I walk through the main entrance of my college’s main building each day. There are three entrance points for the public in this ten-story building. We don’t have many campus buildings; space is limited in NYC so we build up rather than out, giving a large body-traffic flow at this main building. This is my fourth semester teaching at my current college and, though this may be a strange observation, I have never entered or exited the building when the student in front of me did not hold the door open for me.
I noticed this pattern right away. It is something that I have never witnessed at any other university. It happens every single day. And, if I am standing on line, the students let me go first. I do not know any of these students, but they recognize me as a professor right away.
It was Black female reviewers who brought up the point that most professors reading the article would be white and have mostly white students and so would not be able to relate to the content. Yes, you heard that right. It was Black female professors who made that claim. And I shouldn’t have to tell you that the white editors went to town on that right there. Besides the fact that it undermines all Black women when Black women see themselves as tangential to educational research, the idea that the majority of college writing classrooms today mostly enroll white, middle class students IS FALSE! That’s not historically accurate and it certainly does not apply to an era where higher education gets browner and browner every year. Whiteness in this field gets maintained by scholars of color as much as it gets maintained by white scholars and it’s time we start talking about it.
