Mixed Messages

I began thinking in a concerted way about the implications of casual textual racism when Jonathan Loesberg and I gave a reading from The Mysteries of Paris (1843), the nineteenth-century novel by Eugène Sue that we had recently translated from French. The event was held at a Washington, DC, bookstore, and the audience was composed largely of academics, friends, and family members. Jonathan and I had decided that I would give some background about the novel's unusual history and that he would read from the first chapter. Unexpectedly, I felt myself cringe as he read the following passage that occurs near the beginning of the novel:

These were words I knew intimately from having translated them, yet I felt as if I were experiencing them for the first time as they were pronounced aloud. Was I supposed to be proud of this text?

The passage was unabashedly racist, but in the moment, I was processing it with mixed emotions. As a veteran reader of nineteenth-century literature, I knew that Sue's characterization of Cooper's “savages” was hardly unique; his racism is unimaginative. Yet the banality of Sue's juxtaposition of their “brutal” and “bloody” ways to “all things civilized” did not bring me comfort. Did the other people in the room, including a friend's nine-year-old son who looked up from his video game periodically during the reading, understand this passage as run-of-the-mill nineteenth-century racism? And if they did, what did that mean to them? What if the nine-year-old in the audience had not been my (white) friend's son but rather a child of Native American ancestry? What damage might this casual rhetoric of savagery have caused such a listener? What was it, I asked myself, about the conventionality and expectedness of this racism that had allowed me not to see it—or what was it, rather, about me?

Then there was the question of my personal and professional interests in giving the novel a second life in the twenty-first century. By co-translating The Mysteries of Paris, I had helped facilitate its introduction to a new English-speaking readership. This reading at Kramerbooks was, of course, a commercial event. We were hoping to sell copies of the book. Was it wise to read an excerpt of The Mysteries of Paris that made it sound so abhorrent? Would our audience be put off by this racism—and maybe not purchase the book? Overall, the novel is not terribly interested in pursuing its analogy between the North American tribes of Cooper's novels and the Parisian thieves. While it certainly contains other racist elements, the novel does not develop them substantially. The Mysteries of Paris is a diffuse, uneven work with many different strands of concern. Should we have chosen a passage that didn't reflect so badly on a popular novel that devotes most of its energies to exploring the oppression of the poor and the psychopathology of crime across different social classes? Perhaps—but would that not have meant hiding the racist incident and effectively protecting the novel from itself, and us from the novel? To be clear: I don't think that our selection of this excerpt was a mistake. I do wish I had acknowledged its racism, however, before Jonathan read it aloud. But what should I have said?Footnote ¹⁵

The questions this public reading raised for me had obvious implications for my teaching. That very semester, I was teaching Jane Eyre, Bleak House (1853), The Mill on the Floss (1860), and East Lynne, among other texts, in the context of a course on configurations of family in Victorian novels. Each of these novels featured slurs and stereotypes beyond the ones I had remembered. I had intended to bring Susan Meyer's and Gayatri Spivak's influential readings of Jane Eyre, with their respective focuses on Bertha's racial ambiguity and Jane's imbrication in imperialism, into our discussion of the novel, but a discussion of the racism inherent in Rochester's performance and reception as a gypsy fortune-teller—a “shockingly ugly old creature […]; almost as black as a crock”—had not figured in my lesson plan.Footnote ¹⁶ Of course I taught my students about “telescopic philanthropy” in Bleak House, but I had not expected to field questions about Dickens's demeaning, glancing mentions of the “Tockahoopo Indians.”Footnote ¹⁷ Our class was certainly going to be analyzing the episode in The Mill on the Floss in which Maggie runs off to join the gypsies, but dwelling on the stereotyped specifics of George Eliot's representation of the “reality” of the gypsies was not my intention.Footnote ¹⁸ East Lynne, as I have already indicated, contained anti-Semitic stereotypes and asides that I had not meant to spend time on.

