What could organize the being-with of all these different subjectivities? By means of what embracing horizon? At the price of what abstraction from the real? Of what dehumanization? (Irigaray 2008, 68)

Entering into those spaces is like entering into a strange house that has acquired the shape of those who inhabit it, a space that speaks to their modes of traversing it. Their habits, their movements, and their values are expressed through the configuration of the space within that house, and it is that configured space that, in turn, subsequently shapes their courses of action. (Yancy 2017, 9)

I did not own the space where I dreamed of right-relation. As a White educator, I have been received both into the physical space of my classroom at a predominantly white university and into an intellectual space of a curriculum focused on racial equity (Ruitenberg 2015). Prior to becoming an educator, I had also been received as a White, Russian immigrant. That original welcome unlocked the world of racialized inequitable wrong-relation. I wanted the right one.

Right-relation is a central value and an ideal outcome of restorative practices. Right-relation is conceived in terms of justice in an interdependent learning community, relying on more sustainable I–Thou relationships (Acorn 2004). The I–Thou relationship necessitates consistent work through questioning and overall disruption of the stasis of the presumed known. To build right-relation, in this class right-relation was to be a race-conscious one, I relied on my knowledge of restorative practices. Ideally, the focus of my practice would be the disruption of what we presumed to know about racial and ethnic categories in the relationship of inquiry toward each other and our racialized realities. This is easier said than done. As I arranged a restorative space in my class, “Identity and Restorative Justice,” it turns out that I was not prepared for an encounter with the other. I ended up constructing a white space, over and over again until one Black female student showed me that she was not learning much in my class and a colleague of Color observed, having only glanced at my syllabus, that the class benefited mostly White students and inquired what students of Color might be getting from the class.

Ahmed (2007) reminds us that in a white space, White bodies are extended by the space in which they do not need to reach beyond a habitual action in order to cohere; habitual bodies do not pose a problem or an obstacle to an action because they can “sink into space” and become “bodies-at-home.” Being habitual in most spaces, White bodies “extend their reach into space and its objects and the space, in turn, can take on the very ‘qualities’ that are given to such bodies” (Ahmed 2007, 156). In white spaces, certain styles, approaches, dreams, and capacities are already within reach to those who identify as White; bodies of Color would have to inhabit whiteness in order to get in (Ahmed 2007). A white space is one that is normed along the values that continuously privilege White bodies and whiteness (epistemologically, morally, socially, and emotionally). The custodian of knowledge and the starting point for an orientation in space (Ahmed, 2007) tends to be, although not exclusively, in a White body that is, always already complicit in whiteness and already capable of engaging a white gaze (Yancy, 2017). A white space demands certain actions and ideas: ways of gaining knowledge, ideas about what knowledge is valuable, what constitutes order in the space, ideas about the bodies in this space (paraphrasing Ahmed (2007), who gets to be a body-at-home and who gets to be a stranger), and, more specific to my space, ideas about right-relation as the outcome of restorative encounters. In my space, I want racial justice, but doing it using my historico-racial habits as a starting point of orientation, I unintentionally create a white space.

A Note on Intent and Impact

I write this essay as a personal reminder to be vigilant about many things: lofty goals, savior tendencies, the insidious nature of whiteness and the ways in which one’s work could become “parasitic on the racism that it is meant to challenge” (Thompson 2003, 7). I am disturbed and humbled by the contradictory nature of this project of public reflection on my own practice, which is at once necessary and a species of privilege: it is about me “getting my shit together” as a White educator while bodies of Color continue to demand “political and existential urgency” (Yancy 2017, 219). In this essay, I explore the consistent construction of a white space and the challenges to hospitality in my restorative space (Derrida 2000; Ruitenberg 2015; Irigaray 2008). Ahmed’s (2007) phenomenology of whiteness and Yancy’s (2012, 2017) analysis of whiteness and its operation serve to clarify the construction of a white space regardless of hospitable intent. This essay is both about intent and impact. When I write about impact, I do not write to confess. I have come to expect from myself some form of collusion with whiteness. I purposefully keep present tense throughout the essay even to describe past events in order to demonstrate the fact that I have yet to overcome all the possible manifestations of whiteness in behavior and practice (in other words, what’s in the past may not be entirely lost in the past and is still a possibility in some other form); I need to keep present tense to maintain vigilance and to stay within the realm of responsibility. In this reflection, I am looking back on my practice as a site of ambush (Yancy 2012, 2017) and in need of more and better hospitality.

