[Compact] A Black Professor Trapped in Anti-Racist Hell

too long to quote in its entirety but an excerpt below

A Black Professor Trapped in Anti-Racist Hell

https://compactmag.com/article/a-black-professor-trapped-in-anti-racist-hell

excerpt:

Keisha was tasked by Telluride with serving as a teaching assistant in my class and organizing workshops for the students in the afternoon. I welcomed Keisha into the class, suggesting that we find some days when she could lead discussion or share her own research. Instead, she largely remained silent during class for the first three weeks, counter-programming the seminar in the afternoons. During a week on the racist background of the US immigration system, Keisha found one of our texts, the foundational Asian-American memoir Nisei Daughter, insufficiently radical, so she lectured to the students that afternoon about the supposedly more radical Yuri Kochiyama. Keisha was frustrated that our week on incarceration began with George Jackson and not a black feminist, so she lectured on Angela Davis that afternoon. I talked at length with both Keisha and the class about learning unfolding over time, about the need to wrestle with an idea before moving on to the next one, and about the overall direction of the course, but for her (and soon for the students), everything had to happen now.

Keisha and I were supposed to meet weekly, but she told me she couldn’t schedule in advance, and she would let me know when she had availability. She never did. But Keisha did find time to intervene when a student was “harmed.” During one class, when we discussed Brown v. Board of Education, my co-instructor explained what the “doll test” was that provided a psychological basis for the Supreme Court’s decision: It involved showing children black and white dolls and asking what language they would use to describe them, “colored,” “white,” or “negro.” During the seminar break, a student had reported this to Keisha, and she rushed in to tell us that a student had been harmed by hearing the word “negro.”

The fourth week of the seminar examined theories of anti-blackness. It should have been predictable that the seminar would blow up during that week: Since the first days of the seminar, Keisha had been talking about how anti-blackness is qualitatively worse than every other system of oppression, so it made sense she would want us to be stuck on that week, unable to move forward—leaving anti-blackness as the course’s climax, and nadir. It happened that on the last day of the anti-blackness week, I had invited the students over to my home, where we would talk for a couple hours about the reading (a selection from Frank Wilderson’s Afropessimism) and then share a meal. By this time, the students’ faces were perpetually sullen—at least when Keisha was in the room. Occasionally, in one-on-one meetings, I could still kid around with them, or hear them chat among themselves about the mundane details of teenage life.

As I was beginning the seminar, sitting on the grass in my backyard, Keisha interrupted: “I think you should start with a lecture offering context for this reading and telling us the main points.” I reminded the class of the seminar format, of the reasons for it, and of the snippets of pedagogical theory we had read and discussed together, exploring the value of the seminar. Keisha insisted: I needed to give a lecture—immediately. Eventually, I acceded. We had a productive couple hours discussing Wilderson’s evocative text, and then I pointed out to students, “All the things I said in the initial lecture, I would have said during the course of the seminar. Each day, I try to insert the relevant background information and emphasize key points in short interventions so that the seminar can be guided by your questions. There are two dozen lectures I could give about Wilderson, each putting this text in a different light, but I want to share with you the information you want, in dialogue with the insights that you bring.”

To use the idiom du jour, my comment was triggering to Keisha. She launched into a long speech about how I was ignoring the demands of a black woman, and how I had made the space unsafe for black students. She then announced that she would take the students back to their house without eating the lunch I had waiting for them.

It was clear to me the situation was getting out of control, and after the students left my house, I reached out to the Telluride Association to share my concerns. They promised to investigate. Late Sunday night, I was informed the students were too exhausted to have class on Monday. Tuesday morning, no one was in the seminar room. I waited 10 minutes, and Keisha entered. She said the students had something to say to me. Ten more minutes of waiting in silence. Then all nine remaining students entered, each carrying a piece of paper. One by one they read a paragraph. Out of their mouths came everything Keisha had said to me during the “urgent” meetings she had with me after classes when students had allegedly been harmed. The students had all of the dogma of anti-racism, but no actual racism to call out in their world, and Keisha had channeled all of the students’ desire to combat racism at me.

They alleged: I had used racist language. I had misgendered Brittney Griner. I had repeatedly confused the names of two black students. My body language harmed them. I hadn’t corrected facts that were harmful to hear when the (now-purged) students introduced them in class. I invited them to think about the reasoning of both sides of an argument, when only one side was correct. The students ended with a demand: In light of all the harms they had suffered, they could only continue in the class if I abandoned the seminar format and instead lectured each day about anti-blackness, correcting any of them who questioned orthodoxy. The only critical perspectives they were receiving during the summer, they claimed, were from Keisha. A white girl—the one with all the snails—punctuated their point: “Keisha speaks for me: She says everything I think better than I ever could.”

Keisha is uniquely talented at performing her role, but she isn’t the author of the play. Pushing anti-racism to its limits, what we reach isn’t just hollow doctrine, but abuse: Pathological relationships that cut us off from the world, from the give-and-take of reasons and feelings unfolding over time that makes up life in the world. We see this crystal clear in the paradoxes that I encountered: The experience was supposed to be organized around a “transformative justice,” rather than a punitive model, yet the community managed to expel two of its members. Students continually voiced their desire to find practical actions to help change the world, but after four weeks, they had learned to say that anti-blackness is so foundational, the world could never change. The students wanted freedom, for themselves and for all, but they started to say that the only route to freedom is indoctrination: having me tell them what to think.

Saddest of all, for me, was hearing what the black students said. They needed extra help, they were struggling to understand anything from the readings, and they couldn’t even know what questions to ask unless they had guidance—first Keisha said this, then the black students said it, then their “allies” repeated it in solidarity with them. But I witnessed them learning. I heard them ask critical questions about difficult texts. I saw their writing improve. I saw them use complex concepts in thoughtful ways. They just didn’t believe in themselves.

After noticing during the first week of the seminar that two or three students were relatively shy (one black, one Asian, and one white), I asked Keisha if she had any suggestions on how to engage them more fully. She said she thought the students didn’t engage because they didn’t feel like the issues discussed in the seminar mattered to them. As the weeks went by, fewer and fewer students turned in written reading responses, fewer and fewer students showed up on time. They fell asleep in class, and they would walk out for extended snack breaks in the middle of the class. The seminar can’t be sustained, at Telluride or in the university itself, if we understand it as something you enter when you feel like it, stay in as long as your beliefs go unquestioned, and leave when you become uncomfortable.​

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