How many times had I not made a point of mentioning the casually racist aspects of texts I had assigned? I couldn't remember ever having consciously, deliberately avoided mentioning them—but I was sure I had let some slurs go unremarked. Unless we were doing close readings of the specific passages in which they occurred, and unless the trope or argument or information or theme I was trying to bring to students’ attention related to these passages, it was highly likely that I had ignored them. Yet there were certainly times when we had discussed racist and xenophobic occurrences in class in the middle of a conversation about something else. Typically in these instances, I would offer a brief historical context for the racism and then gesture at the differences between Victorian understandings of race and our own. Upon encountering casually racist references, I taught students that the Victorians didn't think the same way about race, or other races, as we do today, and thus I was implying that nineteenth-century writers couldn't know how wrong they were. By insisting on the historical specificity of Victorian racism and on the difference between Victorian racial thinking and our own—that is, by encouraging students to consider the Victorians less enlightened than ourselves—I had been instructing students to think, falsely, that we stood in an evolved relationship not only to Victorian racism but to racism, period. This is not the way I think when I'm thinking about Victorian or contemporary American racism—but apparently, I had not really been thinking.

The most unsettling problem the reading crystallized for me was that I had always wanted students to recognize racism when they saw it but had been asking them, at the same time, to take that recognition and bracket it. In order to train them to be sophisticated readers, I had effectively been telling them to suspend their perceptions of racism.Footnote ¹⁹ While I had been careful to be accurate in my representation of Victorian culture, I had been less careful about how I had been modeling a dissociative attitude toward race. What had I been teaching my students about “the Victorians”—and, more importantly, what had I been teaching them about themselves and their world?

Race, “the Victorians,” and the Speaker's Benefit

Before we can understand the function of casual racism in Victorian literature and culture and in the classrooms that ignore it, enshrine it, or critique it, we need to consider more broadly the ways Victorians and Victorianists have tended to engage the concepts of race and racism. Casual racism, as I have been arguing, holds a special place in Victorian texts because it is so pervasive as to be unremarkable. Yet the ways we talk about race when race is the focus of Victorian scholarship and pedagogy have contributed significantly to the difficulty of talking about racism of the casual variety. I return to the question of casual racism after considering the sources of this difficulty.

It would be impossible to overstate the importance of the interdisciplinary work done by scholars who have studied the rich and diverse Victorian conceptions of “race” that preceded the conceptions familiar to us today. Since George Stocking first published Victorian Anthropology in 1987, scholars have understood that “race” did not have a stable meaning in the nineteenth century. The term could designate a group of people, a nation or tribe, with a common cultural or linguistic inheritance, or it could mean a category of humans who shared a particular trait. In the earlier part of the century, “race” was an oppositional term used to distinguish some Europeans from the “savage” races; it was a term often deployed to explain the collective character of the working classes. From midcentury onward, “race” could but did not necessarily imply a biological base or essence. Some theories contended that all races had originated from a single source, whereas competing theories held that racial difference implied different species. These different understandings and uses of racial categories did not only contradict each other, but they also contradicted themselves internally, as Patrick Brantlinger has shown in Taming Cannibals. According to Edward Beasley, moreover, the very idea of “race” did not build on itself in a linear way so much as it had to be reinvented, in fits and starts.Footnote ²⁰

The Victorians did not think about race as we do.Footnote ²¹ But what does it mean to distinguish Victorian understandings of race and racism from our current thinking about race and racism? Determining what Victorians themselves believed and what they thought they knew is essential: we need to know how “race” came into and went out of existence in order to understand the lability and constructedness of the concept and the policies it engendered. At the same time, however, marking the distinction between their knowledge and our own, and coming to conclusions about what we are entitled to say about the Victorians and their racism (and, ultimately, the casualness of their racism) on the basis of that distinction, are not inconsequential endeavors for scholars and educators today. There is no such thing as a neutral discussion of other people's racism. As Judith Butler writes in Excitable Speech, “The racial slur is always cited from elsewhere, and in the speaking of it, one chimes in with a chorus of racists.”Footnote ²² Yet if we hold analyses of racism from our own time at arm's length as we read Victorian texts, we are effectively imposing what Carlos Spoerhase calls a “veil of ignorance” on ourselves and our students.Footnote ²³

