My racist incident at Bucknell University
The notable experience of racism for me occurred in my 1st week. Bucknell is an expensive, selective, liberal arts college with a demographic that is changing, but still fairly consistent. What’s more it’s in central Pennsylvania, an area where many communities can be considered…traditional (being from PA and spending 8 years at Penn State, I was already aware of such things).
This particular day, started like the day before on my 1st week (waking up, getting ready to get on campus and prepare for classes), except for one important voicemail from the campus police. It seems someone had written a racial slur on my white board.
What followed was meetings with several administrators/people around the college to check-in, debrief, and air any concerns. I chose to keep my name off of anything that officially went around regarding the incident and let some people know over different parts of these past two years know that the incident involved me. The 1st group of people I opted to tell a few days after the event was an informal group of black faculty meeting to discuss the event (without particularly knowing who the victim was and if they would be attending.) I don’t know if it was actually them, but perhaps they were the ones behind this amazing message I had written on my door white board a few days later.
Of course, my wife worried about my safety on-campus, and I had to think in the back of my mind in my classes, “I haven’t been here long enough for many to know me, was it any of these students who wrote the message?” Nonetheless, in the end, life went on. I didn’t really have much time to worry about it as there is always work to be done during the semester. Slowly the incident went further and further into the back of my mind, eliciting less of a visceral response with each recall.
