Disorientation by Ian Williams

Author:Ian Williams [Williams, Ian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House of Canada
Published: 2021-09-21T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

—

In Vancouver, at the University of British Columbia, I gave my (mostly white) students an exercise designed to increase their capacity for risk and empathy. The exercise goes like this: Visit a place that makes you uncomfortable or insecure. If you grew up in a city, go into a forest, into the wild (safely, etc.), veer off path (safely, etc.), encounter the terror of aporia. If you are from a suburb, venture into the poorest postal code in Canada, East Hastings. Don’t rush through. Find a place to be and stay there. Don’t ignore people. Write there without anthropologizing or trafficking in misfortune. Note your anxieties. As a third option, I suggest entering an upscale store where you don’t think you’d be welcome. Process the experience and allow yourself to be processed.

One fall, I did that last version of the assignment. I went into an expensive store in Vancouver’s luxury zone with a friend, a Brown guy, born and raised in a very white Quebec town. My friend was expensively dressed, as usual. See the above hypothesis. The salesperson was friendly. He followed us upstairs. We were not harassed. In my head, I heard the white chorus say, See, we told you so. You’ve been a presumptuous, paranoid dick. The problem is with you, not us.

Would I ever go back to that store again? No. Why? Beyond the evidence of this experience, I know that I am not the desired client in that space. It cannot be proven. It can only be known.

The exercise that I would like to give students involves asking them to go into a place where they are the only person of their race and attempt an interaction without using any of their privileges, of whiteness, of gender, of money. As a minority in that situation, divested of power, how do you even begin to engage with an impervious world? Like Prufrock, when you are pinned and wriggling on the wall, then how would you begin?

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.