Notes on Teaching Systemic Analysis
By Niall Twohig
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 spot. My mom, exhausted from 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. I 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:
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. Here’s another that laments that separation:
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. We relate to the writer. We look in the mirror and ask ourselves 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 the other two characters from the play 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 imaginary of dominant groups, Western men from the WASP class, as they encountered people outside their race and class. In their eyes, these others are 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. to see how different races where constructed as inhuman brutes or savages. I first turn back to 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 the 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 two other immigrant groups racialized as brutes when they first arrived in the United States: The Irish and the Chinese.
We first focus on the Irish. Their immigrant histories challenge the notion that racial identities are static and that race is a fixed essence. The first waves of Irish immigrants were seen as a lesser breeds than the elite WASP class because of their religion and impoverished condition from British colonialism. The Irish race was outside of whiteness. This made it easier for white businessmen to exploit the Irish as cheap and disposable labor alongside their working class brothers and sisters of color. Over time, the Irish worked their way into whiteness. This did so by playing up their Irish-American identity in culture and by mobilizing politically to gain access to, and power within, institutions.
We then turn to Chinese immigrants. We first look at the immigrant 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 and treated as an invading race, a corrupting 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 shows us how dominant notions of race shift over time. Even still, those residues of earlier racist ideologies remain. They have been 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. 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. They teach us an important lesson for systemic analysis: To understand what blocks the road to freedom, for these women and for society in general, 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 clearest understanding of the social matrix. They see the cages within cages that many of us take for granted even when they’re caging our moms, sisters, queer, and transgendered kin. Those cages within cages restrict us all in the end.
I end by reflecting upon the very limited repertoire of the racist and xenophobic imagination. Time and time again, racialized groups are depicted as brutish apes or vermin. That imagery hides the fact that these “unwanted” immigrants built the country and continue to do the “essential” work that keeps it going. Whenever I hear my cousin, who I love dearly, parroting the Right Wing xenophobic talking points about undocumented immigrants, I remind her of this. I also remind her that our kin, the Irish immigrants of old, were once seen as she is seeing these new immigrants. We were once Caliban too.
Day 6: A House Divided
A Social Matrix Built and Rebuilt to Protect Elite Interests
Contradictions - Promises - Women dreaming - Alan’s essay and Marlan’s essay
De-potentiated
Day 7: Everything is Not Alright
Awakening from a Divisive Social Matrix and Moving, Together, to Break Free
Return to ideology of competitive individualism
Missed phone calls from Da - what are we told to prioritize in the rat race, getting in the way
What is gained from competitive individualism?
Limitations of competitive individualism? Naz and Pouria
My student - computer - tears in eyes - different ways of learning/computer when 7th grade - blame ourselves - inequitable playing field (imposter syndrome)
The House - falling through - events that wake people up to systemic problems in the house (Triangle, Pandemic)
The Whole House Hurts - Look Deeper
Who is hurt by unfettered capitalism
Who is hurt by dominant ideologies
The Story of the Course
Waking Up and Moving Together
Awakenings - The Progressive Era
Bread and Roses - Anti-American
Chernin
History Rhymes - Born Yesterday - Why do we learn history - Zinn quote - no b.s. but also see that change is possible when people wake up and organize together, small acts of rebellion (marching to a different rhythm, picking up the phone call rather than just running the rat race.
Step 2 Note:
Our goal with Step 2 is to start developing reader awareness.
When you write this one, I want you to imagine a specific reader who doesn't know the histories or concepts we are studying. Make it real: envision your mother, brother, co-worker, a friend, or an enemy. Write to that specific and real person. It's okay to speak to them in the second person (use "you" if you need to).
Remember, our object in analysis is to reveal new depths to the reader. So, write in a way that reaches them. Try to be aware of their assumptions or shallow views of the world. Think about how you can guide them to new depths of understanding without angering, confusing, or making them feel stupid.
With this assignment, in particular, you're revealing how history can help us understand the present. If an event or phenomenon isn't new then that means we have something old to study and learn from. We can see what led to the event or phenomenon back then and consider if similar factors are at play now. From a historical distance, we can see how folks were trapped by divisive ideologies and how others awakened. We can see who was and wasn't on the side of democracy, then and now. Help your reader to learn some of these lessons. If you do, they'll have more direction as they navigate the uncertain waters of the present.
Day 8: A New (and Raw) Deal
Talk about experience-major-job-who you want to serve
Day 9: Saving the Soul of America
Faux midterm
Day 10