Making Space for Absent Others: Towards a Multicultural Pedagogy by Brian Kennedy, Associate Professor of English Cedarville College If a mythical person from another planet (in pre-politically correct lingo, "man from Mars") landed in the middle of a demographically-typical American city, what racial-cultural- social mixture would he encounter? If he then beamed over to a campus where a Faculty Dialogue reader might work, what would the picture look like? My suspicion is that he would wonder, as he toured most of our campuses, how we had managed to skew the demographics so profoundly toward a white, middle-class constituency. Please understand, this is not an indictment, nor is the judgment necessarily applicable in every case [Note 1]. I simply want to point out that in some measure, the environment that our students live in while they attend our colleges does not reflect the one that most of them will encounter their first day on the job. I do not intend to present a method for instant diversification of our campuses, because the matter is hardly so simple. Recruitment of minority students is difficult, often due to financial considerations, and minority faculty members, sadly, are often lured by larger institutions than where most of us work. What I wish to present, instead, is a rationale for diversification of our curriculum. We as faculty have a moral responsibility to prepare our students to cope with a diverse working environment. More importantly, our responsibility as Christians and educators is to enliven our students' minds to their moral obligations as citizens in a diverse society to value and love those different from themselves [Note 2]. We will best do this not by blandly proclaiming tolerance, but by making our students critically aware that even the contents of our courses and the ways of knowing we value are the product of choices which are informed by our cultural location(s). By constantly interrogating and reforming our own pedagogy, we model for our students a consciousness that ideas and outlooks vary. We thus teach them to make informed decisions about their actions, decisions which stem from an awareness of their place in a diverse culture, and their relationship to this culture's "othered" members. I do not intend to advance a radical agenda. Rather, my intention is to show how diversity might be integrated into a traditional course and curriculum. To this end, I will sketch the theoretical positions currently being advanced in the argument over multiculturalism and suggest ways in which we may claim ownership in these debates. Then, using the example of the Introduction to Literature course taught at Cedarville College (Ohio), I will suggest how we might begin to revise our pedagogy in favor of diversity. 1. Defining the Boundaries What's really at stake here? Does it matter how we respond? In terms of the Faculty Dialogue readership, What can the individual, Christian college professor do? What ought he or she do? The matter cannot be confined to the parameters of an academic debate, though the academy does provide an adequate site in which to discuss diversity and test plans for change. The issue itself, however, is strikingly personal, as I discovered when I went to Atlanta with a graduate of my college for a weekend conference. Staying with his parents in a suburb outside the city awakened me to the ethics of race. In the housing development where the Smiths [note 3] live, there is only one entrance. Apparently, the people who own these half-million-dollar homes are not fond of accidental traffic wandering through their neighborhood. Each street arcs back on itself, taking you not outside, but leading you back inside, to the safety of an exclusive world. I'm sure that living there, you would take comfort in the feeling that no matter what "they" were doing outside, your scion was secure. For an outsider, the feeling was disconcerting, disorienting. In the town where I live, you can drive down any street and feel the comfort of proceeding east-west, or north-south, of getting somewhere, even when you are unsure of your exact location. In this Atlanta neighborhood, the streets mock the stranger, leaving her feeling nervous lest she get caught in a place where she has no ownership. Perhaps not coincidentally, the development, while in theory open to all, only counted two African American families among its two hundred households. Why? Nobody had picket signs up, either for or against segregation. I saw no burning crosses, and a quick check in closets would not, I am sure, have turned up any Klan costumery. But they didn't need any of that, because the very layout of these streets forms a template which suggests exclusion. Just as so many of us do, the majority of people in this neighborhood were enacting white flight, drawn perhaps by the comforting pattern of those circular streets that say "protection" to those who belong there. The net effect is to make "others" absent. And absent, too often, equals forgotten. At this point, readers may chastise me for being smug, too confident of someone else's motives. I concede that it's none of my business where the Smiths live. Yet observing them made me aware that one's choices, even as they concern seemingly morally neutral aspects of life--place of home, type of church, school-- have ethical implications. In American society, such choices, which tend to knowingly or unknowingly factor in ethnicity, have lead to a de facto segregation where whites and blacks (to cite only one division) inhabit almost entirely separate spheres. The result, often, subtly tips the balance of cultural power towards whites. Thus when we, as Christians seeking to uphold principles of love, equality, and generosity, live in an essentially white world, we may