Angela M. Leonard
Introduction
This paper is about "Race" in the Classroom, not any classroom,
but a classroom situated in a predominately white "catholic"
institution of higher education. It is a classroom where most students drop
their heads when the "r" (race) word is introduced. It is a classroom
that rarely includes an African-American student, or any student of color. It is
the classroom where I teach. I think of myself as a constructive and pragmatic
teacher who happens to be an African-American woman who teaches mostly white
students (originating mostly from the mid-Atlantic states). Many of them are
Catholic either by baptism or sensibility, the latter due to private school
backgrounds. I am one of the minority of the faculty population, who, like many
of my students, is a "cradle Catholic"—meaning I was baptized at
birth, my mother, my maternal grandmother, and my maternal great grandmother—all
Catholics. I am a seasoned teacher (with family roots in the deep South and the
Civil Rights Movement), who is probably the only person my students will
encounter who teaches African-American history. I am an academic, who like all
of my departmental colleagues, was trained in predominately white schools of
higher education in America. I am the only African- American teacher in my
department; I am the third African-American to be tenured at my institution that
was founded in 1852, and is the first American institution of higher education
to bear the name of Ignatius of Loyola; I am one of two African-American women
who has been tenured at my institution, the first, who also marked the first for
African-Americans, was tenured within the last eight years. It is a Jesuit
school, and I am a teacher who genuinely feels called by Ignatius of Loyola to
heed his message: to do service that bridges the communit(ies) where I
live and work; to teach in ways that jettison students beyond their
"homogeneous" comfort zones to develop acceptance of the world’s
differences; and to do research that informs my teaching and advances the
value of a life of the mind.
This paper will address the use and the potential use of gravesites of
enslaved people of African descent and the "memory-work" that can be
performed at those sites as a pedagogy to introduce my students to tenets of
social justice, as well as how this pedagogy informs my own research agenda.
