Why I Stopped Using the Epithet “Straight White Male”
The Teacher I Didn’t Want to Know — And How He Changed My Life
A “super-white dude” comes to the ‘hood
The September that Mr. Nitchman began teaching at our predominantly black and Puerto Rican public high school in New York City, he appeared immediately out of place with his blue eyes, pocket protector, and bright morning Midwest smile. What was this new biology teacher doing here at this Brooklyn vocational high school, where in my homeroom class, there was a bullet hole in a window patched over with tape? Where roughly once a week the lunchroom cafeteria broke out in either an all-out food fight or students throwing fists and shouts?
“I bet Homeboy was guilty of white-collar crime, and this is his mandatory community service,” one of my friends cracked.
“Yeah, he probably drove over from Manhattan in a limo,” another friend quipped.
“That’s all we need at this school,” I added. “Some super-white dude telling us all what to do.”
Simply put, there was no way I was going to let this Mr. Nitchman near me. There was no way I’d let this guy fulfill what would end up being his ultimate destiny in my life: to serve as one of the most powerfully transformative figures I have ever known.
Encountering the Other: Lessons from Pocahontas and Levinas
Allowing him in would demand that I release him from the idea I had of him — captured in that phrase “super-white dude.” The ideas we have of people can go very far indeed in eclipsing who they truly are.
I think, in particular, of how the 1995 movie Pocahontas dramatizes this dynamic. There is a pivotal moment where John Smith, an English settler, is about to kill a Native American woman, Pocahontas, during a tense encounter. However, just as he raises his weapon, he hesitates and gazes softly into her eyes. At that moment, he is struck by her beauty, grace, and peaceful demeanor. This profound sense of connection makes him lower his weapon, realizing that she is not his enemy but something — someone — beyond what he had imagined.
What is it exactly that turns Smith’s trajectory away from violence toward relationship? I think it’s safe to conclude that he wants to kill her, not because he is inherently demonic or evil. Instead, some silent mental activity is keeping him from understanding who she truly is. Up until this moment, he does not see her but rather the idea of her. This idea had grown out of the language forged within his own community to describe, as the Declaration of Independence states, those “merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions.” The 20th-century French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas spent his lifetime examining how our perceptions of “the other” enact a certain psychological violence upon them; instead of seeing them, he argued, we can impose mental concepts upon them that crush the immeasurable radiance of who they are into a cold dead stereotype. It’s this idea of Pocahontas, as unhuman, that John Smith wants to kill.
Yet his stunning pivot to relationship occurs when this idea explodes upon the revelation of face-to-face encounter. Her sacred humanity emerges. Old things pass away; Smith’s entire world is made new.
This cinematic moment reminds me of ways in which I myself have, of late, become increasingly aware of the power of language to shape my ideas of people: language that either eclipses or reveals who they are as bearers of God’s image. And as someone who considers himself more progressive-leaning, I’ve become particularly sensitive to a term once so exhilarating to me: “Straight White Male.” Confessedly, it implies something suspect about those it seeks to name, as if an entire segment of humanity were stamped from the beginning as privileged, domineering, toxic.
But might it not be enacting a psychological violence similar to John Smith’s? Might it not be a way of flattening infinitely complex humanity into a sinister idea?
Before continuing this line of reasoning, though, let me pause to clarify that the suspicion that this term evokes is not entirely without cause. Across my life, there have been actual people fitting this category who have done concrete damage to my humanity as a man of color. Across history on through to today, there have been actual people fitting this category who have exerted asymmetrical and damaging forms of societal power that we as a society now stand to heal. In making my larger argument, I’m by no means forsaking my long-held commitment to social justice.
Yet, do these factors now give me enough reason to walk around hollowing out an entire segment of God’s creation into a simple caricature? Straight White Male? As a Christian under orders to honor the image of God in others, this term, with everything sinister that it conjures, has been a stumbling block to me that I’m ready to push aside.
For few people have had such a positive impact on me as that epitome of “super-white dudes” — that new high school biology teacher Mr. Nitchman. And yet with this moniker, my heart had declared a verdict on him even before interacting with him, and would continue, for a long while, to reject any evidence to the contrary.
Who was this Mr. Nitchman?
Even as I resisted him, I grew increasingly bewildered as to why he kept trying to strike up conversations with me of all people, a scrappy Puerto Rican kid listening to hip hop and house music, meandering the New York streets with a 1.8 GPA. What interest was he taking in me?
One day after class, I confronted him: “Yo bro, what you want from me?”
“It’s not what I want from you,” he almost whispered, peering into my eyes with an intensity that made me look away. “It’s what I want for you. You seem one of the most gifted young people I’ve ever met.”
I found it almost impossible to make sense of this statement. Gifted. Most gifted. In reality, I was barely surviving academically at one of the lowest ranked high schools in New York City, the object of countless teachers shaking their heads in disappointment. But it was as if, by some otherworldly eyesight, he had seen in me a vision of something no one had ever seen before.
He saw me.
I wanted to know: What was it, exactly, that he saw? Was there truly a there there?
The answer to these questions unfolded as he began investing in me. Mr. Nitchman talked to me, tutored me, advised me, made me laugh, and built me up as a young man. He saw that I was intelligent but that this was not reflected in my grades, so he helped me build the non-cognitive skills necessary for academic success. At around this same time I was beginning to take up a life of faith in Christ, which only fanned his efforts to champion my development, helping me see myself as being of infinite worth in God’s sight. Above all, he never let me forget that I was on this earth for a purpose.
I slowly began to see what he was seeing and to be convinced of it.
What sort of spiritual violence would I now be doing to cast Mr. Nitchman as just another “Straight White Male,” with everything the epithet implies?
The question becomes all the more pressing given that he must have been under his own temptation to distort me into all sorts of abstractions as well. When I was in high school in the 1990’s, a very powerful stereotype began circulating in the American consciousness, spurred on by the news media, of the “superpredator”: young black and brown men who were incorrigibly criminal, vicious, lacking all conscience — the “merciless savages” of our country’s inner cities. Mr. Nitchman could have easily fallen into the trap of simply seeing me as just “one of them” and turning away.
But there we were, the whitest dude in the world side-by-side the scruffiest Puerto Rican kid on the block, both of us floating beyond the categories by which humanity decides whom to love and whom to hate. In seeing me, he didn’t see a media image, or a statistic, a meme, or an idea. He beheld, I believe, the true image of God in me. And being seen that way empowered me like little else. In fact, my own rally cries to see God’s glory where we least expect it — refracted now in all my writing and speaking — began in the ways he mirrored me back to myself.
So, moving forward, I will try to be a more careful steward of how I use language to describe others. In renouncing the epithet “Straight White Male” in particular, I hope to see beyond the labels and embrace the possibility that, like Mr. Nitchman, those I might once have dismissed could be the very ones who are revealing God’s presence in my life — angels I’m entertaining unawares.