without realizing it be cashing a cultural check which entitles us to more than our share of resources. Peggy McIntosh, in her article "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack," makes clear the effects of taking one's cultural position for granted when she explains white privilege, which is not a feature of the past, but of current American social life. She explains that caucasians experience the world in a way that allows them privilege while simultaneously blinding them to the fact that others may face obstacles in accomplishing what whites easily succeed in doing. We (whites) take for granted "an invisible package of unearned assets which [we] can count on cashing in each day, but about which [we were] `meant' to remain oblivious. White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports . . . " (10). Her list of the items in this knapsack are only partially represented by the following summary: the reasonable assumption that one's neighbors won't view one as detracting from their property's value on the basis of skin color; wide representation of people like one's self on the news or in accounts of history; the ability to speak without people presuming that the opinions articulated represent those of one's entire race (McIntosh 10-11). If this is right, and it seems to match my experience and also confirm that of African American friends, then there is work to be done to change our culture. While we may have structured our worlds with no intent to harm others, we have a responsibility to do more than preserve our comfort. As Christians, we need to lift up the fallen and minister to the broken and disadvantaged, yet this is a difficult task when we don't see them though they stand in our line of sight or don't know how to listen when they speak. We don't intend to perpetuate inequality, or to overlook people based on cultural background or skin color, but the pathways in our minds may, like the roads of that neighborhood, continually loop back upon themselves rather than open up to others. Hence, I want to challenge Christian educators, as I have been challenged, to begin a process of cultural change, and to share this change with their students by ensuring that the curricula we teach and the pedagogies we practice encompass diverse perspectives. 2. Various Attitudes Towards Change One response that some readers might wish to articulate could go something like this: Yes, I see that there is a certain ethical obligation involved here, but really, isn't the answer very simple? Like Rodney King said when he spoke during the L.A. riots, "Can't we all just get along?" Theorists call this approach "human relations multiculturalism," defined this way: "The human relations vision downplays `differences' because it is primarily concerned with the reduction of tension and conflict among different groups. . . . . In the human relations model, the dominant goal is to teach tolerance . . . " (Bensimon 13). A useful strategy as far as it goes, human relations multiculturalism demands that we acknowledge that ours is not the only point of view. However, it is akin to the viewpoint which urges that "we" will allow "them" to do their thing as long as we are allowed to do ours. This sounds suspiciously like the idea of being separate but equal, which American history has shown to be a means of perpetuating inequality [Note 4]. Critics comment that such an approach, when used in teaching, fails "to make students aware of the embeddedness of racism . . . or ethnocentrism in language and everyday practices as well as in decision-making and power structures" (Bensimon 13). The claim that there is no innocent ground sounds both radical and disturbing. However, I feel that our Christian imperative demands more than benign goodwill. "Critical multiculturalism" places the ethics of diversity in the foreground, demanding that we reconcile ourselves to reality of racism that is part of American life, and attempt to make things better. How many of us, for example, realize that as late as 1906, an American President was writing, "`that as a race and in the mass they [Negroes] are altogether inferior to the whites'" (qtd. in Litwack 333)? Or that for a significant part of its history, "negro" scholars were not admitted into the Modern Language Association? Things are undeniably better today, yet critical multiculturalism stresses that we not take it for granted that the job is finished. One definition of the distinction between critical and human relations multiculturalism is stated, though in a different context, this way: The issue is not to privilege difference through an appeal to common culture [as in human relations multiculturalism], but to construct differences within social relations and a notion of public life that challenges networks of hierarchy, systemic injustice, and economic exploitation. (Giroux 16) The wording is crucial. Rather than "privilege difference," we should "construct differences." The latter suggests both activity and plurality to the former's passivity and singularity. Even if we assume that we (all Americans now, regardless of race) possess equal opportunity to prosper, this does not give us the right to assume that we share the same culture, that our means of understanding the world are identical. Nor does it allow us to view other peoples and cultures as merely exotic. Thus the need to educate critically. "In critical multiculturalism the pedagogical aim is `to create conditions in which students become border crossers in order to understand Otherness in its own terms'" (Giroux 14). This sounds difficult, but it has an ethical appeal which seems imperative for the Christian. Further, and perhaps surprisingly to our colleagues in secular institutions, being at a Christian college