September 16, 2016 - 16:42
This week at Bryn Mawr, we talked about “slipping” in classroom discussion. As defined by Anne Dalke and her student Emily Elstad, slipping is an honest, involuntary “act of associative mis-speaking” that helps us learn or realize the truth of what we think (Cohen 254). After a “slip” is made, we can learn and grow by processing the comment in the context of the classroom, the campus, and our society. Sometimes a slip is immediately clear to us; other times we do not know we have slipped until we are called out. Regardless, in an ideal academic contact zone, we will strive to learn from slips together. One hundred twenty years ago at Bryn Mawr, students were likely slipping in the classroom like they do today, however the Black at Bryn Mawr history tour created by Emma Kioko and Grace Pusey (‘15) instead documents the flip slide of the involuntary, productive slip: the intentional utterance.
Through the Black at Bryn Mawr project, Kioko and Pusey investigated the history of the college with a racial lens, amassing evidence of how the institution’s intentions promoted social and racial inequalities from the time of foundation to recent years. In particular, the students noted the supremacist values of Bryn Mawr’s second president and architect M. Carey Thomas and how those beliefs are reflected in her architecture of the school (Kioko). To exemplify Thomas’s un-Quakerly, elitist, and racist values, her own words appear in the tour’s narration of her life and house on campus:
Of her time in Morocco, Thomas said that the country served as "[...] an object lesson of what will happen to us if we ever permit intermarriage with our American Negroes [...] I came home with a stronger belief than ever in racial integrity and in putting a stop to immigration before it is too late" (Kioko).
Like an unconscious slip, Thomas’s white supremacist language sheds light on her inner biases against black people and against diversification, revealing what Elstad described as what Thomas “really means” (Cohen 256). The difference, however, between a genuine slip and Thomas’s statement is that what she really meant was no puzzle. Each of her statements and visions for the college campus carried intentionality.
The Black at Bryn Mawr tour demonstrates that many aspects of Thomas’s architecture purposefully facilitate a hierarchy in which elite white women students are at the top and exploited black employees are marginalized. From the library’s underground passageways that kept the service staff hidden away to the inhumane attic living conditions in the oldest dorm, the creators of the historical tour argue that residential and learning buildings across campus “were designed to inculcate and preserve particularly classed and racialized values in Bryn Mawr's student body” (Kioko). The calculated social effect of the campus infrastructure goes hand in hand with Thomas’s “racist rhetoric,” which the authors of the tour assert was not “merely a quirk” - in other words, not an example of Dalke’s “slip” of expression that can become a productive moment of growth (Kioko).
Slipping is distinct because it implies that there is an opportunity for learning instead of judgment. A slip in the classroom, like any other comment, comes from a place of vulnerability that we all enter to some degree when we put ourselves forward to share our thoughts in a group discussion. Because the classroom should foster critical thinking and problem solving, honest slips are not deemed intentional insults. Though both slips and conscious disrespect may hurt people, the way Thomas’s buildings intend to isolate the black service staff and promote class hierarchy among the students makes them inexcusably different. Intentionality and room for growth form the line between a slip and a conscious offense.
Similarly, the incidence of a confederate flag on Bryn Mawr’s campus (which was simultaneously the impetus for Pusey and Kioko’s illuminatory historical project and an integral part in Dalke’s discussion of slipping) crossed the line from slippage into offense when the students insisted on maintaining the flag after students and administration requested its removal. Their intention to leave it up and their resistance to understanding or learning how others were hurt by their symbol contradicted two key characteristics of a slip, unintentional and productive.
What Kioko and Pusey’s research shows is that healthy slippage and the conversations that follow are not often documented in history; instead the firm desires and resulting actions are remembered, for better or for worse. We might never know what kind of slipping went on inside the classrooms 100 years ago and whether it was productive for developing progressive thought, but the Black at Bryn Mawr tour reveals the campus on a macro level to be a wholly unproductive space, intentionally and physically limiting social change through conscious racism. Fortunately, with the development of the Black at Bryn Mawr tour, Kioko and Pusey are confronting the real history that happened at Bryn Mawr in order to learn from it instead of keeping hidden or censoring difficult elements of the community's past. In this way, they are forcing Bryn Mawr to slip and be open about its past intent in order to consider its goals for improvement in the future.