Although there has been much discussion in composition studies for the past several years about the importance of contact zones, dissensus, and conflict to the process of learning (Bizzell; Harris; Jarratt; Lu; Olson; Trimbur; West), there has been less talk of the relationship between safe houses and conflict, as well as the role anger plays in social and political engagement. Some composition scholars have argued that in order to help prepare students for participation in civic culture, it is necessary to articulate radical pedagogies, ones that encourage modes of argumentation and that see the tensions of social difference as points of political friction to be interrogated. In arguing for the necessity of agonistic pedagogical models, however, it is easy to overlook not only the affective relations of social and political engagement but also the fact that conflict and dissensus-precisely because of emotional ties and affective investments--o not always follow the proscriptions of reasoned or civil discourse, that engagement cannot always be understood in terms of prevailing rationalities and intelligibilities. In arguing for the importance of conflict (that ideological positions are forged and tested through argumentation rooted in social difference), it is also easy to ignore that sometimes we need to deal with some of the more damaging and long-lasting results of engagement: the effects of pain, violence, cruelty-psychic and emotional injury as well as physical

In Challenge of Diversity, H. Roy Kaplan, executive director of The National Conference of Christians and Jews, writes, Our obsession with or fear of differences has become a morbid fetish that threatens to tear our moral fabric apart (8). The article appeared in a weekly newspaper that covers arts, entertainment, and public issues in and around Tampa Bay area. The newspaper is also read-with varying degrees of attention-I discovered, by about two-thirds of my first-year composition students at University of South Florida. Although well intentioned, piece answers the of with a kind of laissez-faire pluralism: We must create an environment where people, all people, feel needed and wanted-part of a of caring and sharing human beings; where diversity, pluralism and differences are valued for richness and value they bring to human experiences (8). My students' offerings on cultural diversity and race relations bear striking resemblances to Kaplan's sentiment. At institutions with culturally diverse populations like South Florida, students often find it convenient and reassuring to believe in promise of a harmonious pluralism. Like Kaplan, many students believe that it is focus on and preoccupation with gender, racial, and class differences that is actually problem and not social and political dimensions of these differences. Certainly, in order to work for livable futures and in order to interrogate asymmetrical power formations in multicultural societies, we should envision difference as an asset and not a liability. However, we cannot create livable futures by simply ignoring real frictions and tensions created by unequal access to power and benefits of dominant culture. The answer to challenge of is not to imagine a community of caring and sharing human beings but to recognize our multicultural society as a tense plurality, as Joseph Harris says, and learn how to generate productive dialogue from tensions of difference. As evidenced above, students do not come to class ignorant of tensions