we are born into a cave where we mistake shadows on the wall as the real thing. The journey of the philosopher, for Plato, consists of moving beyond the cave toward a higher-order reality. The visual in the slides shows this as a process of enlightenment, a movement toward the light beyond the cave.

I try not to get too lost in abstract philosophy. We all know what it’s like to “take the red pill” or to come outside the cave. These are those moments when we realize that the “reality” we knew isn’t the only reality, the Truth we held is actually untrue. I give them a silly example of my two-year-old daughter who thinks I’m the funniest person on earth. I tell them that, one day (soon), she’ll go into the world and meet actual funny people. She’ll realize I’m not the king of comedy. This is her coming out of the cave. We also turn to more serious examples like waking up to social problems. In this regard venturing outside the cave means encountering a deeper suffering. It’s more like Neo’s emergence into pain than the bright sunny day shown in the image of Plato’s cave. To quote Ecclesiastes: “For in much wisdom is much vexation, and those who increase knowledge increase sorrow.” Or the Buddha’s awakening to suffering. But we can’t forget there’s great power and joy in knowledge.

We then move from the cinematic vision of the matrix to what I call a social matrix. A social matrix, like the matrix in the film, is system of control hidden in plain sight. I tell students that it’s easier to look back at older social matrices rather than the one we are born into. With distance, we have an easier time seeing them as built structures. So, this is what we do. We look back at the monarchial social matrix.

We have a discussion about what life would like if we were born into the high and low strata of this social matrix. If we were born into the aristocracy, we would think of ourselves as superior to commoners. We might be born into a palace surrounded by luxuries. If we were a prince, our father would take us to the top of the palace and tell us that all the land belongs to us. If we were born into the bottom strata, our life would be one of toil and misery. We’d work the king’s land as our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents had worked it.

I introduce the first keyword social hierarchy to help us understand this inequitable arrangement. I then ask students what they, as people in 2021, find troubling about this hierarchy. Most point to the fact that there is no social mobility. One’s blood determines one’s position and fate. One lives and dies in the same social position.

So, why don’t people rebel? What keeps them in their place? They point out the difficulties of rebelling if one is working to survive. They point also to the threat of violence. Yes. I remind them of how the King is often depicted as hovering over society with a sword in hand. He is the sovereign subject. His will is the will.

Sometimes they point out that there’s no precedent. How can you get upset if you’ve never seen alternatives. This leads into a discussion of hegemony. Aside from the threat of force, everything around us in this social matrix would be teaching us that this built social order is natural and the only way. Princes are taught that God has made them superior, while commoners are taught that they are born to be beasts of burden. What teaches us this is the dominant ideologies that circulate throughout institutions and culture. One dominant ideology, in the West, was the Great Chain of Being that taught people that the order was God-given and that their roles in society were divinely ordained. Thus, rebelling against the King is a rebellion against God.

One final question I ask about the monarchial matrix is who benefits from this arrangement? This gets students to consider the relationship between the different strata of the social hierarchy. Kings gain wealth and riches through the work of human hands. As with the matrix, those on the bottom are the battery of society — their labor and their misery are conditions for the nobility’s luxurious reality.

The benefit of focusing on the monarchial matrix is that it gives us a context for understanding the emergent ideologies of the Enlightenment that shape the thoughts and actions of the Founding Fathers. Without this context, we easily forget how radical The Declaration of Independence is.

I give students basic background on the Enlightenment. It signals a movement away from religious dogma and superstition to reason and empiricism. The King is, in a sense, dethroned as sovereign. What takes his place is the liberal individual. No one is his master. He is the king of his domain. Guided by reason, he can name and tame the world. Blood does not determine his fate. His hard work does. I remind students that the notion of the individual, that we hold near and dear, is born in this moment. It is born from revolution.

We turn to the language of The Declaration. After reading the introduction and first grievance, I list the three main democratic principles:

• Equality - no “man” is superior to another

• Rights - every “man” has inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness

• The common good - government should create laws to protect the public or common good

Given the monarchial social matrix, can you see how these principles are revolutionary? I remind them that these principles will provide social movements with a compass for demanding rights and holding the country to account. They will also provide a compass for us as we write about social problems. For me, this helps counter claims that could be made against this as an un- or anti-American course.

