Theory is for everyone!

This past week, in my Race Theory and Social Thought class, a black woman in her first year of an Africana Studies masters program announced to the class and our professor that she doesn't like theory.  "I'm not interested in all of that," she said, gesturing to the air above her.  "I'm not good at that theoretical stuff.  I don't get it.  I mean, it's fine and all, but I just don't do theory.  I'm interested in the practical, what's real."  She pounded on her desk, indicating that the desk was real and theory merely abstract particles.

The professor (a black man) responded by pointing out the importance of theory for critical thinking.  We don't have to enjoy critical thinking - sometimes we don't like something, he seemed to indicate, because it can be difficult or uncomfortable.

While perfectly valid, his response was not addressing the fundamental misconception in the student's expression.  She was making the mistake of assuming theory to be intrinsically dense and unwieldy, yes.  She was making the mistake of assuming theory to be entirely divorced from reality, double yes.  But the most critical mistaken assumption she made was to believe that she herself was not already a theorist.

I know that there is often knee-jerk resistance to that idea - that we are, each of us, theorists.  This is for good reason, largely because the academy has done an admirable job convincing non-academics that they are not theorists.  Theory is deemed the domain of the professional intellectual, and this is no accident.  The academy has created a cannon of literature, stamped "theory" on it, and wiped its hands of the matter.  (Not an academic?  Oh, that's too bad!  If you're lucky, maybe someone will do you the great honor of dropping by and translating your petty common ideas into golden nuggets of theoretical wisdom one day!)

In positing itself as an interpreter (or, more likely, reinterpreter, or, better yet, re-writer) of The Other, the academy has managed quite the colonialist wake of stolen knowledge.  Given its history, it's no wonder some students, especially those who do not look or sound like what we have conceptualized as a "theorist," would distance themselves from theory.  Black women are especially susceptible to such a distancing, regardless of black feminist inroads into the academy (as detailed by Griffin 2005).  "The fights over canons and curricula were in fact struggles for power," Griffin notes, but just because "the academy [has become] yet another location, another site in the centuries-long battle against white supremacy and patriarchy," doesn't mean that that battle site is a winning one.  It sure doesn't seem so to students like the one from my Race Theory class.

Further more, academics are complicit in misinterpreting such theoretical foundations.  Griffen chronicles the many theorists (even scholars of color) who have accused black feminist writings for being "more practical than theoretical" and having a "debilitating reliance on experience."  Where is such a student as the one in my Race Theory class supposed to find herself among such divisive bickering?  The arguments lobbed at early black feminist writings as 'essentializing race' miss the point entirely - race and gender are experienced as essential identities when you are treated as if these categories are essential to you.  The student in my class understood theory to be what rejoinders to black feminist thought have suggested, not black feminist thought itself.  Theory is experiential.  To say otherwise is self-delusion, if not self denial.

As educators, we are responsible for healing this gap.  We must guide students into seeing the way they (much to their dismay!) have been preaching theory all along - that their theories are the foundation for not only their lives, but the lives of others.  On the opening page of Weaving a Family, Rothman writes, "It would be a mistake to read academic language and think it is devoid of values, feelings, or experience.  It is no less a mistake to read the vernacular and think it is devoid of theory and research."  Many theorists (their mothers, for example) may not sound like they imagine or have been told a theorist should sound.  The theorists they are most likely to be exposed to and told are authentic theorists really do seem distant from their lived realities, even if they aren't (coughMarxcough).  When a student tells us she just "doesn't do" theory, we must, must, must tell her that she already is.

"Theory" may also be a bad name for a cool idea.  When we say we have a theory outside of academia, we usually mean we have an idea, a hunch, a thought.  "Theory" in the academic sense is so much more than a hunch.  Theory is about articulating our truths, verbalizing our material conditions and lived realities, spitting hot flames to ignite a darkened room.  The words you speak is the theory you live.

Theory is for everyone, if only because theory is by everyone.