In Praise of Discomfort: An Open Letter to White Educators

Across the K-12 school landscape, statements of horror at the deaths of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and George Floyd (and so many others whose names comprise a shameful, damning, ever-growing list) have begun to give way to calls for action. More and more, school leaders acknowledge that schools need to lead the charge against racism. Students of color in our schools deserve and demand our advocacy and activism; and fighting deeply ingrained prejudices and socially and politically encoded injustices seems simply to be the right thing to do.

The obvious question: How, exactly, do we do this “right thing”? Every time I hear or read an iteration of that question, I remember walking across a mall parking lot in the summer of 1989.

I was sixteen. My friend Aaron and I were leaving a theater in which we had been the only two white patrons, sharing space with about two hundred African-American moviegoers. But that wasn’t unusual enough to make me remember, all these years later. Every time Aaron and I went to our usual fast-food haunt, Terry’s Place, which was in Chicago’s west-side Austin neighborhood, two blocks from my home on the other side of the city border, we were the only two white customers. Sure, we’d had our share of those-two-people-look-different stares from little kids. But we were white, and had therefore internalized the message that we could pretty much go anywhere, within reason, and feel safe and secure. 

No, I remember that walk because of a feeling of discomfort that had comparatively little to do with the fact that Aaron and I had spent a couple of hours in in a theater with a majority-Black clientele. After all, we’d gone out of our way to attend that particular theater. It was the opening week of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, and we’d sought out the only nearby theater that was showing the film.

It was, rather, Lee’s movie itself that had made me feel so ill at ease. In the climactic scene (spoiler alert), Lee’s protagonist makes the conscious, considered decision to engage in an act of property destruction in the midst of street protests sparked by a white police officer’s murder of an unarmed Black man. And it took me more than a year to figure out why I’d been so shaken by this one decision by a fictional character. 

In the fall of 1990, I was a first-year student at Carleton College. One afternoon, the conversation in “Introduction to African-American History” left me walking in a daze across campus, feeling a discomfort that was as familiar as it was disconcerting: it was what I had felt in that parking lot after viewing Do the Right Thing. 

A group of students in class that day had made the case that any white person living in a society/culture rife with institutional racism was, by definition, a racist. The professor — who would later be a mentor of mine, but whom at that time I had just met — allowed this premise to stand as a given for the purposes of that day’s conversation.

I walked from class back to my dorm feeling that this formulation was unjust for two reasons. First, such a way of looking at things felt self-defeating, since it seemed to mean that in the United States no white person could be an antiracist, if every white person was by definition a racist. (This was, of course, long before the term “antiracist” was even in common usage. Helpful paradigms for talking about definitions of “racism,” like the one at the heart of Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist, were few and far between in most white communities.)

I discussed this first cause of my discomfort with my professor, one-on-one, outside class, and initially it seemed that his mentorship of me began in that private conversation. Only through confronting the second reason I’d felt so uncomfortable about that day’s class, however, could I eventually see that my professor’s mentorship had actually begun when he had encouraged a class discussion under the auspices of the white = racist formulation, in the first place.

Once I was able to get a bit of distance, it became clear that my biggest problem with that day’s discussion had simply been that it had hurt. My feelings had been injured; I had felt personally attacked. I’d found it deeply unfair to be made to feel prejudged, and in fact defined and named, based not on anything I’d said in class, or anything I’d done outside of it, but rather just on the basis of who I was.

Well. It wasn’t hard to see where one of the lessons was in that: if it hurt to feel prejudged for an hour or so, one needed to be capable of a serious leap of imagination to begin to comprehend the pain and frustration of being prejudged every day.

For a seventeen-year-old college freshman, it was a bit harder, but not impossible, to see beyond that first lesson to a second one: that my discomfort was not just acceptable, it was a necessary precondition for me truly to interrogate my own feelings, let alone larger phenomena having to do with race in America.

The sixteen-year-old version of me who had seen Do the Right Thing and been left shaken by it had sensed, but not been able to formulate, that vital fact. It wasn’t just that Lee’s film, and the protagonist’s decision at the climactic moment, made me uneasy. It was that my discomfort was necessary if the title of the film was to mean anything at all. A white person seeing Do the Right Thing will only begin to interact with the film in a meaningful way when she or he faces the way in which the film seems to say to the white viewer, “Are you disturbed by the idea that maybe the white world’s definition of the ‘right thing’ is utterly meaningless in the face of racist systems and racist violence? Good. That’s a starting point from which you can learn.”

Let’s take Lee’s lesson — and my professor’s — to heart. Let’s not just accept discomfort as part of the educational process. Let’s create the structures that encode discomfort into the educational process where necessary — doing so, of course, with the emotional (and physical) safety of young people in the forefront of our minds.

There is a huge body of research that demonstrates that learning is impeded by feeling unsafe. But feeling uncomfortable is not the same as feeling unsafe. Schools are often among the most psychologically and emotionally “safe” spaces in the United States, for their white teachers and students. It is people of color who are far more likely to feel and be unsafe in our schools. We white educators have to demonstrate our willingness to make ourselves — and, yes, our white students — uncomfortable if we want to do anything tangible about that fact.

How, precisely, can this be done? Any given department or division must ask that question in the context of its students, faculty, and program. I’ve worked for more than two decades in literary and cultural studies, so the first examples that come to my mind are in that arena.

Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” is taught in literature, rhetoric, history, and American-studies classes as a masterpiece of writing and a vital historical document of the Civil Rights movement. But the often-traditional approach to King’s piece provides at least one easy “out” for white teachers and students: the letter is, among other things, a statement of nonviolent civil disobedience that can (and often is) paired with Thoreau. The radical justice for which King argues so passionately can be subsumed to the more general history of (white) nonviolent protest philosophy.

