One of the prerequisites or unavoidable results of multiculturalism is that the classroom becomes what Mary Louise Pratt calls a "contact zone." But how does the teacher keep discussion productive without taking sides? How does the teacher abdicate enough authority to diminish the asymmetricality but not so much that the class becomes a shapeless mass? When students meet and clash with each other and with the teacher, chances are good that the teacher's authority will become eroded. Within the spectrum of student political approaches is the student who is openly belligerent to the multicultural agenda and the student who is "converted" or will simply give the teacher what he/she wants. But most classrooms consist of those in the middle, those who reconstitute the nature of the polarity being discussed as a means of eliminating completely any traces of asymmetricality. In other words, they make their own experiences compete with the textual expression of Black authors. An example of a student in English 102 at Rutgers illustrates this point. The student is representative of a group with which most composition teachers are familiar: white, middle class, from a homogeneous suburban or rural background, and uncomfortable talking about race. In her final essay, if she was not less racist, the student repositioned her cultural views within the dominant terms of the discussion. One possible approach to such students would be to foreground and problematize the position of whiteness. (TB)