ABSTRACT
To begin a pedagogy that, to use Giroux's term, is "critical" and promoting democratic values, one needs to be willing to confront the simple acts that have allowed for an identity and teaching style that are situated in the complicated context that is the United States today. Personal consciousness, individual oppression, lived experience—in short, identity politics—operates in the classroom both to authorize and to de-authorize speech. Experience emerges as the essential truth of the individual subject, and personal "identity" metamorphoses into knowledge. Who we are becomes what we know; ontology shades into epistemology. There is no need to consider the all too often "unspeakable" dimensions of teaching, as long as one performs according to plan—in other words, as long as the instructor plays it straight and white. Each teacher ought to consider and reconsider the performative dynamics of their teaching in light of the critique of the simple acts of privilege suggested here.