To my mind, the most instructive analogy for thinking about the way we think and speak about Victorian racism may be found in Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality, volume 1. While this text is widely known and cited for its contributions to our understanding of sexuality, subjectivity, and power, it is less often invoked for its brilliant analysis of the work “the Victorians” (despite their reputed repression) do for those who claim to be “liberated.” In his discussion of the repressive hypothesis, Foucault wonders at its success: why, he asks, have educated people believed so readily and fervently that the Victorians were “repressed”? Given the mountains of evidence to the contrary, how could the Victorians’ successors have become so convinced of their intolerance for sexuality? Part of the answer Foucault supplies to this question is what he calls “the speaker's benefit”:

The speaker's benefit, with respect to sexuality, is the pleasure derived from setting ourselves apart from the unenlightened, the feeling of bravery associated with thinking ourselves independent and rebellious. Calling the Victorians repressed is thus not a neutral nor merely an erroneous act, in Foucault's analysis: the repressive hypothesis represents an important investment on the part of those who propagate it, an investment in a particular version of a self. For Foucault, the repressive hypothesis is, as has been broadly understood, an element in the formation of the modern subject. But this formation comes about not only through the proliferation of discourses of sexuality. He makes clear that the post-Victorian self which is produced in connection with the repressive hypothesis is produced also through the performance of disavowal. The Victorian is the not-me to the “liberated” contemporary “me” who splits it off, deriving a sense of myself in the process.

Disavowing Victorian repression has an analogue in disavowing Victorian racism. When we tell our students that Victorian culture was deeply racist and provide historical context for the racism without acknowledging our continuity with this culture, we reap a collective speaker's benefit. Of this unintended effect of historical contextualization, in and beyond the classroom, Jennifer Fleissner writes that it can create the impression Nietzsche noted in “On the Use and Abuse of History for Life”: that our culture embraces “the rarest of virtues, justice, to a greater degree than any other age.” She notes the readiness of students of literature to use historical material in just this spirit: “The moment it's put forth as a method of reading, it seems inexorably to lead to papers pitying those poor oppressed women from the nineteenth century—if only they could have known what we do now!”Footnote ²⁵ If we portray the Victorians as if they were different from us in their ignorance and in the throwaway casualness of their racism—and this is what we do when we demonstrate, by giving contexts for Victorian thinking about race, that the Victorians didn't know what we know and thus that they should not be held to our standards—we are effectively portraying our own culture as one that has, to some unexamined degree relative to the Victorians, transcended racism and, equally, as one that actually holds itself up to our own standards.Footnote ²⁶

The problem with claiming the speaker's benefit that comes with being more knowing or more evolved than the Victorians is that we are congratulating ourselves for a prize we have not earned. So long as white privilege continues to remain the unspoken norm, so long as a sizable percentage of white Americans believe themselves greater victims of racism than members of racial or ethnic minorities, so long as a significant proportion of the American public believes that the notion of black lives mattering is itself racist, any confident portrayal of the Victorians (or indeed of any culture of the past) as racist that does not include an acknowledgment of structural racism in our own moment is decidedly premature.Footnote ²⁷

This analogy between the disavowal of repression that Foucault resituates within—not outside of—the very discourses it distances itself from, and the disavowal of racism we are apt to perform and encourage our students to adopt if we neatly characterize “the Victorians” as racist, suggests another, possibly more difficult lesson for us as well, a lesson of relevance to our present relationships to language, in scholarship and in the classroom. Foucault concedes in connection with Victorian repression that the vocabulary of sex was purged of certain words. The incitement to discourse developed concurrently with renegotiation of acceptable terms:

If there has been a purging of vocabulary with respect to race, it is today's speakers who operate under the relatively new rules of propriety, not our Victorian forbears. The Victorians practiced these rules in connection with sex and sexuality but observed few such areas of “tact and discretion” regarding race. The implications of this analogy should give us pause. For if carefully policed statements about sex did not prevent Victorian discourses of sexuality from proliferating but rather, on the contrary, played an important role in their proliferation, perhaps we need to remember that, while the expurgation of slurs from our contemporary discourse is a welcome development, discursive continuities go far beyond vocabulary. Encountering purged words in Victorian texts without noting these continuities allows the triumphalism of the speaker's benefit to go unchallenged.

