After listening to the group presentations on Wednesday, I was really interested in Maria\u2019s discussion of how binaries are used in literature, and in the group\u2019s discussion question of how our conversation about civil rights relates to education.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Like many of my classmates, in some regards I\u2019ve been critical of Baldwin\u2019s limitations, especially surrounding gender. It\u2019s frustrating to see how easily Baldwin\u2019s female characters can be categorized into five tropes, as Faith mentioned. But I agree with what folks have pointed out in discussion: it\u2019s not fair to expect Baldwin to do everything, tackle every civil rights issue. Placing him in his social and historical context is important as well, to take into account how Baldwin was shaped by his family life, experiences in France, and worldview as someone coming of age in the 1940s. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
That being said, I wonder if there might be some points of connection here with the points that Ryan brought up about education and empathy. I certainly agree with Ryan that more voices need to be included in American education. I also think that maybe teachers have a particular opportunity to break down the problematic binaries that we\u2019ve been discussing, including disrupting the idea that power is a clear-cut binary. Our class conversations about intersectionality underscore the point that agency is rarely as straightforward as we sometimes portray it to be; rather, it depends on the particular circumstances of any person\u2019s life, and it is not the same in every situation. Paying attention to nuance, especially recognizing the contingencies of agency, could perhaps be one way to begin to undo overly simplistic binaries of Black and white, oppressed and oppressor, female and male, and so on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
By fostering conversations that focus on intersectionality and look critically at the binaries we\u2019ve all been taught, we can participate productively in Baldwin\u2019s legacy of civil rights work. If we can honor the complexity of each other\u2019s lives, then perhaps we will be quicker to have empathy for one another\u2014the focus on love that Baldwin called for. Just as Baldwin invited Americans to move into new ways of thinking, so too are we called to the same work, which hopefully moves us to greater empathy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
After listening to the group presentations on Wednesday, I was really interested in Maria\u2019s discussion of how binaries are used in literature, and in the group\u2019s discussion question of how our conversation about civil rights relates to education. Like many of my classmates, in some regards I\u2019ve been critical of Baldwin\u2019s limitations, especially surrounding gender. … Continue reading Empathy and Breaking Down Binaries<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3909,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[471414],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-721","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-native-son"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/jamesbaldwin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/721","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/jamesbaldwin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/jamesbaldwin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/jamesbaldwin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3909"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/jamesbaldwin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=721"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/jamesbaldwin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/721\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":723,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/jamesbaldwin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/721\/revisions\/723"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/jamesbaldwin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=721"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/jamesbaldwin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=721"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/jamesbaldwin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=721"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}