VULNERABLE DISCLOSURE: DANGEROUS NEGOTIATIONS OF RACE AND IDENTITY IN THE CLASSROOM

This essay discusses my experience as a teaching assistant deploying auto-ethnography to explore my racial performance and politics as related to informing and shaping classroom dynamics and relationships. Set in “Race and Cultural Diversity”, an advanced undergraduate writing composition course, I examine my performance of blackness and how my racial performance embodies commitments to racial and social justice within classroom happenings. Using critical performance pedagogy this study explores my identity performance to identify and create effective strategies that further dialogue on the often charged and sensitive topic of race, developing more awareness of how my racialized self enters and manifests in the classroom.