puts one in a particularly advantageous position to respond to this cultural imperative, because while many of the students at our colleges are privileged, they also possess an ethical good will which makes them accessible for someone who brings a message of change. These are not people who lack the compassion which might provoke them to rethink their notions of the politics of cultural power. Instead, the same impulse to personal piety that they may be used as an opening into which to insert the barb of change. That is, while many their age might be receptive to human relations multiculturalism, these students, because they build their lives on ethical foundations (at least in the ideal), can be made to see the rightness of going beyond, to critical multiculturalism, which asks that they examine all they do, say, and read in the light of justice. The goal, in terms of the example that I cited above, is to produce students who, before they can feel comfortable buying into a neighborhood like the one in Atlanta, have the wherewithal to analyze their choice in terms of their ethical responsibility in the world. But how does this ambition take on a practical dimension in our classrooms? 3. Curriculum Transformation Change starts with our willingness to interrogate our choices in selection of course materials and in methods of presentation. We must think critically about the ways in which we impart knowledge to our students, asking ourselves what we take for granted in our conception of our disciplines, and who we exclude, if even innocently, by our pedagogy. As an example of how we might become critically aware of pedagogical content and method, I want to discuss the "Introduction to Literature" course offered at Cedarville College, where I teach. The course typically is used by sophomores to fulfill one of their general education humanities requirements. While the choice of materials is open to the instructor, most choose a book like Literature: Reading Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and the Essay, published by McGraw-Hill, and teach the course as an introduction to the genres. Typically, the course deals in canonical texts, used to build a certain version of literary history and interpretation that most of us would recognize [Note 5]. The idea is that the teacher guide the students in reading a set of standard British and American texts, chosen because they represent the pinnacle of thought in our culture. The difficulty which becomes apparent as one scrutinizes this seemingly-neutral method is that it both denies the presence of cultural "others" by keeping the canon closed and ignores the potential for diversity of interpretation by centering meaning in a rationalist hermeneutic. Such assumptions allow one to think either that the course somehow skirts the questions posed by multiculturalism or that the course leaves no room for change, ideas which I am arguing must be rethought. The interpretive method which the anthology itself suggests may illustrate my point. This model assumes that the primary goal of reading literature is to arrive at the singular and stable meaning intended by the writer, a sort of a-cultural perspective which takes interpretation to be completely independent of the cultural code which the reader brings to the text. This sounds acceptable, especially to those of us who have been trained that the alternative is relativism. However, such a method effectively writes out of existence readers' perceptions about what texts mean to them, perceptions which will be colored by their cultural contexts. Such contexts do, I will argue, matter, and to consider them as a factor as one reads is not to destroy the fixity of meaning. Rather, it returns us to a hermeneutical model represented by the classical rhetorical triangle, which encompasses text, writer, and reader. The net effect of eliminating the reader from interpretation, especially when one considers the gender and color makeup of the traditional canon, is to suggest that one sort of person (white and male) defines aesthetic experience, not only as the writer, but as the controller of interpretation. I want to suggest that the field of literary interpretation (let alone selection of texts) allows for more diversity. For example, the anthology has a section which teaches students to read poetry. Here, the authors break literary hermeneutics into a three-part hierarchy: the experience of poetry, the interpretation of it, and its evaluation. The method is described as moving from "subjective responses" (experience) to "intellectual processes" (interpretation and evaluation) which are "analytical" and "rational." The further one goes up this scale of interpretation, the less he or she involves his or her own cultural perspective as a reader (and, according to the book, the closer she or he gets to the real meaning of the poem). The explanation of this hermeneutic asserts: "If one of our initial acts is to somehow appropriate the poem personally by relating it to our experience, another is to consider its meaning." The division of response from understanding intensifies with this statement: "When we interpret a poem, we concern ourselves less with how it affects us than with what it means or suggests" (374); yet these two are far from different orders of knowledge [Note 6]. In the method here described, the crucial matter of interpretation, of saying what something means, is governed not at all by who the reader is, but only by abstract intellect. "Interpretation relies on our intellectual comprehension and rational understanding rather than on our emotional apprehension and response" (374). However, this approach not only denies cultural similarity or difference (the cultural location of the reader) as relevant to