The speaker's benefit is only part of the problem that arises when we differentiate contemporary from Victorian concepts of race. For while histories of race, racism, and race relations are crucial components in our understanding of the past, they can also affirm the notion that racism should be diagnosed on the basis of the reconstructed intentions of the subject accused of it, and that the racist's intentions can only be evaluated with reference to his state of knowledge. If, when I tell my students that Dickens did not think about race with the benefit of critical race theory or a post-civil-rights-era liberal education, I do not offset my presentation of Victorian context by a deliberate analysis of the banality of racism in our present, I am teaching them that our knowledge and conscious intentions are more significant than our actions (or structures).

It's all very well and good to maintain that “race” and “racism” would have meant different things or nothing, respectively, for the Victorians, but if what we call racism is on display in our contemporary readings of Victorian texts, then interpreting casual racism within those texts strictly from what we have construed as a Victorian perspective may well limit and even undermine our attempts at antiracist education and scholarship in the twenty-first century. My students, most of whom hail from white, “ethnic” working-class backgrounds, do not take readily to the notion that they benefit from white privilege. Having grown up in a culture that loudly anathematizes racism and quietly maintains systematically racist policies, they have understandable difficulty accepting the idea that their good intentions and friendships with people of color do not automatically make them immune to racism. It's hard for them to imagine, furthermore, that the benefits they derive from their whiteness are largely unconscious. When I tell my students that Dickens was racist but that he was racist in a typical (casual) nineteenth-century fashion, I may be telling them something true about Dickens and Victorian racism, in other words, but if I am not careful to avoid doing so, I am also training them not to think about how racism functions with or without the knowledge or intention of the racist subject. I am training them not to see the pervasiveness of racism that seems purposeless. I am reinforcing the all-too-common idea that only deliberate racism is racism and that the real racists are the people who behave with an agenda they openly embrace and advertise.

Some of our students, on the other hand, come to us with an acute awareness of racism in many of its guises, an awareness often achieved through the experience of having been treated as a racial other in a culture that purports to be “color-blind.” Encouraging such students to see casual Victorian racism as merely routine without further discussion amounts here to an act of aggression. As Erica Kanesaka Kalnay writes, the normalization of whiteness in the Victorian literature classroom wears disproportionately on students of color:

For the students who are the most sensitive to every nuance of racism in contemporary discourse, ignoring casual racism in the texts we teach constitutes a betrayal. If I treat the ignorance of the casual racist remark as a lamentable Victorian quirk, I am telling those of my students who have suffered microaggressive indignities, differential treatment, and outright insults to their humanity that “minor” racist events do not matter. I am teaching all of my students, those who are “raced” and those who do not consider their race to be a significant aspect of their identity, to stop being curious about how racism is historically constructed precisely through such repetitions. I am teaching all these students to blunt their sense of what is right by training them not to react to it.

Casual racism in Victorian literature and culture is not, was not, a Victorian problem: it is a Victorian studies problem. It's not that we don't need to know—or teach—how Victorians understood race or ethnicity but, rather, that such knowledge on its own is inadequate to the task of training our students to think critically about their own historical moment and themselves as historical agents. Apprehending the banality of Victorian racism requires a different approach—one that addresses it in continuity with the banal, too-often unremarked reality of systemic racism in our own time.

A pedagogical approach that foregrounds historical continuities between past and present in order to bring greater clarity to both temporal categories sounds a lot like presentism, which would seem to raise a different set of problems. Here, however, it's important to remember that presentism comes in many forms. As historian Alexandra Walsham writes in her introduction to an issue of Past and Present devoted to the question, the concept of presentism is “slippery, amorphous and polyvalent.” What different presentisms do have in common is that they tend to be viewed with extreme disapprobation: “At root it is a term of abuse, a slur conventionally deployed to describe an interpretation of history that is biased towards and coloured by present-day concerns, preoccupations and values.”Footnote ³⁰

Consider how widely the following definitions of the term vary. Here is Lynn Hunt, for example, then-president of the American Historical Association, urging her colleagues to join her in opposing presentism for its tendency to see sameness instead of discontinuity: “Presentism, at its worst, encourages a kind of moral complacency and self-congratulation. Interpreting the past in terms of present concerns usually leads us to find ourselves morally superior. […] Our forbears constantly fail to measure up to our present-day standards.”Footnote ³¹ Contrast Hunt's castigation of what she calls presentism with cultural critic Adam Gopnik's. No less nefarious than Hunt's presentism, his fosters the opposite negative tendency. For Gopnik, it is what we get when we don't see enough continuity between past and present:

