Who has the right to tell whose story?
Jessamin Birdsall, Ph.D., Visiting Assistant Professor of Sociology
Who has the right to tell whose story? I think about this question a lot as a sociologist. A huge part of my job is telling other people’s stories. In the classroom I teach about immigration, racialization, inequality, and the sociology of religion. Some of these topics intersect with my own experience, but others are more distant. I believe I have a responsibility to expose my students to a variety of stories and perspectives. How do I do that in a way that is ethical? I want to avoid tokenism, superficial engagement, and misrepresentation. This is most challenging when teaching an Introduction to Sociology course, which requires covering a wide range of topics and stories in a short period of time.
One of the questions we discussed in this year’s CACE seminar was: what is the difference between empathetic engagement with and appropriation of a story? Colleagues noted that appropriation is characterized by taking a story out of context and using it for one’s own gain. Empathetic engagement, by contrast, is marked by curiosity, humility, and putting in the work to better understand the person/community whose story you are telling. What does this look like in the classroom? More specifically, what does this look like when I as a white sociologist teach the complex topic of race in an Introduction to Sociology course?
I have been reflecting on several insights that colleagues shared during our days together. The first is the importance of assigning primary texts from people who have lived experienced of the topic I am teaching. This means that when I teach about race and racism in America, it is critical to assign texts authored by people who belong to minoritized racial groups in the United States. I also have the responsibility to research and present to my students some context around the authors of the texts that I assign. I want to help my students think about: how does the social location of the author shape the way they write about race, and how does your social location as a reader impact the way you respond to the text?
In sociology, a further consideration in assigning texts is incorporating studies that use a range of research methods. One of the strengths of sociology as a discipline is that we use a variety of tools to gather and tell stories, including large-scale surveys and statistical analysis as well as in-depth interviews and ethnography. When teaching about race, I think it is valuable to have students read both qualitative and quantitative research. The qualitative texts help students to engage with race on both an intellectual and emotional level, attending to the particularities of people’s lived experiences. And the quantitative texts help students to place those individual stories within a wider context, considering how particular stories fit into larger patterns of structural injustice in American society.
Regardless of what texts I assign, the other critical component in fostering empathetic engagement is modeling to my students a posture of humility and curiosity. I have failed as a teacher if my students believe that after reading a small selection of qualitative and quantitative texts they now fully understand “the Black experience” or “the Asian experience” in America. Rather, I want my students to grasp that there is always more to learn, that there are significant variations between individual stories, and that they as students have agency in the larger story of race in America that is continuing to unfold.