interpretation but also demands that the reader shut off her own sensitivities in order to turn what was an object of imagination into a purely rational construct. The poem, if this is true, may as well be an architectural drawing. The unstated assumption that all readers may adopt a neutral and rational mindset to make sense of the literature strips readers of their cultural attachments. The suggested interpretation of Frost's poem "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" may serve as an illustration of the way this methodology removes the poem completely from the grasp of the reader's experience. The text explains that the speaker is trying to convey his feeling that he has many responsibilities to fulfill before his death (378), assuming that the person is an important man-about-town with a set of obligations and goals as a citizen, though no biographical or secondary evidence is cited to indicate that this might have been Frost's intention. No thought is given to the possibility that who he "is" (after all, he's not real) might have something to do with how the reader perceives him, or that some readers may be repelled by the powerful man, and that their reactions could then be important in the matter of interpretation. The anthology leaves no room to ask whether he might be a cultural outsider or for the possibility that the poem could expose the misery of his life as an insider. The poem is taken to speak for itself, if readers use the proper intellectual frame of mind. This pedagogy has been dubbed by critics "liberal humanism," the belief, applied to the interpretation of literature, that all people may draw upon a similar culture which helps them to understand "universal" themes. Desirable as it may seem to universalize in this way, such an approach shuts out a multi-perspectival approach to literature. Yet think back to the definition of interpretation offered in the literature text. Why should we rush past emotional response to "analytical," "intellectual" interpretation? Whom do we silence in so doing? Do we, by following this method, not lose a crucial part of what it is to read literature? Poetry exists to be read, and in the reading, to be absorbed by its hearer in his or her own context. Just as the beauty of Tennyson on a spring day owes something to the balance of the poetry's rhythms with the sensory experience of fresh air and the presence of one's true love, so any reading of literature is at least partially indebted to the reading situation itself. When we fail to take into account the diversity of potential readers, we ignore the contextual part of interpretation. Critical multiculturalism demands at least three revisions to this familiar practice of teaching and interpreting, asking that we rethink the matter of how we teach, how we read, and what we use as subject matter. Casting the matter in radically ethical terms, one might say that students should be taught "how to read texts critically, to analyze the forms of exclusion and oppression, and to understand the process by which those who are dominant construct these exclusions" (Bensimon 15). As a first order of change, then, we need to rethink our pedagogy so that we encourage our students to articulate their social positions and different ways of knowing as they read the texts we choose. Sara Suleri says it well when she comments that "a multicultural approach is not a solution but a practice of reading or an interpretive strategy that attempts to accommodate the complexity of the cultural universe that we inhabit" (17). The teacher must see herself or himself as more than a dispenser of knowledge, the person with the "most rational" perspective, to use the superlative of the literature anthology's term. Instead, the teacher must privilege the different potentials for meaning which will reside in the class. Henry Giroux comments that this pedagogy offers students the opportunity to engage the multiple references that constitute different cultural codes, experiences, and languages. This means providing learning opportunities for students not only to analyze how cultural texts produce and are produced by various discursive racial codes, but also how students `read' themselves . . . into those cultural identities . . . offered by dominant and oppositional representations. (25) Assuming that a given poem represents universal experience does not account for the gaps which might exist between the student and, say, the poem by Frost because of differences in culture, geography, time, or social class. While our goal, of course, is to teach students in such a way that these comprehension deficits are bridged, we must also take into account the fact that some students may feel alienated by "the" interpretation, the one which, proceeding on supposedly rational lines, helps readers sort through the fallacies of their "emotional" responses. The multicultural answer is not simply to train students to think exactly as we think, but to observe the reading strategies that both we and our students bring to a text, and to make room for readings which draw upon a diversity of audience locations. The Frost poem, for example, may have different resonance depending on whether a given student is from a rural or urban background, rich or poor, or even comfortable outside in the winter. Some students may not appreciate the aesthetics of a snowy winter night, while others might feel vulnerable at the thought of stopping somewhere in the dead of night. Others might wonder whether the speaker resembles a homeless man, an outsider who knows to whom the woods belong--the privileged man who has a house in the village--and who, perhaps, has slept in them on occasion. Perhaps he is even thinking of doing so now, but on a cold night like this, a better place