As a White educator, I am childlike when facing race: race is new, like new experiences and sounds, and it is still fascinating, even if already challenging. Facing race and racism is essential in restoring a racially and ethnically conscious right-relation. Yet I struggle when naming, openly or to myself, my students’ race or ethnicity: once named, how do my students not become the thing I name? This challenge showed up acutely in an environment where this thing became the object of study. I fluctuated between wishing to honor each student’s alterity and recognizing that I am in the presence of raced individuals, already somehow factual as defined by the white social episteme (Yancy 2017). The goal of this reflective project is to engage in the work that is necessary for the creation of a hospitable space, no longer for “Whites only.” In the process, I will problematize my understanding of right-relation as a restorative value to avoid reproducing whiteness as an “embracing horizon” for our being-with each Other (Irigaray 2008). As a result of this reflection on my practice, I envision right-relation as that which necessitates hospitality.

Restorative Practice?

As it is commonly practiced, restorative justice concentrates on concrete harm (an instance of injustice), with concrete offenders and victims, who are members of a concrete community, often present in the same circle, with mutual obligations whose fulfillment ideally leads to right-relation. In the “absence of” specific racially-motivated harm, our restorative practices concentrate less on repairing the actual harm and more on exploring the harm done historically and repeated daily, on building community, on getting in touch with sociopolitical reality as it is—not as we want it to be, and on finding ways in which we might take on responsibility to effect a change toward racial justice and right-relation.

In restorative practice, a facilitator’s responsibility is to initiate the circle, offer prompts for reflection and discussion and mild-to-moderate guidance or direction without unjustified taking over of the dialogue. The circles tend to gain a momentum of their own as the participants become more comfortable with the format and begin to take responsibility for the rhythm and content of the circle. In concept, restorative circles are compatible with hospitable intentions: they allow the host to initiate and then get out of the way, and there is room for spontaneous emergence of new hosts. Community building circles (Pranis 2005) are most open to the intricacies of hospitality. These types of circles do not specifically deal with a wrong to be righted but with building right-relation, and they are particularly oriented toward a welcome and a (re)awakening of a sense of interdependence. In these circles, we are reminded that we affect each other. In a racially-divided classroom, we come already affected, and we continue to affect each other as we explore race-based inequities and work on right-relation.

In conceiving this course and its format, I was guided by the transformation conception of restorative justice which “addresses not only individual instances of harm but goes beyond to structural issues of injustice, such as racism, sexism, classism” (Van Ness and Strong 2015, 44). The harms done by structural injustice are ongoing and “most of us contribute to a greater or lesser degree to the production and reproduction of structural injustice” (Young 2006, 120). In the social connection model (SCM), individuals are seen as essentially intertwined in structural relationships in which injustice is real and from which stems far-reaching responsibility for rectifying injustice. Responsibility in SCM is envisioned as forward-looking and geared toward reform, whether or not individual actors are to blame for past problems. The injustice is to be changed through collective action, but responsibility is not shared equally.

In the transformative conception of restorative justice, the idea of restoration relies on an ideal outcome: a right relation of interdependence and respect, which necessitates continuous inquiry for the purposes of understanding. Right-relation is conceived in terms of justice, in the case of my class, racial justice. In my conception of racial justice, learning about each other as raced beings offers an opportunity for such understanding. I am guided by my personal desire for race-consciousness as part of right-relation. In this intent, I effortlessly “sink into (white) space” (Ahmed 2007). In this space, building race-consciousness tends to be a novel experience for a person in a White body; the space is colored by the focus on and the novelty of academic and existential exploration of race and whiteness. The color is white. The White students are extended by this exploration. What happens to students of Color in this space?

At the time, I felt my insistence on race-consciousness as a focus was justified. In naming race, I hope that we begin to see and hear each other more clearly. My “we” is not all-inclusive: many of my students of Color have had pretty clear vision and hearing before they entered our class. In naming race and ethnicity, I also run into the thingness of the social group category of race. It has a name, an already narrated story; it is a preexisting essence (Yancy 2017). Initially I experience race as a barrier to a welcome. The only available relation seems to be the I-It relation. I end up with a class of cardboard cutouts: “Look, an Asian/a Black/a White!” (Yancy 2012) I suspect this is wrong. In this space, I have people with racialized lived experiences bound to their flip-top desks. I want to welcome them properly: unconditionally.