The final part of the class introduces the key concept of contradiction. To get at this term, we return to the liberal individual. Remember, what the Declaration promises him: No one is his master. He controls his own destiny. He has unalienable rights. We contrast the liberal individual with the image of slave Peter whose whip-scarred back resembles a gnarled tree. I pause on that image. Then I show them the slave ship and fugitive slave and slave auction ads. At the same time that the Founding Fathers were writing the Declaration, they were also participating in, or maintaining, an institution where this was common practice.

Finally, we turn to the two texts assigned for class: Frederick Douglass’s “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” and Sojourner Truth’s recorded testimony from “Her Religious Instruction.” Lately I’ve been spending more time with the latter. It gets at a hideousness of slavery students don’t often learn: The fact that from its conception the child belonged to the slave’s master. They could be torn from the family at his whim. At the same time, Truth’s testimony demonstrates a resilience and hope, born from the most hellish corners of this social matrix, passed on through fire.

How can a country that espouses equality and rights for “all men” treat human beings in this way? It helps to return to the visual of the social hierarchy in the colonial Americas. The king is on top followed by a class of white landowning men and merchants. The desire for revolution is coming from that class. The Declaration is written by them. After the war, its promises hold true for them. Why don’t they, these children of the Enlightenment, extend those promises to slaves and other groups within the giddy multitude? Or to women within their own class for that matter? These questions will guide our next lecture.

Note: Step 1 gets students to discuss the notion of contradiction in a concrete way by asking them to ground their discussion in their own experiences.

Day 4: The Monster Below the Surface

How is Slavery and Genocide Rationalized in a Liberal Social Matrix?

We pick up a question we were left with on Day 3: How do enlightenment thinkers rationalize practices that are so contrary to the democratic principles of liberty and equality?

Before we grapple with this, we look at a pivotal moment in the formation of the liberal social matrix: Bacon’s Rebellion (1675 - 76), a rebellion of black slaves and white indentured servants against the Virginian ruling class. To see the importance of this event, we return to the concept of social hierarchy.

I project two images of social hierarchy and ask: What is the great fear of elite groups in a social hierarchy? Revolution! The masses awakening to inequality, uniting, and mounting a revolution to overturn the established order. I make a familiar symbol of revolution: the clenched fist. When the fingers are separated, I show them, there’s no power. When they come together, like a fist, then force can be applied to greater effect.

Takaki shows us how this great fear of the “giddy multitude” became real in colonial Virginia when frontiersman Nathaniel Bacon organized the rabble to occupy Jamestown and burn it to the ground. What I highlight is the systemic backlash that occurs after this rebellion: colonial governors reorganize society on the basis of class and race. They turned to African slaves as their primary source of labor, effectively cutting out the need for white indentured servants. This shift creates an armed “white” working class scavenging for jobs. They are now utterly divided from enslaved black laborers stripped of rights (including the right to bear arms). In other words, the color line rips through the working class and defuses its explosive energy.

We then jump a hundred years forward, to the American Revolution, to see how the Founding Fathers maintained this same race-class hierarchy. Why? Takaki suggests that racial caste was too deeply embedded in the capitalist economic system. It was too late to turn back. Also, as Noam Chomsky explains in Requiem for the American Dream, the colonial elites feared the multitude. They preached democracy while fearing too much of it. Too much meant anarchy. The mob needed enlightened rulers to oversee them and the republic. At least that’s what they had come to believe (or convinced themselves of). Was their fear legitimate? Were the masses naturally incapable of governing? This is a topic of much debate in the realm of political philosophy. The tradition I draw from teaches that the giddy multitude is made giddy. They are denied their fair share of resources and, in many cases, their basic needs and human dignity. Hungry dehumanized people turn against each other, or they turn into mobs carrying fire to the palace door. But what if people had their fair share of rights, resources, and power? What if these things weren’t hoarded at the top? What if people weren’t scavenging, against each other, for crumbs? That multitude, I believe, would be capable of channeling its energy toward the common good.

This leads us back to our question: How do enlightenment thinkers rationalize practices that are so contrary to the democratic principles of liberty and equality? We can use logic here: To deny rights promised to “all men” means that the group excluded from those rights are not men. This exception can be understood in the gendered sense, since women were excluded from these rights. But it also can be understood in the more general sense of the word “men” as synonymous with humankind. In that sense, those denied their rights were seen as less than human or monstrous. Such beasts needed to be lorded over, or eradicated.