Both poles of presentism dismissed here, the presentism of too much sameness and the presentism of too much difference, end up revealing the limits of the term's usefulness. Certainly, there are readings of texts from earlier periods that too readily assimilate ideas of the past to our own in ways that enable us to triumph. As we have seen, however, when we encounter casual racism in Victorian texts, stressing difference over sameness can encourage precisely the kind of moral complacency and self-congratulation Hunt most objects to in presentism. Gopnik's contention, on the other hand, that a focus on the present prevents us from humbly appreciating the continuity of our own crises with historical crises of the past, would seem equally capable of encouraging complacency, although of a fatalistic, as opposed to self-congratulatory, variety.

To make the unremarkable remarkable—to destabilize the complacency that has developed over years of not seeing the casual racism that sophisticated reading breeds—perhaps we need to give ourselves permission to think about history and textuality in less orthodox ways. I am convinced that Jack Turner is right when he urges us to eschew methodologies that limit our ability to use historical texts to speak to our own moment. Writing in the wake of the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, about the continuity of American racism, he argues that to “refuse to use the history of political thought to interpret the present because one distrusts one's own ability to do so responsibly is to close off potential illumination out of fear of judgment's vagaries.”Footnote ³³ Admittedly, there is a lot riding on Turner's term “responsibly”—but to me, making such calls is the essence of academic freedom.

Attempting to salvage presentism from its reputation for fostering triumphalism and ignorance, the V21 Collective has recently taken up the term and reconfigured it. In their introduction to the most sustained consideration of the implications of the term, a cluster of articles devoted to the theme of “strategic presentism” published in Victorian Studies in 2016, David Sweeney Coombs and Danielle Coriale write that

For the authors represented in this cluster, “strategic presentism” offers a path toward contemporary relevance that does not cast aside historical specificity so much as it reframes our relationship to it. This deliberate reframing function is what Nathan Hensley insists on as a precondition when he stresses that “there can be no such thing as strategic anything—essentialism, presentism, whatever—without first, an analysis of a specific moment in time, the present […]; and, second, a final goal to be achieved, an end in the sense of telos or object.”Footnote ³⁵ Strategic presentism is, in this sense, a way of taking stock of ourselves as historical agents and recalibrating our relationship to the texts we read and teach.

A strategic presentism that strives to mean something—and do something—as we live through dispiriting and dangerous times will require that we think not only about the object of analysis (i.e., texts of Victorian provenance) but also about the specific outcomes we wish to achieve under the peculiar conditions of our present. Of course, not everyone will want to reframe their scholarship or commitment to teaching Victorian texts with an eye toward our present moment—and there's no reason they should, unless their scholarly and pedagogical priorities impel them to do so. The institutions we have collectively built to study and teach Victorian culture are robust enough to allow multiple approaches to the past and present (and the not-yet-past and the never-really-existing present) to thrive simultaneously.

If a cheap and easy presentism would encourage students to reject the importance of the past and to cease studying it, the strategic presentism I envision aims to draw students’ attention explicitly and deliberately to the very casualness itself of casual racism in Victorian texts. Yet because this Victorian “normal” that I want to consider with my students cannot be understood except as an elaborate set of practices that came historically to be taken for granted, we need to familiarize ourselves with those practices. Such familiarity can never be achieved without an awareness of historical context.

Balancing the teaching goals of contextualization and engagement with current concerns need not be all that difficult. Indeed, as Wai Chee Dimock concludes, agreeing with Benjamin Morgan, “presentism and historicism need not be opposed.”Footnote ³⁶ Here is an example of the kind of classroom practice I envision: Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone (1868), a novel I often teach, contains offhand racial slurs even as it features racial supremacy as a central theme (in a mode that manages to straddle anti-imperialist critique and full-bore orientalism). By the time we read of Sergeant Bruff's suspicions of “some of those strolling Indians who infest the streets,” my students have already learned about British colonialism in India, orientalism, and Victorian conceptions of race.Footnote ³⁷ They have learned, from reading the introduction to Christopher Herbert's War of No Pity: The Indian Mutiny and Victorian Trauma, to situate the novel in the context of what he calls Mutiny literature.Footnote ³⁸ At the level of the plot, they have read enough of the novel to understand the centrality of India and Indians to what is presumed to be the theft of the diamond from the cabinet of Rachel Verinder. They are conditioned to expect the presence of Indians in the novel and to consider this presence meaningful in many ways. Yet in spite of the historical contexts these students have encountered in preparation for discussions of imperialism and orientalism, the casualness of the word “infest” in the sentence above still demands special attention. By no means should it be taken for granted (and ignored) as merely typical of Victorian racism.

