The Ugly Truth Of Being A Black Professor In America

Chronicle of Higher Education Review:  The Ugly Truth of Being a Black Professor in America, by George Yancy (Emory):

"Dear Nigger Professor." That was the beginning of a message that was sent to me. There is nothing to be cherished here, despite the salutation. Years ago, Malcolm X asked, "What does a white man call a black man with a Ph.D.?" He answered: "A nigger with a Ph.D."

The message came in response to an op-ed I published in The New York Times in December 2015. I’d spent much of that year conducting a series of interviews with philosophers about race. I wanted to hold a disagreeable mirror up to white readers and ask that they take a long, hard look without fleeing. My article, "Dear White America," took the form of a letter asking readers to accept the truth of what it means to be white in a society created for white people. I asked them to tarry with the ways in which they perpetuate a racist society, the ways in which they are racist. In return, I asked for understanding and even love — love in the sense that James Baldwin used the term: "Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within."

Instead, I received hundreds of emails, phone messages, and letters, an overwhelming number of which were filled with racist vitriol. My university did its important and necessary part — top administrators assured me that my academic freedom was protected. Yet my predicament was not easy. Campus police had to monitor my office. Departmental instructions were clear: No one was to provide any strangers with my office hours. I needed police presence at my invited talks at other universities. It all felt surreal — and dangerous.

This is what it’s like to be the target of racist hatred:

Another uppity Nigger. Calling a Nigger a professor is like calling White Black and Wet Dry.
Even the most sophisticated nigger will revert back to their jungle bunny behavior when excited.
You can dress a Nigger up in a suit and tie and they’ll still be Niggers.
This belief that niggers even reason is blatant pseudo-intellectualism.

For these writers, "nigger professor" is an oxymoron. ...

Some of my students of color have asked me, "Why talk about race with white people when at the end of the day everything remains the same — that is, their racism continues?" "Why teach courses on race and whiteness?" "Do you really think that such courses will make a difference?" I find these questions haunting; they nag at my conscience. ...

It is probably true that I would not have my job were it not for affirmative action. Many white women wouldn’t have jobs either! And of course, white men have benefited from white supremacy for years. But affirmative action is not white supremacy in reverse; it is not antiwhite, but pro-justice. It was created so that with my Ph.D., which I earned with distinction, I would actually be able to teach at a university. Affirmative action, in the case of black people, is a response to systemic racist disadvantages. It’s important to get that history right — not twisted. ...

By recounting, in explicit language, the white backlash that I encountered after writing "Dear White America," those violent and dehumanizing racist modes of address, I risk becoming retraumatized. The retelling is imperative, though. For too long, I have had black students say to me that they feel unsafe at PWIs (predominantly white institutions). I must believe them. And while they may not have been called a nigger to their faces, such white spaces position them as inconsequential, deny their blackness through superficial concerns for "diversity," and take their complaints as instances of individual problems of institutional adjustment. I insist on bearing witness to black pain and suffering at PWIs because the deniers are out there. We are told that what we know in our very bodies to be true isn’t credible. This is a different kind of violence, the epistemic kind.