Love this, Maha. So much to think about after that chat.

I’ve been pushed to think more about how oppression just can’t be understood as binary. As the professor, I wield a great deal of power, but I’m reading research recently that students consistently rate women lower on course evaluations, and that has real implications for my standing in my program. And, while we talk all the time about “white males” dominating classes, I’ve come to learn slowly that many of the white males in my classes are from poor or working class backgrounds and simply referring to them as as “privileged” in the same ways that the very entitled men are lets everyone off the hook from talking about deep social class inequities. TIm Lensmire and his colleagues wrote a great piece on this in the Harvard Ed Review last year.

This is intersectionality 101 , of course, but I think that we can romanticize “everyone is heard” when talking about critical dialogue in classes when what we’re hearing in their pretty deeply socialized *student* self and they’re likely hiding much of the rest of themselves, unsure of those things even belong in academic discourse. And Ellsworth was so great in reminding me that some people need to be quiet and listen sometimes.

So thanks for complicating all of this in this post and in your articles (will read later. Thanks for linking).