Beyond all reason indeed: the pedagogical promise of critical race testimony

摘要

Critical race testimony is the act of bearing witness - from a critical perspective - to the ways in which racism is inflicted on and inflected in one's life experiences. In this article, the author begins her process of theorizing within the context of a classroom dilemma, which compels her to expand on the meaning and value of critical race testimony to a socially just pedagogy of race. She provide a brief historical analysis of critical race testimony, locating it within the Black autobiographical tradition, and most notably within the work of W.E.B. DuBois, who insinuated throughout his body of work that a 'purely' rational approach to race was an incomplete and thus to some extent ineffective approach to redressing notions of race and practices of racism. This tradition, the author suggests, has been revived and reasserted within the context of critical race theory's use of the Black (Latino, Native, Asian, and European) autobiographical voice through counter-storytelling - not as an alternative extant of reasoning, but as epistemological and pedagogical intervention, working to reveal the socially constructed and contextually dependent nature of reasoning itself. She concludes by returning to her classroom dilemma to suggest that the pedagogical promise of critical race testimony lies in its ability to move beyond Reason as we have come to know it, to reveal the ways in which rationality (unchecked) itself reinforces racist attitudes and practices.