RWA 1 is aimed at exploring the role of race (including whiteness) in our stories. This can help push our dialogue on Being White in interesting directions. To that end, please do the following:

1)We are attaching a book chapter from Jensen (2005) Heart of Whiteness, which you should read in preparation for our next class. As you are reading, try to figure out what Jensen is saying about things like ideology and how it relates to whiteness. Bring questions to our next dialogue class session.

2)For RWA 1, carefully reread pages 22 – 24, where Jensen – a white guy – tells a story about his life in two different ways. In the first version, he leaves race and racial identity ambiguous or implicit; and in the second version, he tells the same story but makes race explicit. Read the two stories in order, and use it as a model for what we are looking for from RWA 1:

Write two versions of your own story of how you got into UIUC.

1.Version 1: Write the story as if you were talking about it to a stranger or an acquaintance. Tell the person about the different steps that ultimately led you to your acceptance into and your arrival a the UIUC campus, whenever that was.

2.Version 2: For this version, take the same story of how you got into UIUC and retell it as a “racialized” or “raced” story. That is, tell the story in such a way that you make transparent the race and racial identities of everyone in the story. This includes mentioning your own race, the race of other people you interacted with (family, high school teachers and counselors, people who helped you with your application, etc.), the racial make-up of the organizations (like schools) and communities that affected you, etc., or which you were a part of.

3.Write a paragraph or two on how doing this unraced and raced storytelling affected you. What was relatively easy and why? What was more challenging and why?

4.How might this storytelling approach be related to the phenomenon of Being White or whiteness and what we have started to study in class so far? Feel free to speculate here, since there probably isn’t an exactly right or wrong answer.

Submit your RWA to Compass using a .doc or similar format. Remember that you do not need to include the above questions but can simply answer the prompts by section: 1, 2, 3, 4.