This should remind students of our discussion of the monarchial social matrix and The Great Chain of Being. That ideology taught people that God made the animals and peasants to be beasts of burden for the King. The good King would lord over these things with kindness or a stern hand if they became unruly.

But weren’t the enlightened minds of the revolution moving society away from dogma and superstition to science and reason? Yes, but ideologies don’t just disappear. They go underground. They get modified and updated to take on renewed power in the social matrix. Since the founders are turning from God to nature, from superstition to science, the old ideology will find its new form in the natural science itself.

This is why “rationalized” is a crucial word in our subtitle. The enlightenment thinkers will look to science as a way of rationalizing exceptions to the democratic promises.

In this next part of lecture, we look at this rationalization process. We first consider how knowledge itself is changing. Knowledge no longer comes down from the King and Church. It is produced by a new class of men who study, measure, and name the world and universe using scientific methods. I show students some of the classification tables they used to order nature. The dangerous turn is when this ordering of nature gets applied to human beings. We look at the now-debunked sciences that sought to discover where different types of human beings belonged on the Tree of Life. According to these sciences, some groups were closer to nature while others were of a higher order. The slippery category of race became the category for determining where groups fit. Not surprisingly the ones doing the classifying, Anglo Europeans, constructed their race as superior. Influenced by residual religious ideologies, they categorized “darker” races as inferior. Pseudo-science and rigged measurements confirmed their bias and justified their hubris.

This leads us to the key concept of white supremacy. I point out that this ideology is rooted in an essentialism similar to the ideologies surrounding blood and bloodlines in the monarchial matrix. According to this updated ideology, a characteristic called race, which one has no control over, determines one’s capacities and potential. It marks one as superior or inferior in the racial hierarchy. If we were troubled about bloodlines determining one’s place in a monarchial matrix, then we should also be troubled by this.

At this point, what I hope students see is the context that shapes men like Jefferson and Jackson. It’s easy to see them as the villains, but this leaves the deeper toxins unseen. In their context white supremacy was “common sense” or a widely accepted “truth.” Jefferson needn’t look too far to rationalize his paternalistic understanding of slavery. Jackson needn’t look too far to rationalize warfare and genocide. Their world provided their reason.

Their white supremacist common sense was constructed in two dimensions of social life: the cultural dimension and the institutional dimension.

• Culture consists of the mediated stories of reality we receive which, in turn, influence our understanding of reality. In the days of Jefferson and Jackson, reality is mediated through cultural forms like newspapers, travelogues, treatises, novels, plays, art, sermons, etc. I show students representations of Black people and Native Americans that circulated in 19th century newspapers and magazines. Representations of these sort leave readers or audiences with a shallow inhuman image. Imagine all you came to know of these groups were these representations?

• Institutions are real or virtual settings that organize social life and manage people’s access to resources. We discuss two institutions were policies and practices were shaped by white supremacist standards: Native American boarding schools and the IQ Test.

In this lecture I introduce these two dimensions and begin to show students how a racial common sense is constructed in, and through, both. Focusing on these dimensions helps us see racism as more than just a person-to-person phenomenon. We see the systemic dimensions of racism. When we see these dimensions, we see how the ideology of white supremacy is insidious and hard to root out. It can’t be weeded out by merely cancelling racist individuals or even changing people’s minds.

We end by returning to the American Progress painting. With Takaki’s “Toward Stony Mountain” in our toolbox, we see past the binary of civilization and savagery presented in this painting. Takaki has helped us see the indigenous cultures and agricultural practices before they were wiped out by violent Westward expansion. We see how existing practices were more in tune with earth than the “civilized” practices that supplanted them. Takaki has also revealed to us the savagery just below the surface of “civilized” men. We see something monstrous in the men pushing civilization forward through legal manipulation, forced relocation, and war. We see that monster, most clearly, in the face from our twenty-dollar bills.

Note: I let my students know that we are studying on stolen Kumeyaay land and that their Chancellor’s mansion rests atop a sacred burial ground. But I also remind them that the tribes are still here, despite the violent superimposition of the liberal social matrix. They survived a slow-moving genocide fueled by white supremacy. Later in the quarter, we’ll look at how indigenous people across the globe are spearheading climate struggles across the globe. This painting, by Charles Hilliard, foreshadows where we will go.

