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영어

In the summer of 2001, two doctoral students—an African American female of Hispanic ancestry and a Korean male—created an intriguing and challenging five-week course entitled “AFH 394: (Un)Ruly Voices of African American Women” at Arizona State University. During the second week of the course, when the instructors introduced such Western philosophies as those of Plato and Friedrich Nietzsche to help the students understand multiple discourses of a literary text, the students refuse to understand, claiming those theories as “the ideology of the dominance.” They also saw the instructors as cohorts with “the oppressor.” In the midst of the turmoil, they began to question the qualification of the instructors in terms of their race, gender, culture, and education. Scrutinizing the causes of this phenomenon, this essay frankly discusses the instructors’ missteps and in large reexamines racial and sexual conflicts in American society. Further, this essay offers possible suggestions to such cases which may happen in any American classroom where multi-ethnic personnel share the space of ideas.