ABSTRACT
When I first published Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom I included a dialogue with Ron Scapp. We have the pleasure of being both colleagues and true friends. In his new book Teaching Values: Critical Perspective on Education, Politics, and Culture Ron states; “… there is a real need (an ethical imperative) to disrupt and challenge the simple acts of privilege, and that one of the ways to begin this process is by listening to and acknowledging those for whom such acts are not simple. So clearly, for a white, heterosexual, male, tenured professor of relative financial security this means reading, listening to, and speaking with, among others, people of color.” We still live in a culture where few white people include black people/people of color in their intimate kinship structures of love and friendship on terms that are fully and completely anti-racist. We still need to hear about how inclusion of diversity changes the nature of intimacy, of how we see the world. When 106I walk out into the world with Ron, clearly indicating closeness by our body language and our speech, it changes how I am seen, how he is seen. This is yet another way race matters in a white-supremacist patriarchal context. It is still important for us to document these border crossings, the process by which we make community. This dialogue extends the first. It was spontaneous—neither of us had questions beforehand or altered what we said after the fact. It is shared as a way to bear witness to real community, real love, and what we do to keep it real.
