Who Am I? Or Condemned by speaking and Damned by Silence

A Decades Long Currere Journey

Abstract

This currere essay and, especially, its guiding metaphor exploring the dialectic of speech and silence as way to think through—beyond?— is a way to think through my own Whiteness. Crafted as a sort of “meta”currere, a specific narrative originally written in a particular moment of my life history, it also extends to this current moment. My rendering  it seeks to blur the linear expression of time and its easy reduction to a formula of inevitable progress. I cling to the promise that “I am what I am not yet,” as Maxine Greene would say, but in many respects, I am still who I have always been, and not necessarily better. Many of the same issues and questions that originally prompted this reflection persist.