to sleep must be found. Hence, the character has "miles to go before I sleep." Did Frost have this in mind? Probably not. Yet this reading gives the poem a contemporary resonance. These responses, far from opening the door to relativism, rather allow us to enrich our perspective on the text by seeing more completely its potentials for meaning. Of course, each reading of the poem will have to be supported by the person offering it, upon whom falls the burden to demonstrate that such a reading has validity in the text. This reading methodology suggests that we must get students to look at the structures of texts--their various layers of disparate voices, and potential implied readers, and to understand how they, as interpreters, approach these texts from complicated social contexts. Giroux suggests that we help students to recognize not only their own historical locations and subject-positions, but also to shape historical locations within rather than outside of a political imaginary in which differences are both affirmed and transformed as part of a broader struggle for a radical, cultural democracy. (34) In so saying, he indicates that students need to think about what they read not as the isolated activity of the classroom, but as contributing to the ways in which they live. In order for this to be meaningful in terms of the social ethic that I have been suggesting, the instructor must help them see the values content of every interpretation they make. More importantly, it means that she or he must be aware of times when only the agreed-upon position is being articulated, to the exclusion of opinions which might differ. However, looking at my own working context, I know that having more than a couple of minority students in a class is unusual. Yet even if our students don't represent diverse backgrounds, we need to raise the question of how others not among our group might read the texts we teach. At the same time, this empowers the students to read and grasp texts for themselves, rather than taking the received interpretation for granted. However, those of us who teach at Christian colleges and want to implement a multicultural pedagogy may have to develop techniques which will attune our students to listening to absent voices (those of the African American, etc.). That is, we will have to work hard to let the voices of people who are underrepresented in our schools be heard. This without doubt creates a set of challenges that we have not previously encountered. It will demand, for example, that we- -teachers and students alike-- be silent in our classes at times. We are people who are accustomed to having the voice in our culture. For a change, we are going to have to sit quietly while someone else--who is not even in the room--talks. That is, we may have to strain hard to think about how a member of another (minority) culture would respond to a given text. Our job might be made easier, however, by choosing texts which place the voices of the marginalized in the foreground. Thus the second imperative concerns choice of texts--why we read what we do, and what to do about it. To students, a text like Literature bears cultural weight in proportion to its physical mass of nearly 1800 pages; student readers have no idea that what the book contains is a matter for debate. To them, it's as authoritative as the periodic table. Even more so, students used to accepting the canon of scripture are unlikely to realize that they can challenge the literary canon unless the instructor gives them the opportunity to do so. Teaching them that the canonicity of a literary text owes something to its situation in culture might help equip students to understand both how disparate perspectives may enliven understanding. To reinforce this idea, it behooves us to make some deliberately challenging choices as we assign reading. For example, Literature has been updated with a good variety of contemporary choices in each generic category. I like pairing newer work with more familiar choices, both as a way to open up the discussion and to demonstrate the newer texts may rearticulate and interrogate familiar ("universal") themes. Thus along with Frost's poem, I might have the students read Linda Pastan's "Ethics" (see Appendix 1), which sets the persona in a familiar yet oddly disconcerting public space, like Frost does, using nature images which parallel Frost's while providing contrast. The class might observe the ways in which the two persons relate to the land, for example, using Pastan's notion of a color darker than winter to contrast the snow of Frost's winter evening, and segue from there to questions about female experience and the nature of aesthetic choices. This is not to toss out the traditional American canon [Note 7], and here I invoke critical multiculturalism's third demand. We might reread familiar texts, but from a new perspective. To cite one example, Toni Morrison, in her book Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, suggests that American literature would not be possible were it not for the backdrop of African American experience, yet she notices how little the African voice is heard in the interpretation of that literature. Setting aside the question of the canon, Morrison urges that at the very least, familiar texts could be reread with attention paid to their African American characters. Thus, an introductory literature class might usefully read Huck Finn, but focus, as Morrison suggests, on Jim, and the ways in which his slavery help define the freedom of the other characters (56-57). 