“TEACHING WHILE BLACK.”
“No one warned me about white students. They did not tell me the psychic violence that they could inflict upon my black body. Like the time I student wrote an entire 6 page paper defending the Trans-Atlantic Slave trade or the time when another student wrote in a midterm exam that U.S prisons were necessary to ensure the maintenance of black criminals behind bars. No one said they will question my authority and intelligence in ways that they would never do for another white instructor.
No one warned me about white students. How they would willingly enroll in a class that centers blackness and then get frustrated, resorting to defense that “this is just too complicated, why can’t we all just be one race” narrative when discussing race. No one prepared me for this. Not my colleagues nor my cohort. Surely not the administration. No one!”
