Casual Racism and Stuttering Failures: An ethics for classroom engagement

Casual Racism and Stuttering Failures addresses the affective consequences of pedagogical experiences in which an instructor is surprised by the eruption of racist discourse in the classroom. In the context of an outwardly politically progressive graduate program, I found myself riding on the presumption that students and I thought alike about race and ethnicity, in our classroom discourse and in the theatre. Instead, on two different occasions, I found myself unprepared for addressing overtly racist comments in class. This essay meditates on what the experience of such failures means to feminist and progressive teachers.