So, don’t pair King’s letter with Thoreau. Pair it with James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, which was published in the very year in which King wrote his letter, and which allows for no easy outs — for anyone.

Toni Morrison’s Beloved is a searing, brilliant evocation of many complex phenomena, including racial injustice. But it too seems to provide some easy “out”s for white teachers and students who are looking for one. First, it takes place during the era of chattel slavery, which can lead to the “well, that’s behind us” defense. Second, the novel’s sheer artistic fluency might encourage an instructor to focus only on style and structure, not on systems of racist horror.

So, pair the novel with another late-1980s masterpiece of American art and culture, released within two years of Morrison’s book: Do the Right Thing (which might need to be expurgated to fit school standards regarding adult situations, language, etc., but which can still be devastatingly effective). Consider the question of how these two texts, on their surfaces different in all kinds of obvious ways, speak to the same moment in America’s racial history. Examine what we can learn from Morrison and Lee about whiteness in the 1980s, and earlier, and in our own time.

And so on.

Of course, there is nothing inherent in King’s letter or Morrison’s novel that leads us as white teachers to search for an “out,” for a way to make studying the texts less threatening to ourselves and our white students. It is our defenses that do that. Neither text needs to be paired with anything to be a devastating indictment of white supremacy and, indeed, of the very concept of whiteness. It’s just that our default mode — I include myself here, remembering how, for example, I once taught Morrison alongside Woolf and Faulkner, almost entirely through the lens of 20th-century Modernism and post-modernism — has not been to seek out the discomfort to be found in these canonical texts. So, one way to change the default approach is to place the texts in new contexts, designed to allow for discomfort.

Another way would simply be to re-approach King and Morrison from scratch, with a specific pedagogical goal of looking for the pressure points that will help white people to feel a necessary unease about the implications of whiteness. 

Indeed, there are in school curricula innumerable ways to prioritize, rather than to try to minimize, discomfort with and about whiteness. Opportunities exist in every discipline. Perhaps some will seem more obvious than others: a psychology class foregrounding the structure of racial resentment, or a history class refusing to look away from those statements of Thomas Jefferson that might sound to 21st-century ears like Jefferson Davis.

But experts in all fields can no doubt create entire curricula predicated on the need to create space for discomfort with whiteness. An economics teacher can approach a foundational concept like supply and demand through the lens of redlining, and can define labor markets specifically through a study of how those markets have been shaped — or, more accurately, warped — by policies based in white supremacy.

Biology state standards always include genetics. It might well make white students, or even teachers, uncomfortable to be upfront about the fact that the field was in part pioneered by people working specifically to provide evidence for white-supremacist ideologies. What a perfect entry point that is into the reality that “race” does not actually, biologically/genetically, exist. Where there are environmental-studies courses, environmental racism can serve as the opening unit, as a way of focusing the entire course, rather than being an add-on later in the semester. Where there are not such courses, biology curricula usually include units on environmental studies, so the same principle applies.

The point is to work across the curriculum to create the kind of discomfort that breeds thoughtful self-awareness. So often, we talk about finding ways to engage our white students with whiteness without, you know, making them “feel bad.” This is a mistake. In an educational context, discomfort is a powerful tool.

I was far more prepared truly to hear Baldwin when I first studied The Fire Next Time because in the previous eighteen months I had had the two unnerving experiences described at the outset of this essay. I was sixteen when I saw Lee’s film, seventeen when I took Intro to African-American History, and eighteen when first I read The Fire Next Time. Learning to see my discomfort during the first two experiences for what it was and what it meant readied me to read Baldwin with my defenses down to an extent that would otherwise have been impossible. Baldwin’s unflinching clarity about the nature of whiteness got through to me in part thanks to the cracks that Lee and my professor had chipped into my armor.

It is important to note that in all three “teachable moments,” I was and felt completely safe. In the first case, I’d gone to see a movie with a friend; in the next two, I was in seminar classes taught by approachable professors at a liberal-arts college. Again, uncomfortable did not mean unsafe. In fact, in retrospect I wonder if my discomfort was only acceptable to me, insofar as it was, because I did know that I was safe. And in the course of those interrelated experiences I was precisely the same ages as most of our current tenth, eleventh, and twelfth graders — who are just as able now as I was then to be able to handle discomfort, if it is managed within a safe overall environment.

We must remember that there are people who not only feel unsafe but who are unsafe, given their racial identities, in our schools. It is to them that we owe a willingness to give up our own comfort, if doing so can in any way increase their safety.

We cannot be content with hoping that approaches like curating “multicultural” reading lists and curricular materials, and creating “inclusivity statements,” and so on, are actually equal to the stark reality of 21st-century America. They are not. Millions of our fellow Americans — hundreds of thousands of our students —  are daily faced with existential pain born out of hundreds of years’ worth of institutional white supremacy.

If we as white citizens and educators aren’t willing to seek out and embrace the discomfort necessary to address the devastating consequences of that history, and of the privilege white supremacy confers on us, then we fail ourselves, our students, and our future.

Lucas Jacob is a high-school teacher and writing-instruction consultant based in Indianapolis. He has worked in independent, public-charter, and public schools across the United States and in Budapest, Hungary, where he was a Fulbright Teaching Fellow. Currently, he is on the staff of La Jolla Country Day School, in San Diego. He is the author of the full-length poetry collection The Seed Vault (Eyewear/Black Spring, 2019) and the chapbooks A Hole in the Light (Anchor & Plume Press, 2015) and Wishes Wished Just Hard Enough (Seven Kitchens Press, 2019). More at www.lucasjjacob.com.