Now, as more and more students begin to take responsibility for writing their dialogue, it is becoming clearer and clearer how much we need this intertextual forum for learning.

Angela Boyd, a graduate student at CSUDH, started out a whole thread on responsibility that has led to some good analysis and self-reflection for all of us. You can follow that on responsib01.htm and responsib08. htm.

Rebecca McLaughlin, an undergraduate at UWP, sent in her survey report, which confused jeanne no end until she figured out that Mac was writing poetry. raceaware01.htm. You can tell from the title of the file, I was trying to place it in theory and methods. I stopped and entered it as a poem to the collaborative writing journal, and then added a painting. In response to the painting Mac sent the response below.

On Wednesday, August 8, 2001, Mac wrote:

"wow... i'm STILL beside myself (in a good way). awesome, jeanne! thank you! i really didn't anticipate much from the survey... let me explain ever so briefly... i've got some white friends that are really set back by me, what i believe...they're angry. calling me a liberal. my husband has even called me some derivative of a black-sell-out, but a white tom finn or something like that. i know HE appreciates it when i give in to HIS cries! what's wrong with showing some accountability? i knew what he was trying to say though. i've found that many close friends of mine are actually racist in all of this. defensive. angry. cynical. i tried to explain that we (both black and whites) need to let the other feel what they need to, to heal, to listen, and just forgive. i think it's when i said that, in the political arena, both blacks and whites have their heads up their a . . . that pissed a lot of them off. lol....oh well. Farrakhan, jessie jackson....too many whites think they speak for blacks. i tried to explain to some of these conservatives, that, what if all blacks thought clinton spoke for all whites (because the ones i refer to really dislike him) and they didn't seem to care. it was then that i really saw the racism, because they didn't care what blacks thought. but on the same note, if some, either race, want to be separatists, that's their choice, but racism isn't an intelligent option. it's ignorance and maliciousnesss and a malignancy. i dunno... i think we're all accountable. i think we're not listening. if we'd just listen. i wish they had seen the little girl's face... sorry.... didn't mean to go off like that... simply had intended to JUST say thank you. how IS Pat doing???? better go here...time is short and i've run out. thanks for all of yours.

:) mac
ps i know what to tell people i'm going to concentrate on in grad school now! i may not have very many friends though. lol (this is worse than when i found jesus!) :O

On Wednesday, August 8, 2001, jeanne responded:

And so we watch process texts grow.

The reason I've been calling this a process text, is that it when our entries appear in the Collaborative Writing Journal section, we aren't making definitive statements about people or theories. We're thinking out loud. We're taking two steps forward, then three steps backward, and a tentative step along a different path. This is how public discourse has to happen in small, informal groups. We're not a formal commission; we're thinking and being self-reflexive about that thiniing. This is one of the ways in which we push past the constraints on the imaginary imposed by dominant discourse.

I contemplated editing Mac's entry above. I contemplated taking out her mention of her husband, and her mention of finding Jesus. Lauren Langman would say they are "too personal." But then I thought of Bridget and Lisa and the theory class discussion on religion, and I realized that personal is how we feel things. Personal isn't bad; it's just not normative: dominant discourse defines personal as "inappropriate." Hmmm. In the hope that Mac will forgive me, which she has done before, I left the statements in, subject only to my adding a caveat to all of us that this is a journal entry. Bridget and Lisa misheard each other in our discussion of religion. But if we hadn't had those very personal statements, we would never have realized that.

I think the real problem is that dominant discourse assumes that we always "mean" whatever we "say," with no clear understanding that there is no value-free position. What I mean at this moment shifts as soon as I rethink it in a different context. Once again, we run into the problem with "knowingness." I hope that we will learn to listen in good faith with our collaborative journal writing. I hope that we will understand that what we say is shaped by the context in which we are thinking about it.

I hope Mac will let me leave her statement as she thought it when she wrote it. I think the "personal" has merit, the kind of merit Catharine MacKinnon describes in the methodology of "consciousness raising," in taking what women say as valid without a need to establish objective validity. Such acceptance necessitates that we see validity as fluid and not neutral, and that's OK, if we're going to live in a self-reflexive world, which I hope we're going to do.

love and peace, jeanne

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