Day 5: The Changing Face of Caliban

Constructing and Reconstructing Race and Gender in a Social Hierarchy

This is a fitting moment to pause to ask students how they’re connecting to the material. Their journals and Step 1 open up good ground for doing so. I ask them if the material brings to mind memories. For me, they conjure another memory of my mom.

A neighbor once confronted her in our backyard. He was mad at her for driving through his property, an unused parking lot, to get to her backyard parking space. My mom, exhausted from her night shifts, ignored him as he berated her. I recall vividly what happened next. He hurled his hot cup of coffee at her window, which was luckily closed. “Go the f— back to your country!” he screamed.

That encounter helps me to see how ideologies operate. They give a person a simplified story to make sense of complex realities. In this case, ideology equipped the onlooker, a second generation Italian American, with a lens that erased the complexity of my mom’s life. All that was left was a shallow story about this type of person in his gaze. “I know you,” ideology told him. “I know what you people are like, where you belong.” Once my mom was no longer human in his eyes, when she became a thing, this man—who I had seen acting kindly to his family—became a monster.

Today’s class examines a concept that helps explain such encounters: racial formation. This can be a confusing term, especially when explained on a theoretical level. My goal is to help students grasp the process the term describes in a concrete way that can then be applied to their lives. If they can understand what it signifies without ever using the word, that’s enough. In fact, I tell students that the real skill is explaining these terms in understandable ways rather than hiding their meaning behind shorthand. They’ll reach more readers that way.

To show what racial formation entails, we will focus on two immigrant groups discussed in A Different Mirror: Irish and Chinese immigrants. We focus on these groups because they show how racial identities change over time. They help us see that race is not a fixed essence that imparts one with more or less desirable traits, more or less valuable qualities. Society, we will see, projects meaning and value onto the minuscule variation called race.

Before we see this, I let these immigrants speak. I want students to hear them as people rather than abstract groups who help us understand a concept. Here’s the voice of an Irish immigrant as quoted by Takaki:

Such troubles we know that have often

Caused stout Irish hearts to roam...

And... sons from their homes were drove....

The hills and the valleys so dear to my heart;

It grieves me to think that from them I must part.

Compelled to emigrate far, far o’er the sea   (132)

I can relate. Like the writer, my family left behind a tiny town in County Cork for New York City. We left a dear part of ourselves behind too. Many of my students also see their journeys reflected in this poem. Even those who haven’t crossed oceans know what it’s like to leave home, to be separated from loved ones, especially now in this pandemic. Such homesickness is also captured so well in a Chinese folk song, also quoted by Takaki:

Pitiful is the twenty-year sojourner,

Unable to make it home.

Always obstacles along the way, pain knitting my brows.

A reflection on the mirror, a sudden fright:

hair, half frost-white.

Again, we can relate. So many of us couldn’t go home these last few years. I’ve taught international students who couldn’t leave for fear of losing their visas, students affected by the Muslim Ban, students who attended Zoom funerals for loved ones in impossible-to-reach states or countries. Like the writer, many of us look look at ourselves in the mirror these days and ask where has time gone, who is this older person looking back at me?

After our discussion, I explain the title for this lecture: the Changing Face of Caliban. Caliban is a character from Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Below we see an image of Caliban, on the right, and two other characters on the left: Prospero, with his hand outstretched, and his daughter Miranda, body turned away but her head turned back and eyes affixed on Caliban.

Takaki shows how this theatrical encounter represents the imagination of Western colonists as they encountered people outside their race and class. In their eyes, these others were like Caliban: not human, but beasts outside the bounds of civilization. The encounter depicted in the painting also represents how dominant groups saw themselves: as protectors and saviors who bring light to the darkness. As with the painting, whiteness and anti-blackness are tropes that dominant groups use to define their encounter with marginalized groups, as is the trope of protecting his pure women from the seductive and destructive hands of brutes.

We now turn to the cultural side (of racial formation) to see the changing face of Caliban, i.e. how different races where constructed as inhuman brutes or savages. We first review representations of the two groups we studied last class: Native Americans and African Slaves. I ask students to imagine that they lived in these periods in areas where they had little or no contact with these groups. All they would know of them were images and stories from the books they read, gossip, or sermons they heard. Those representations would shape their understanding of reality. Students are able to see, since they’ve read Takaki’s chapters on both groups, how much complexity is erased by these representations: whole civilizations, whole lifeworlds and cultures.

