"But You Aren't White:" Racial Perceptions and Service-Learning‪.‬

Much of the writing on service-learning has documented how service-learning affects students' perceptions of "the other." Service-learning, it is argued, makes students more "ethically committed" and interested in democracy (Cooper & Julier, 1997), provides students with an opportunity to explore multiculturalism (Rhoads, 1998), and engages students in the work of the "public intellectual" (Cushman, 1999). These are all important and thoughtful goals for service-learning, but much of the writing focuses on the abstract and the ideal, what happens in our service-learning classes on our best teaching days with the students who "get it." In arguing for service-learning, we often gloss over the difficulties that students have performing service in places where they are uncomfortable, where poverty is not pretty or idealized. The service-learning student can feel disconnected, angry, frustrated, and recognize, for the first time, that service-learning is not an experience that immediately makes one "feel good." The faculty member teaching service-learning can also feel angry and frustrated, and if she is committed to multicultural education, recognize, for the first time, that finding ways to talk about race and class is in some ways more difficult when students are confronted with lived race and class differences than when facing race and class differences as represented in textbooks and readings. This article explores one aspect of what can make my students uncomfortable--race. While talking about race is always uncomfortable, particularly for white people, it is absolutely crucial that race be addressed in service-learning courses, and especially in service-learning courses where mostly white students perform service among mostly people of color. Well-intentioned white people, both students and faculty, must learn racial awareness, and middle class people of all races must think about how class affects the service situation. It is absolutely important to talk about the intersections of race, class, and service in order to prevent service-learning from replicating the power imbalances and economic injustices that create the need for service-learning in the first place. In what follows I unpack how race and class affected some of my service-learning students, and discuss how teaching about race, particularly whiteness within the course, made it easier for students to talk with one another about race and class and to problematize their own agendas for social justice.