Sergeant Bruff does not distinguish himself as especially racist in The Moonstone. Unlike such foils for his acuity as Gabriel Betteredge, whose tradition-bound, misogynist, and xenophobic tendencies help establish how ill-equipped he is to resolve the mystery of the stolen gem, Bruff does not typically engage in or accept others’ wholesale generalizations regarding groups of people. Indeed, Bruff's professional success is premised on his refusal to subscribe prematurely to positions commonly held by his colleagues and peers.

The “infestation” remark is an example of casual racism within a text that also, simultaneously, raises questions about (what we would today call) racist perspectives. Drawing my students’ attention to the apparent incongruity of his words and character, I ask them to think of equivalent incongruities in our own historical moment. How do such racist terms and tropes seem to speak themselves through people who do not consider themselves—and whom we may not consider—racist? I invite my students to consider racist utterances on a continuum, ranging from the mindless repetition of coded language from a half-digested cultural script, to the issuance of a dog whistle, to the pointed use of a recognized slur. On June 19, 2018, Donald Trump suggested in a tweet that Democrats “want illegal immigrants, no matter how bad they may be, to pour into and infest our Country, like MS-13.”Footnote ³⁹ Without likening Trump to Bruff or Bruff to Trump, I want students to consider what it means to describe strolling Indians or undocumented migrants as infesting “our streets” or “our Country.” Can such language ever be innocent? What does it mean to attempt to construct a context of innocence for such an utterance? Given what they know about the subjection of colonized peoples in the Victorian period, is there anything they can see in the casual use of “infest” in The Moonstone that we can import into an analysis of blind spots in our own moment?

Calling out and recognizing banal incidents of casual racism as the Victorian “normal”—without allowing the banality of casual racism, its taken-for-grantedness, to stand as a characteristic peculiar to Victorian culture—can provide a crucial entry point for students to reflect on the myriad continuing effects of racism and privilege in their own world that generally go unmentioned in polite public discourse. When we remark the unremarkable in Victorian texts, we can take advantage of our students’ recognition of Victorian blind spots to turn their attention to ongoing practices that maintain racist inequities. By focusing on the blind spots of the Victorians (before introducing a discussion of our own), Victorian literature professors can actually train students to do the kind of critical thinking in the present that might otherwise threaten them. This strategic displacement of attention has the potential benefit of transforming the Victorian literature classroom into the kind of space that feels “safe,” even as it pushes its participants to make greater intellectual and affective demands on themselves than they might otherwise.Footnote ⁴⁰

For some readers of this essay, my treatment of the casual term “infest” in The Moonstone may veer too quickly away from the Victorian text and context and too easily into a discussion of a culture less scholarly and more familiar to my students. This criticism is fair. Yet there are moments when the intuition of simultaneous distance and proximity can produce such powerful insights among students as to their own situatedness that the particularities of historical context—and even the particularities of the literary text I am teaching—are just not as important. I will always give priority to the classroom epiphanies that emerge when students’ attention to their present is simultaneously distracted and enabled by their focus on what seems to be (safely) past. Although I aim to educate my students about Victorian texts and contexts, I am happy to leave them with an imperfect grasp of those texts and contexts if it means they are thinking more deeply about analogous formations in the present and their relation to them. For me, this is sometimes what it means to engage with texts of the past “responsibly,” as Turner puts it.