4. Conclusions In this entire endeavor, we must pay attention to nuances that are not familiar to us. We will be confronted with what a Canadian experiences when he first comes to the US--a strange new accent which colors speech, making it somewhat exotic. We have to be careful to understand that speech without reveling in its difference for difference's sake. We must learn that the effort to extend cultural access to others doesn't stop with the final exam, and isn't always easy. We have to resist being sappy-sweet about embracing change in an environment where, after all, there is not that much at stake--the students can all still get their good grades, and we can cash our checks and feel proud about having "made a difference". Nobody has to sacrifice resources. We can all "do" multiculturalism without it costing us what it might in the real world, where money and power are at stake. Instead, both students and faculty must reconcile what we learn in the class, which students might very well cooperate with and then forget the day the semester ends, with our lives as citizens. These sets of readings, this consciousness that cultural value, and hence cultural power, may reside in places in which we might not normally look, must start to invade the usually private spaces of our lives. We must see, and help our students to see, that considering others, valuing their culture, and being willing to share in the matter of interpreting culture are crucial ethical matters. I read a T-shirt slogan recently which said "the solution is revolution." Maybe, but there are only a few Martin Luther King, Jrs. in every generation. I doubt very much that I am one. But I can teach my students that the way that they spend their time and their money matters, and provoke them to be agents of change by urging into them a consciousness that interrogates their choices. What do they perpetuate by always buying their gas on the "white" side of town? Does it matter that my students live right beside the National Afro-American Museum and Cultural Center (in Wilberforce, Ohio) while in college and yet never visit there? Yes. I want the invisible yet not inaccessible elements of white privilege to surface in their minds. A course like Introduction to Literature might be the start of this as it not only exposes them to new kinds of thinking but also teaches them to read the familiar differently. Later on, as they grow more powerful economically, I hope that they make informed choices about allocating their resources. As they adopt places of leadership in their churches, I hope that my students don't do what their parents did--move to the suburbs and leave the problems of the city behind as too distracting. If nothing else, I hope that they resist that urge to run to safety. Maybe their sophomore literature class can be the first moment in the process that makes them face their responsibility in these areas. If so, perhaps their first day in a diverse corporate America won't be quite as much of a shock as it would otherwise have been. Notes 1. Peterson's Choose a Christian College, 3e, bills itself on the cover as "the official guide to the member schools in the Christian College Coalition." There are 84 schools listed there. Their minority populations (African Americans, Native Americans, Hispanics, Asian Americans--I'm excluding international students because of their unspecified ethnicity) ranged from a low of 1% at Dordt College in Iowa to a high of 31% at Nyack College in New York. Most were between 3% and 8%, with the actual numerical average just under 9%. Throwing out the high and low numbers made the average 8.8%. 2. Throughout this article, I refer to ethnicity, class, and gender when I use terms like "multiculturalism" and "diversity." 3. The Smiths exist; their name is changed. 4. Litwack quotes African Americans who comment on the idea of separate but equal. One says, "`Our seedy run-down school told us that if we had any place at all in the scheme of things it was a separate place, marked off, proscribed and unwanted by the white people'" (323). 5. There are still lots of things one might do with this book, though, as I detail later. 6. Despite the fact that the evaluation section claims to prize personal reaction again as it suggests that aesthetic judgement is a slippery business (379-80). 7. Canon revision is probably not as widespread as popular academic belief would make one think. A recent NY Times article indicated that "times may change, but the writers student read stay much the same" (Applebome B8). The article lists those must often read as Melville, Whitman, Dickinson, Twain, and Emerson in American literature courses and Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, and Pope in British courses (B8). Works Cited Applebome, Peter. "Class Notes." The New York Times 1 Mar. 1995: B8. Bensimon, Estela Mara, Ed. Multicultural Teaching and Learning: Strategies for Change in Higher Education. State College: The Pennsylvania State University National Center on Postsecondary Teaching, Learning, and Assessment [NCTLA]: 1994. DiYanni, Robert, Ed. Literature: Reading Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and the Essay 3E. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994. Giroux, Henry A. "Post-Colonial Ruptures and Democratic Possibilities: Multiculturalism and Anti-Racist Pedagogy." Cultural Critique. 21.2 (Spring 1992): 5-39. Lauter, Paul. "Race and Gender in the Shaping of the American Literary Canon: A Case Study from the Twenties." Feminist Studies 9.3 (Fall 1983): 435-63. Litwack, Leon F. "Trouble in Mind: The Bicentennial and the Afro- American Experience." Journal of American History Sept. 1987: 315-37. McIntosh, Peggy. "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack." Peace and Freedom July-Aug. 1989: 10-12. Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination [1992]. New York: Vintage-Random, 1993. Suleri, Sara. "Multiculturalism and its Discontents." Profession 93. MLA 1993: 16-17.