A welcome to individuals in their groupness is hardly compatible with an unconditional, hospitable welcome, which is to be extended to individuals in their irreducibility to a thing (Irigaray 2008; Derrida 2000; Ruitenberg 2015). One would do best to suspend any predetermination of another and stay open to an encounter with each irreducible self-presentation. Derrida (2000, 29) asks,

Does hospitality begin with an unquestioning welcome…? Is it more just and more loving to question or not to question? To call by the name or without the name? to give or to learn the name given? Does one give hospitality to a subject? To an identifiable subject? To a subject identifiable by name? to a legal subject? Or is hospitality rendered, is it given to the other before they are identified, even before they are (posited as or supposed to be) a subject, legal subject and subject nameable by their family name, etc.?” (Derrida 2000, 29 original emphasis).

Irigaray (2008) further insists that the welcome space not be a familiar space but a threshold between two subjectivities, a space never yet arranged and the language of encounter not yet created. I imagine the “always still to be arranged” and “always still to be created” as perfect descriptors for my conception of right-relation across difference, namely its fluidity. I learn firsthand the limitations to hospitality that can be offered in a space already familiar to me.…

Ideally, “Let us say yes to who or what turns up, before any determination, before any anticipation, before any identification… (Derrida 2000, 77 original emphasis). But what do I do with the race narratives staring me in the face? Am I a responsible or a delusional and/misguided host for wanting to tarry with race? Ruitenberg (2015) identifies an aporia of unknowability and addressability: welcome the stranger as they come, yet a personal address necessitates that I attempt to know the one I am addressing. I am invited to face this ambiguity. Furthermore, by following an ethic of hospitality, I am invited to relinquish control:

an ethic of hospitality hangs in the balance between invitation, as the host seeks to prepare for the arrival of the guest as best as possible, and visitation, as the guest who may eventually turn up in unforeseeable ways and the preparations may miss the mark (Ruitenberg 2015, 24).

Into what world do I invite my students? Can all of my students “imagine livable lives for themselves there?” (Ruitenberg 2015, 17)

White Space and Hospitality

My space is white.

As George Yancy (2017) describes in an epigraph to this essay: the space’s effect is circular as the dwellers’ values and modes of being are represented in this space and the space demands of its dwellers and visitors certain courses of action that continuously inscribe and re-inscribe their muscular memories (Boal 1993).

In our class, flip-top desks are arranged in a circle, whose shape is to communicate the restorative values of equality (everyone has an equal seating and a chance to participate) and connectedness (Costello et al. 2009). We are building a community. We are guided by the value and the goal of right-relation, a vision of interconnectedness balanced by an appreciation of particularity of each participant (Wolf and Rickard 2003; Zehr 2002). Some might claim that the gesture of hospitality has already been extended by virtue of the very arrival of bodies of Color into a space generally inhabited by and supportive of White bodies. Ahmed (2007) suggests that while inviting new bodies into a white space has a potential to restore the space, this potential is sacrificed if showing up in this space requires inhabiting whiteness. Regardless of intention, in our circle space, participants are invited to inhabit whiteness. In hidden but real ways our circle is about control. We monitor in verbal and non-verbal ways whose stories and what stories are most welcome, whose emotional safety will be guarded, what emotional expressions will be legitimated, what types of disagreements and with whom are deemed appropriate, and how deviations from our unspoken norms will be disciplined: sometimes via silence, sometimes by switching the topic or via non-verbal expressions. Niceness and consensus (even if uneasy) are consistently elevated and legitimated.

