by David Winner
Angela, my wife, and I are over-educated middle-class white New Yorkers of a certain age.
My six months on Avenue D gave me a leg up in my search for further teaching positions around New York. I was now deemed capable of teaching non-white students because I had taught non-white students before as if the teaching of non-white students were a skill unto itself.
I don’t know how cynical to be about such a formulation, but given the rowdy students of color depicted in so many movies and TV shows, it’s hard not to imagine that non-white students are somehow considered more difficult, their white instructors more trainers than teachers. For the record – please forgive the invidious comparison – my biggest classroom struggles have been with white students, the kid at NYU who wrote “David Winner is an asshole” on his student evaluations.
Non-white classrooms have often been identified in job descriptions by peculiar racial dog-whistling, terms such as “population” (as if white people somehow aren’t that), “community” (same thing), “inner city,” “urban,” as if no white people live in cities. “Diverse” and “multicultural” often just mean non-white rather than a confluence of different cultures.
Are all non-white students the same? Can I be a “Black expert” and say, Judy, my fellow white person, be a “Latinx expert” and, Frank, an “Asian and Pacific Islander expert?” Graduate education in both the fields of ESL (English as a Second Language) and Social Work has sometimes answered these questions by the encouraging of stereotypes. On a hiring committee for an ESL professorship, I once listened to recently minted job candidates explaining to us about Chinese, Egyptian, Dominican people using hair-raisingly broad labels whereas a friend (white non-Hispanic like myself) “learned” in NYU’s Masters in Social Work program that she needed to be careful while working with Latinas because they might have an attack of “ataque,” a sort of loud hysterical fit that women from all over Latin America were deemed to be prone to.
Another problematic assumption in classrooms with “diverse” “populations” involves the texts that students are assigned to read. While it is inappropriate to assign only white western male canonical texts to students with no evident connection to them, there is sometimes an implicit notion that all texts written by non-white writers across the planet have something in common that makes them interesting and comprehensible to all non-white students. During the pandemic, Angela tutored a young woman who had recently immigrated from Bangladesh. Her community college basic English class had been assigned a complicated and challenging text, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes are Watching God. Angela (feeling uncomfortable as a white person in this role) attempted to explain some basic American racial history and tried to translate 1930’s rural black southern dialect into something like standard English. The resulting game of telephone could not have provided Angela’s tutee with any real understanding of the text.
And what of me, and my decades as a white man teaching primarily black and Latinx students? First of all, it has to be said that long before the Supreme Court’s attack on affirmative action, the color of my skin has not stopped me from being hired.
Both my students and I generally just try to be reasonably respectful and kind. Given the common dynamic discussed in this writing, my non-white students, already extremely familiar with white instructors, hardly seem to focus upon my absence of pigment and European features. And pundits who bemoan what they called “identity politics,” the notion that non-white people tend to be preoccupied with their racial and cultural identities, would find a stark absence of that in my classrooms where cultural identity is simply a fact of life. Implicit also in the complaint against “Identity Politics” is some sort of simmering rage against oppression which white teachers in non-white classroom might wish to unlock, but if I’ve learned anything as a white professor in non-white classrooms, it is that racism and racial humiliation are painful private matters.
Inspired in part by that old Walker Percy chestnut, The Loss of the Creature, which imagines a European chancing across the Grand Canyon with no knowledge of its existence, I’m curious how we respond to the unfamiliar. With that in mind, I showed my students a music video from a country that many (I suspected at least) had never heard of, Uzbekistan. Gamely, the students tried to make sense of the men dancing in their very eighties clothes, the women in traditional Uzbek dress, the unearthly mosques and palaces of Samarkand, then by comparison, I asked my students to decode something that I imagine would be more familiar, but instead of the Chance the Rapper video that I had selected, having heard the song on the radio over and over again, I mistakenly showed them an obscure and confusing video by Future, which was really a self-conscious statement about the making of itself, the musicians with turntables and recording devices.
A student, a young Black woman who came to talk to me after class, suggested that I show J. Cole’s “Crooked Smile” instead. I took her advice, and as one class followed right behind the other, I did not watch it beforehand.
Crooked Smile tells a painful story of a Black child shot by white cops. When it was finished, I clumsily asked for reactions but was met with silence. The showing of the video unearthed a clear division between many of my students and myself, the lurking possibility of police brutality irrelevant to my white life.
Racists create mythologies about people of color and what they can call “the cult of victimhood,” but no one wanted to be a victim that afternoon in my class. And were relieved, I think, when I talked about homework due and other less loaded matters.
I have no wisdom to offer my fellow white “Black experts.” These patronizing, problematic racial tropes may be on their out as worse misinformation penetrates curriculum. What will the post Trump/DeSantis/Vance classroom look like now that basic American racial history and culture are being eradicated? Will copies of old white chestnuts like Ethan Frome, Silas Marner, and The Red Pony get dusted off and reintroduced into classrooms as problematic figures (Jefferson, Columbus) get newly lionized, making it impossible to engage our students in honest conversations about our history? That is a problem that no Black or white (or yellow, orange or blue) expert can begin to solve.