Regan informed me that various comments I had made inside and outside of classes had given me a reputation as being "reactionary" and "complacent on the subject of race."

So there it was. Behind all the arguments we perennially engage in -- about racial iniquity or poverty or sexual orientation -- this possibility always looms. Through the hurled abstractions, we learn that we're unpopular. Ivory towers disintegrate to sandboxes in an instant. But for me this only tautens my determination to make the conversation about our ideas, not our identities.

What had I done to alienate my classmates -- to make many people think, as she told me, that I didn't belong in the department -- when for so many years I had worked so hard to arrive? In a class, I had suggested that even in "Othello," not every line is about race, and that to think so is as monomaniacal as it would be to think that the play is not about race at all. On another, even more infamous occasion, I had complained about something my Chinese housemate was always cooking, which I was never able to identify, not because I disdained to ask but because we can't speak each other's languages. Whatever it was stunk terribly to me -- to me, not to the objective nose or to the radical nose, just my nose. Is a nose subject to ideology? If so, what's behind my loathing of my stepfather's sauerkraut?

"They're not going to actually do anything," she reassured me about my classmates, "but let me put it this way: They won't go out of their way to make you feel comfortable."

There were no African-Americans in the class on "Othello," nor were there any Chinese present to hear me slander their cuisine, if indeed that is what I had done. So it must have been on the behalf of these groups that my mostly white classmates who were listening were so scandalized. At my "Othello" comment, a student gasped. To the Chinese cooking complaint, a student, while rolling his head back, said slowly and deliberately, "Ouch!"

"You are participating in an ideology that makes Western European-ness the model for what it means to be American," Regan said about my Chinese cooking comment. Trying to avoid a no I'm not-yes you are trap and curious to know what she really believed, I ventured. "But don't all cultures believe to some extent that they are superior to others?"

"No, not like whites."

"What about earlier this century when Japan invaded Korea and occupied it for 30 years?"

"The Japanese didn't think they were superior, they just needed the resources. You obviously know very little about history."

"This is why I haven't taken a class about race," I fumed. "I have heard too many statements like yours which employ double standards in interpreting history."

"Did it ever occur to you," she asked, "that such discourse against whites might be so prevalent because it is true?"

"Sure, to the extent to which the mere fact of a thing's happening legitimizes it." My most obvious fault in these arguments is my tendency to assume a position of absolute critique, and at moments like these I realize that no matter how sharply I seem to myself to be thinking, beneath is a juvenile impulse to prove people wrong. In this instance, I lapsed into full satire. "Is slavery right? Well, let's see, is it happening? I guess you'd be pleased to see history come to a complacent halt, since whatever is, is right!"

"How much more deeply do I have to watch you dig yourself in?" she asked.

She grimaced.

Suddenly, there was nothing more important than showing her that I wasn't the schoolyard bully she'd painted me to be. "If there's something I'm ignorant of about race," I pleaded earnestly, "whether a fact or a way of thinking, and if you're genuinely committed to promoting greater understanding, then please try to explain it to me."

"It's not my responsibility to educate you, and I can see that our classmates are right about you," she said. I could have tried to explain myself again -- that my comments about race were in fact anti-racist if anything and my comments about food, were well, about food, but I didn't. Instead, I surrendered to my fear of being excluded. I played my identity trump card. I told her about my sister who is half African-American, half Vietnamese, and my half-Latino, half Native-American brother. I told her how my parents adopted them before I was born. I told her that I was born into a family where racial difference is just an everyday fact of life, not something to be afraid of. But more importantly, I cried -- so that she could see my multicultural, albeit invisible, identity shining through me.

"I'm glad we had this conversation," Regan said, at last relaxing. "I'm very glad."

My Oprah-esque confessional meant something to her, and she responded with something like forgiveness for my seeming like an average, white, middle-class, neo-liberal bigot. But I felt as though I had just failed an exam more important than any Ph.D. orals, and I couldn't forgive myself.
salon.com | June 4, 1999

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

  Get a printer-friendly version

  E-mail a friend about this article

  Backflip this article to find it again

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Search Salon