Visibly, we are divided in space. In that circle, my students who identify as Black or African-American, Caribbean and mixed race (self-identifying as Black) tend to sit in close proximity to each other, Latinx students tend to congregate, the two Asian male students tend to sit at the same curve of the circle. The bodies of Color are present in the white space but do not sink into it. They form outposts instead. I experience the silence (especially if I know the student to be knowledgeable and generally outspoken on the subject) and the huddling together in the same curve of the circle as a form of armor against the whiteness of the space and in the space. I tend to stand or sit in close proximity to Black female students (in retrospect I wonder if my body is located in the most likely line of fire). I reach toward students who identify as White, especially those who indicate resistance to topics of discussion; my eyes, voice, and actions serve to awaken and draw in White students whom I a priori view as a problem and, in this secret perception, I am dutifully apologetic as I try to make it up to my White students by extra patience and compassion, frequent disclaimers of the we-did-not-choose-this-order variety. Effortlessly, I re-inscribe the centrality of whiteness by extending the White bodies as most worthy of my apology. In Sarah Ahmed’s words, in this class, White bodies “inhabit spaces that extend their shape” (Ahmed 2007, 158), while bodies of Color are made invisible as their emotional and existential needs are not adequately addressed.

The content of our lessons revolves around building race-consciousness and exploring the category of race. Since I am committed to undoing the damage of the category, I wish to face it head on and am sucked into the relation with it. Interactions in class become mediated by this category and the restorative process develops along the lines of an I-It relationship. It is as if the commitment to engage with individuals is veiled in the cloak of race, which obscures the irreducibility of each participant in the circle. As if first we will deal with race (that which prevents us from welcoming individuals), and we will deal with how race affects our lived experiences, and only then we will deal with the actual individuals who are having a lived experience. Operating in categories is costly to students of Color who end up being studied by a white gaze (Yancy, 2017), locked out of the world in which they can be legitimate meaning-makers (Yancy, 2017) and pronouncers of their own name (or even coming anonymously). While White students, too, are experienced as representing a category, “always already complicit with whiteness” (Yancy 2017, 221), I am more prepared to recognize myself in them, thereby on some level animating their humanity. Intuitively, I sense this difference in treatment as a wrong to be righted.

So, in the spirit of restoration, I offer students of Color an opportunity to animate themselves (only in retrospect I realize that I am still driven by the need to study my students, thus inviting them to continue to be a spectacle) and to White students an opportunity to face themselves (this intent seems to promote the restoration of their goodness, which I also realize only in retrospect). Together we will do extra work at the level of the intellectual and the somatic in a group assignment for which our class is divided into racial and ethnic affinity groups. Typically, the affinity groups are racially and ethnically homogeneous; they are meant to offer forums, which address the need to bond based on racial or ethnic particularity and to voice the tensions and differences of lived experience without the fear of dismissal or other negative reactions more likely in interracial settings. Ideally, affinity groups are to offer spaces where one can be complex without censure, one can speak without being silenced by difference and one can explore the unexplored for which another (group) may not be ready. I fancy this division as a gesture of hospitality: it seems hospitable to self-naming.

In reality, our affinity groups reinstate the I-It relationship. Students organize into affinity groups as they self-define according to the 2010 Census race/ethnicity categories. Why use Census 2010? The original intent is to invite the students to face the box in order to break out of it. As we divide into groups, the limitations of my vision to the spirit of hospitality are immediately visible: each student has to claim some clear racial/ethnic identity and then spend time processing this forced clarity in a space that, while meant to be hospitable to all in their affinity group, ends up becoming exclusionary to various identity misfires, or at least confusing. Practicing restorative justice through affinity groups, I experience what feels like failure as a host: in this initial “boxing in” of individuals we name each stranger and communicate in subtle ways that on some level we know each stranger in an affinity group. Not surprisingly, there is student resistance to this naming.

I witness that White students get into their groups reluctantly. For many of them, this is “unfamiliar racial ground… as it violates the imagined story of an America in which ‘we are united’” (DiAngelo & Sensoy 2014, 125). White students are not the only ones struggling with this obvious division. At first, the group of Black, Caribbean and mixed race (Black) students act almost euphorically: eagerly, cheerfully, and speedily working through the group questions/prompts that are geared toward establishing group coherence as members reflect on what brings them together and what separates them from other affinity groups. As they get to the second portion of this assignment, I sense hesitation from some members of the Black affinity group. The second portion of this assignment requires that each group member choose a memoir from a list of suggested readings, written from the perspective of their particular race or ethnicity. They then get together to discuss the content and lessons they learn from the chosen memoir. Their group task is to create a Power Point presentation based on the lessons they have individually and collectively learned from both the memoir and from their own lived experiences.