Blind Spots

Through much of this essay, I have been suggesting that a deliberate focus on the banality of Victorian racism can provide us with a way of talking about the ubiquity and taken-for-grantedness of racist constructions in our own moment. This is not to say, however, that such a practice is capable of identifying, let alone eliminating, all the racist assumptions any of us carries around. Learning to see casual Victorian racism and teaching students to see it is only one element in a constant struggle antiracist scholarship and pedagogy will have to wage if we are to undo institutional mechanisms that abet white supremacism. Noticing, thinking, and talking about casual racism in Victorian texts is not even radical. It's really the least we can do.

No doubt, there are blind spots remaining in my own thinking about casual racism. I became aware of some of them when I shared an earlier version of this essay with students who had expressed interest in reading it. These were deeply thoughtful and generous members of an upper-level English literature class, “Victorian Constructions of Race,” that I taught at the University of Rhode Island in the spring 2018 semester. Although the course dwelled mainly on texts in which race and ethnicity figured centrally, I had insisted throughout the semester on calling attention to the unexceptional, throwaway slurs in our readings and, as I have suggested here, on linking their routine character to the pervasiveness and invisibility of racism in contemporary culture. When it came time for the students to write their final papers, several responded to the ideas I've set out here and made me think much more about them. I took to heart the note of caution in one student's paper. Riffing on a line from Chinua Achebe's essay “An Image of Africa”—“travelers with closed minds can tell us little except about themselves”—he warned (me?) that “perhaps more dangerous than mere travelers are guides with closed minds.”Footnote ⁴¹

For the most part, my students agreed that casual racism was certainly not to be ignored. When they considered pedagogical approaches to making it visible, however, most insisted on history as an antidote. One, an exchange student from Europe (Lisa Jonchère), maintained that the ignorance of American students regarding their own and world history could not be underestimated and that any opportunity to provide them with historical context could only be for the good. Another (Jack Goodger) took me to task for not acknowledging some positive aspects of historical change and expressed fear, also, that a focus on casual racism could heighten identitarian tensions in the classroom. These were good and helpful observations that made me temper some of my brasher inclinations, on one hand, and develop strategies for dialogues I had not anticipated, on the other.

A student-author who plans to teach at the secondary level gave serious thought to the pedagogical approach she will take to unremarkable racism in her high school English classes. She suggested that we direct students’ attention to racist elements in texts before they even begin reading them:

While the student-author advocates this practice of “prereading” in the service of historical specificity, her proposed technique of alerting students to the significance of what they are about to read can also give them permission and incentive to see what they might otherwise not see in texts featuring casually racist elements. The notion of directing students’ attention so assiduously to what I want them to find runs against my usual pedagogical grain, but I believe her approach makes sense in this context.

The same student-author who proposed “frontloading” went on to underscore her commitment to talking openly about racism of the centripetal and casual varieties with her future high school students, even though she acknowledges the difficulty of doing so: “Every instance of racism needs to be taken seriously. If, as educators, we decide not to discuss the racism within these texts because of our own discomfort or because of the time that it will take away from the curriculum content then we shouldn't be teaching them at all” (Ross). Although I would not go so far as my student does to suggest what anyone should or should not teach, I appreciate her commitment and hope that I have modeled an approach for her in my Victorian literature classroom that will enable her to make good on it.

Coda

It feels funny to be writing about casual Victorian racism at this historical moment. In the time it has taken to conceive, write, and revise this essay, the focus and mood of American political discourse regarding racism on campus have shifted dramatically. When I began writing these words, the Black Lives Matter movement on campuses was compelling discussions of contemporary racial violence, and beneficiaries of DACA were demanding to pay in-state tuition. “Trigger warnings,” “safe spaces,” and the menace of rogue Title IX offices were being touted by some as the greatest threats scholars faced to their academic freedom. Since November 2016, however, many of our students have come to fear for their safety amid a noxious wave of racism, xenophobia, misogyny, and transphobia that does not seem to be cresting. Faculty, in the meantime, are now facing the prospect of losing their academic freedom in far more radical scenarios than most of us ever believed possible; from the loss of research funding to the loss of tenure, from the circulation of professor watch lists to the specter of a future without unions, some of us find ourselves feeling whipsawed between the urge to protect our students and ourselves, and the urge to challenge our students harder than ever to think clearly with courage and energy. It seems to me that pushing students to think critically about what gets taken for granted in their world—in the context of thinking critically about what gets taken for granted in another—addresses both of these urges at once.