• How does the image of Joyce Walker fit into this text?
• Textually.
• Born in 1965
• Raised in Collinsville, Illinois (22,000 inhabitants)
• Attended an all-white Lutheran grade school
• Attended an integrated public high school
• Single-parent home
• Mother a Registered Nurse
• Two older sisters and one older brother
• Attended Southern Illinois University, graduated in 1987
• Lived 4 1/2 years in Washington, D.C. Worked as a nightclub manager
• Returned to Collinsville for one year. Married Anthony Roth in 1992.
• Lived for two years in Houston, Texas. Worked as a contract employee at Exxon USA.
• Returned to graduate school in 1994
• Received M.A. in Rhetoric in 1998
• Presently attending University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana working toward a Ph.D. in Writing Studies

What this says about me is questionable. I am a white woman living in the Midwest. I am, I think, a member of the middle-class, although my salary at present doesn't really reflect this economic status. My understanding of issues such as race, gender, and sexuality are shaped by numerous factors, such as family influences, schooling, religious background, friends, and geographic location. My understanding has been deeply influenced by my recent school experiences, where I have for the first time spent time in classes reading and thinking carefully about the various ways these issues can be framed and discussed. However, these newly found resources for dealing with such issues are sometimes an awkward fit to my daily experience and to the memories which shape my world view. I find the complexity of daily life as difficult to frame through theory as I find it difficult to recognize myself in the list above.

Looking at my own experience though the various theoretical lenses I've acquired, I have learned to recognize differences and inequalities which I failed to see before, or failed to see as significant. I have added this knowledge to my framework for living and working in the world, and I can see ways that this added knowledge has changed my behavior and my responses to experience. However, it seems to me that the more I see, the more difficult it becomes to find easy ways to describe or understand my experience.

Let me provide some examples which illustrate how complicated this process of renegotiation is:

• When I was 15, a sophomore in high school, I suddenly began to experience what it felt like to be a sought-after young woman. (a phrase I realize is hopelessly outdated--some sort of Victorian compulsion to seek safety in euphemism) I began to go out on dates. I was very innocent compared to many of the girls my age. I was asked on a date by a young man who was African American. As a result of my innocence in two areas, dating and race relations, I saw no problem with accepting his offer. He was a nice guy and racism was surely a thing of the past (in 1981). Suddenly I found myself facing an uproar from other, white students. Friends (but were they?) told me that no white boy would date me if I dated a black boy, even once. I remember being scared and angry, both by how unfair it was, and also in realizing how fragile my newfound popularity was. I was cowardly (I knew it then) and reneged on my offer to go out with the African-American student. I don't think I told him the real reason--I think I said I "just wanted to be friends." I'm sure this is not an unusual story. I do remember, though, my surprise and shame that I did not have the moral fiber to stand up to the people who threatened me with their racism. But I also remember the fear, and the desperate need to be accepted. Because my physical environment had been "white" -- i.e. made up almost exclusively of white people -- until this time I had only a theoretical understanding of interracial relationships. I accepted the rhetoric of equality that I read in books without difficulty until I came face-to-face with the "real-world" reactions of whites to these relationships.

• The first year that I taught a freshman composition course at Southern Illinois University I had an African-American student that I both liked and admired. She was strong-minded and intelligent and she led the class in discussions and wrote interesting, creative pieces that I enjoyed reading. She was my "favorite" student in that course. One day, as a prompt for writing assignments, I had the students look at a variety of pictures of families and then do a short, in-class writing about their ideas. This student chose to write about a magazine advertisement from the movie "Raising Isaiah", which starred Jessica Lange and dealt with the difficulties of  black/white adoptions. I don't remember her writing fully, but I remember that she came out against whites adopting black children on the grounds that black children should have the cultural experience of being raised in black homes. In the last few lines of her writing, she said that she couldn't imagine being raised in a white home -- she wrote, "I mean, have you been to these people's houses, do you know how dirty they are?" As a white person and the instructor of the course I was in what I felt to be an extremely awkward and challenging situation, and I found myself at a loss for the best way to discuss this issue with this student in a productive way.  We eventually discussed the issue in a private conversation (which began with other matters) in my office. We talked about both knowing and fearing people of other races. We spoke about my white Dutch grandmother and her stringent criteria for what constituted a "clean" house. We agreed that our prejudices are always complicated

• In the course I took on critical race theory several years later, I told the above story of the student and her writing. Another student in the class, (an African American and a teacher) was appalled that I had not come down harder on this young woman for what he saw as her racist remark. He felt strongly that I should have brought the matter up in class. I thought it was interesting and troubling that he and I found it so difficult find common ground. For me, the fact that I liked this woman, that I wanted to talk to her as another person, a white person, not as the authority who evaluated her work as inappropriate but as a person who could and was hurt by a description of her racial group as dirty and unworthy of friendship, made my position extremely complicated. But for him it was as simple as, "I can't believe you would let something like that go on in your classroom." In my own role as a student I wanted to explore how my response to the young woman student was shaped by my position as a white woman and teacher, but I was held back by the awareness that my response seemed inappropriate to my male, African-American colleague and fellow-student. He seemed to think the answer was simple, while I found it incredibly complicated.