Menu
header photo

Project Vision 21

Transforming lives, renewing minds, cocreating the future

Blog Search

Blog Archive

Comments

There are currently no blog comments.

Why we exclude ourselves from thinking?

Francisco Miraval

A year and a half ago, the first day of classes of the Spring semester, I went into my classroom a few minutes before the class began and, as I always do, I wrote on the whiteboard with big letters the name of the course: Humanities 101. And then, below that, I wrote my name: Francisco Miraval.

I was still writing my name when, suddenly, a female student (from South America) began to laugh. She was not making fun of me and she was not disrespectful. She was laughing with that uncontrollable laugh you use as a defense mechanism when you found yourself in an unexpected situation.

I approached the student and I asked her why she was laughing. (I wanted to be sure there was nothing wrong with my clothes. You never know.) She calmed down and then she said, “I thought only Americans could teach philosophy.”

In other words, she was laughing because she found herself looking at a non-Euro-American professor with the credentials needed to teach humanities, a situation she did not anticipate. She also explained to me she has been in the United States for three years and, during that time, she never met a Hispanic or Latino college professor.

I felt sad that somebody excluded herself and excluded others not only from the possibility of studying philosophy, but even from the possibility of thinking, just because her nationality or ethnicity, or those of the instructor, were the “wrong” ones to talk about philosophy.

It is disgusting to see that some people assume that only people with a certain color of skin, or speaking a certain language, or born in a certain country can actually think and teach others how to think, leaving everybody else (that is, us) excluded from thinking.

At the same time, it is even sadder, disgusting, and worrisome that my student, from a certain point of view, is right. I remember reading some statistics from the American Philosophical Association saying that a very small percentage of “minority” students take Humanities classes, and an even smaller percentage of non-Euro-American professors teach Humanities.

That means that the opportunities a “minority” college student has to have a “minority” professor teaching him or her Humanities are very small. For that reason, when that happens, students laugh, as my student did a year and a half ago.

It is sad to see that very little, if anything is being done to change that situation, that is, to revert the exclusion and self-exclusion of “minorities” from thinking. If we do not think for and by ourselves, then who will do it? The answer is that if we do not think, somebody else will do the thinking for us.

Thinking, far from being a privilege for just a few, it is a privilege for everybody. Is it possible to create an environment where the possibility of thinking can be restored for those previously excluded or self-excluded? Yes, it is possible. But that will be the topic of another column.

Go Back