Conceived from a “Human Relations (Why-Can’t-We-Just-Get-Along)” perspective (Gorski 2010), the memoir and power point seem to present an opportunity to share “personal experiences…so that students learn from each other.” Ideally, as we learn about each other, we present puzzles, invite inquiry and thus “unlock the world” not yet known (Ruitenberg 2015), one still to be arranged. Isn’t this a path to right-relation? It could be but the choice of memoirs demonstrates to students what stories I am ready to accept (Srivastava and Francis 2006); in what factual cloak I have already wrapped them. The gesture reduces irreducible persons to a handful of acceptable embodiments. It never occurs to me: what if a student does not connect in any way to any of the stories in the available memoirs? Are they invited to fake their personal story for a grade or for their professor’s and classmates’ comfort? Why did I not invite students to contribute to the list? Furthermore, the assignment requires students to reciprocate my original gesture of hospitality (the creation of affinity groups) by becoming hosts. There is no choice to keep their dwellings inviolable. They are to publicly risk their dwellings and welcome newcomers into the most intimate parts of their lived experience, all the while subjugating a possibility of transcendence to the facticity of the racial/ethnic category. And in this way we are meant to restore right-relation. In my intent, I am guided by the possibility of education for all. In reality, White students are the ones who are most likely to benefit from this education. I am acting on behalf of whiteness.

In their presentation, the members of Latinx affinity group resist subtly: whether they planned it or not, they do not open doors for strangers to witness their complex lived experience, instead they revisit all the stereotypes commonly associated with Latinx identity. While homage is paid to differences within the group, such as various countries of origin, language differences, and some differences in tradition, overall the group is presented as monolithic; sameness is consistently stressed. A similar path is taken in the Asian affinity group’s presentation. Both groups seem to have (inadvertently) extended to us an invitation to unlock the closed space of race-ethnicity for other possibilities to unfold. What are other unexpected, irreducible, undiscovered ways in which one can be (or not) a Latinx or an Asian individual? In what ways can one name oneself, become a meaning-maker or not name oneself at all, or not yet? Posing these questions today is a discovery for me prompted by hospitality; “it lets happen, in myself as well, this other towards whom my ability to be cannot be only activity or personal initiative.” (Irigaray 2008, 77) These questions suggest a release of control, the letting be.

In the White group presentations (there were two groups to accommodate the number of White students in the class), students describe discovering the lack of internal community. They ask, what exactly connects us as White people? Their groups are composed of American-born Whites and immigrant Whites, some of whom are still connected to their heritage cultures. They openly envy the Latinx and Black affinity groups, who seem to perform a coherent community in their class presentations. In retrospect, their question was an invitation to offer more and better hospitality (Ruitenberg, 2015) and could have opened up a rich exploration, without a pre-determined outcome into what indeed it means to be in a White body. Unfortunately, as a class we treat their invitation to inquiry as a sad rhetorical question. We lament, “look what has been done to us in the name of whiteness…” and move on to build right-relation.

On the other hand, in their presentation, students who identify as Black, African-American, Caribbean, and/or mixed race (Black), highlight the intersectionalities of identity, taking us beyond race/ethnicity, reminding us of the internal heterogeneity of their group. They concentrate less on the oppression and more on the rising. They re-defined the focus of their presentation and chose not to tell us the story we expect to hear (Srivastava and Francis, 2006). Earlier the same group of students asked me to add another memoir to the list of choices available to their affinity group. Today, I am able to see both their presentation and their request for another memoir as their way of demanding and claiming more and better hospitality.

And when I will have divested this other of all the surroundings in which I had wrapped him or her, the other will not be unveiled as a mere facticity… it is from this moment on that the other might begin to appear to me with surroundings that are their own. (Irigaray 2008, 105)

As the students talk back to my curriculum I see the act as their own restorative triumph since these students demanded correction of the original wrong and specified how it should be corrected.

Hospitality and Right-Relation

I still remember the face of that student to whom I attribute a re-opening of my world: “a stranger who crosses the limits of my territory and upsets my habits” (Irigaray 2008, 97). Fashioning myself as an agent of restorative practice, I could not imagine asking myself the question: “How does it feel to be a problem?” (DuBois 1994). The student who showed me that she was not learning much in my class, the same student who was the leader in the Black affinity group, arranged an encounter in which this question became possible and, dare I say, restorative.