This is also a good moment to point out the irony of these representations. The dominant groups doing the representing project onto these others savage animal instincts. In doing so, they show that these instincts are outside of their group. But these instincts are in all human beings. Jackson’s own accounts of slaughtering Native Americans men, women, and children testify to this. They show us how easily “civilized” man is capable of brutishness. In culture, Jackson’s brutishness is hidden. He is, instead, constructed as a hero who helped the nation achieve its destiny. Like Prospero, he protected us from Caliban. He spread light into darkness.

The remainder of the lecture focuses on the early waves of Irish and Chinese immigration. The dominant ways of seeing these groups are represented well in this image.

We first focus on the Irish. Their history challenges the shallow view of race as an essence and racial identities as fixed. Victims of savage British colonialism, the Irish were pushed into a state of degradation and impoverishment. When they arrived to the U.S., they were seen and treated in ways comparable to, or sometimes worse than, black slaves. This is a strange thought for us, in 2021. We think of the Irish as white. But in that earlier context, they existed outside of whiteness. They were seen as a brutish race. There was something in them, bad blood, that made them prone to vice and that led them to be that state of degradation (notice how race, as an internal essence, hides away external factors that degrade people). Seeing the Irish race in this way made it easier for WASP businessmen to exploit them as cheap disposable labor. Over time, the Irish worked their way into whiteness. This did so by playing up their Irish-American identity in culture (sometimes at the expense of Black people and immigrants of color) and by mobilizing politically to gain access to, and power within, institutions.

We then turn to Chinese immigrants. We first look at the Chinese men who left home and family in search of Gold Mountain. Initially, they were welcomed, mainly because industrialists needed cheap exploitable labor to build the railroad lines that would connect the continent. While industrialists used them as a source of cheap labor, nativists depicted them as the “Yellow Peril” that threatened white western culture. They were seen as an invading race, a hoard of Calibans, that needed to be kept out. This is precisely what happened with the Chinese Exclusion Act. We juxtapose that historical moment against another, more recent moment, when Asian groups were depicted as the model minority. No longer where they the group to exclude. They were a group that other races should aspire toward and emulate. This demonstrates how dominant notions of race shift over time. Even still, those residues of earlier racist ideologies remain. We’ve seen them bubbling up in the new wave of nativism and Anti-Asian violence during the pandemic.

Finally, we turn to Chinese immigrant women. Their experiences help us to see how race and class domination exist alongside patriarchal domination. Treated as inferior in their homeland, these women would come to see that treatment amplified as they crossed the ocean and entered capitalist markets. Trafficked as sex slaves, they were racialized as sexual monsters, objects of fear and desire, things to be bought, violated, and thrown away. Lost were the complexities of their lives, their yearning for freedom, their dreams.

These women’s stories teach us an important lesson that helps us reach a deeper systemic analysis: To understand what blocks the road to freedom, for specific groups and for society at large, we need to consider how multiple modes of domination (class, race, gender, etc.) intersect in people’s lives in ways that rob them, not only of their labor, but of their dignity and their human potential. The other side of this is that those who experience intersecting forms of domination often have the deepest and most intimate understanding of the social matrix and its manmade crises. They see the cages within cages that many of us take for granted even when they are caging our moms, sisters, queer, and transgendered kin. Those cages within cages restrict us all in the end.

I end by pointing out the recurrence of racist imagery as new groups are racialized as Caliban. Each new wave of non-Anglo immigrants is depicted in similar ways: as ape, vermin, an uncontrollable tidal wave. The limited repertoire of racism demonstrates how shallow a discourse it is. Such imagery hides the fact that these unwanted “animals” built our country. Today, the new Calibans continue to do the essential work of feeding, nursing, sanitizing, clothing, caring for, delivering and delivering to society. This brings to mind another anecdote I often tell my class. My cousin, who I love dearly, often parrots shallow Right Wing talking points about undocumented immigrants. Whenever she does, I remind her that these immigrants do the dirty jobs that keep this country going. I also remind her that our Irish ancestors were once seen as undocumented immigrants are now seen. Who does she want to stand with? With those who, like our ancestors, left behind their homes with hungry bellies with dreams of finding a warm hearth? Or with those who spat on them and told them to get out?

Day 6: A House Divided

A Social Matrix Built and Rebuilt to Protect Elite Interests

To come