In choosing restorative practices as a pedagogical approach, I undoubtedly sought order in the form of right-relation. Yancy (2017) identifies order as a familiar trope of whiteness: political order, emotional order, social order, order in the house/classroom, hierarchical order…as distinct from disorder, represented by breaches of white supremacy. In this analysis of my practice, I now see ambiguity: a desire for fluidity, the still-to-be-arranged quality of encounter (right-relation) and the persistent internal hum demanding order, the already-known, the familiar. This ambiguity appears to work like a switch: on–off-on–off, until someone cannot take it anymore, and asks for better hospitality.

When whiteness was switched on, my class would become my project about order, an opportunity to discipline bodies toward racial equity, a space incompatible with hospitable intentions, albeit for minor breaches. In this space, I-It relationships were practiced without notice, or even when they were noticed, they were means to an end: the irreducibility of every student was thus turned into reducibility to a racial/ethnic category, facticity as a means to the end, the racial equity end. I built right-relation with the thingness of my students. Sometimes the students talked back from behind the veil of thingness. Those were important moments: demands for recognition, momentary glimpses of the keys to unlocking the world not yet open to our imagination (Ruitenberg, 2015).

My student invited me to do true restorative work: to re-conceptualize right-relation as one I would need to build with myself and with each individual student in a world that is not imposed but shared, one yet to be discovered. My job, as far as racial equity is concerned, would become one of arranging the space where newer ways of performing one’s skin could emerge.

Irigaray (2008) speaks of self-affection as essential to hospitality, getting in touch with my own subjectivity, a point of return after an encounter with the other. I needed to discover that point, that dwelling to which I could return. In my case, as a White educator, I had to discover the unbearable and insidious whiteness of being and to become un-sutured (Yancy, 2017). I credit my student with the initial impetus to this un-suturing. In George Yancy’s words,

…whites must strive to be un-sutured…to tarry with the multiple ways in which their whiteness is a problem, and to remain with the weight of that reality and the pain of that realization. Being un-sutured is a site of openness, loss, and great discomfort. (Yancy 2017, 13)

Being un-sutured is an indispensable act for whites who aspire to offer hospitality, not a prerequisite but an ongoing co-requisite. It is in the experience of un-suturing that one becomes a host. You see yourself as an unfamiliar (and unwelcome) embodiment and also as a possibility. This discovery helps one imagine that there are possibilities beyond what one knows.

Earlier in this essay, I have evoked visible division of students in physical space. Initially, this division was taken as a sign of separation and thus a lack of right-relation. I look at this separation differently now: it is a visual reminder of our remoteness from each other, a remoteness not to be bridged but to be honored as a goal of re-conceptualized right-relation: “the other is still and always to be discovered” (Irigaray 2008, 126).

I suppose the right-relation is one that comes from hospitality: one does not add-on hospitality but starts there. Hospitality necessitates continuous tarrying with whiteness of a space and whiteness in a space. It seems that when whiteness is enabled, hospitality is not possible: whiteness seeks to impose meanings, impose order, impose outcome; in short, it seeks to control, even right-relation. I imagine that to arrange a hospitable space where the other can “secure their own presentation” (Irigaray 2008, 85), (a white) one would need to let go of familiar meanings (Thompson, 2003) and let the other unfold and become a meaning-maker with open possibilities of performing their skin in newer ways. I am reminded that I must “do my best not to affect in advance the Being of the other. This Being has an original situation in a proper world and exists through a proper project” (Irigaray 2008, 77). This Being I attempted to define in the spirit of misguided (white) hospitality. This act of letting go and letting be (Irigaray 2008) does not only invite freedom into the space, but it is a humanizing act; it connects us to our vocation of “transcending toward an open future of possibilities” (Yancy 2017, 151), unfolding as long as we live. And this act of letting go and letting unfold is to be retried as if anew every time, for it does not seem to occur naturally. In this repeated act we ourselves restore as we explore “fresh possibilities of responsiveness” and build right-relation. Paraphrasing Irigaray (2008): this right-relation is not something that belongs to one participant in this relation, it is always to be elaborated by the two without belonging to either one. This loss of control over right-relation is a form of un-suturing and would undermine the controlling whiteness of the space and whiteness in the space. It is a challenging right-relation. And it reopens the world.