When Today’s Words Heal Yesterday’s Wounds
Now we’re speaking out and seeing change
A microaggression. That’s what it was, the remark made by the professor whose exam I failed on a warm July afternoon in 1988 at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. Over the years, I’ve often thought about that exam and about his remark — uttered in a manner I’d best describe as incredulous disdain — and the discomfort it caused me: “Mademoiselle,” he said with a wave of his manicured hand, “you are a disgrace to your race.”
I was taken aback and at a loss for words. What did my race — I am Indian — have to do with my performance on the exam? Failing an exam had everything to do with how much one had prepared and nothing to do with one’s ethnicity. And, as it were, failing the exam wasn’t due to a lack of study. Back then at my alma mater, we were given oral exams — I happened to pick a topic from the pile of face-down index cards on the professor’s desk that he had covered for all of twenty seconds in class. There was no way I could have spoken on said topic for the requisite fifteen minutes.
I fumbled and mumbled for a couple of minutes before he said what he said about my performance.
Then he continued,“Yours is a race that is generally intelligent and articulate. You’re not exhibiting any of these traits. Go, now, and only return to take the exam when you are ready to do your race proud.”
This week, as I scrolled through a set of Instagram accounts recommended by my college-age son, those remarks came right back to me as though I’d heard them yesterday. These accounts, where students of color — mostly Black, but also Hispanic, Asian, or Indian like myself — on campuses across the country post anonymously about their experiences, are the lens into the truth of what it’s like to be not-white at university in America. And as I read the posts — some of which made me angry, many of which made me sad — I finally understand what made me so uncomfortable more than thirty years ago at the University of Geneva. I finally grasp what a microaggression is.
Back then, of course, the term “microaggression” did not exist. Not at the University of Geneva, anyway. And even if I had an inkling, an amorphous notion of the fact that the professor’s statement was wrong, I would never have dared tell him so. He was one of Geneva University’s finest, after all — eloquent, erudite, a decorated scholar who’d published papers and books. He was also a political émigré from behind the Iron Curtain, which added to his mystique. Always dressed impeccably in perfectly tailored suits that matched his perfectly coiffed grey hair, the creamy smoothness of his voice and the cadence with which he delivered his lectures led many a female student to sit up straight, lean forward, and pay close attention, and then, in the hallway after class, seek to impress upon him her wit, charm and intelligence.
If I ever had such intentions — and I did not — I would not have been successful, because the only thing I had apparently impressed upon him was my race. Perhaps if I had researched the so-called science of race that originated centuries ago, that claimed human beings are divided into separate and unequal races, that enabled colonialism and enslavement, and instituted white supremacy, I might possibly have thought that he had paid me a compliment, in some bizarre, backhanded way. Those ridiculous theories that equated intelligence with skull size seemingly placed South Asians somewhere near the top of the rankings. I doubt very much, though, that I would have been anything less than grossed out, had I researched race theory in 1988, for I knew full well that intelligence and aptitude have nothing to do with race.
Anyway, as I did not have the tools, language, or confidence to react to my professor’s remark, all I could do was hunker down in the library and spend my summer studying for the exam I’d failed, bearing not only the burden of mastering the subject matter’s academic rigor, and researching topics covered only for twenty seconds, but also the weight of “living up to” a race that was allegedly intelligent and articulate.
My alma mater, which dates back to 1559, had for centuries been reserved almost exclusively for Geneva’s vanguard — families of old wealth for whom streets, buildings, parks and monuments were named. Many years after I graduated I visited the Old Slave Mart Museum in Charleston, where I learned that the ancestors of some of those families had been important figures in the slave trade. Like many universities in Europe, the university is publicly funded. On my first day, my father handed me the modest sum of 300 Swiss francs (my fees for the semester), and then, armed with the results of my end-of-high-school International Baccalaureate (I.B.) exam, I rode the tram to the downtown campus and stood in line at the bursar’s office, cash at the ready.
I needed only a passing grade on the I.B. exam to be admitted to the university, but I had done rather well. Indeed, I was always a good student — but that professor’s association of academic ability with race rendered my hard work and accomplishments meaningless. His remarks made me feel like I had been granted a space at the University of Geneva — a place where I was already in the minority given how few students of color there were, where walking the dark hallways of the centuries-old building with its sunken-in stone floors often felt like walking on borrowed ground — only by virtue of my race and its alleged intelligence. I knew several other students had failed that exam; I am pretty sure, though, that the professor didn’t link their poor performance to race or racial anomaly.
I went back to retake the exam in October of 1988. This time, I passed — thereby embodying, as the professor glowingly said, all the positive attributes of my race. Two years later, I would graduate from Geneva University and move on in life, but the malaise would never leave me. In fact, there were numerous other incidents akin to that one, I would realize in retrospect, and as I now read through the posts on these Instagram accounts — including the one featuring the experiences of Black and other students of color at the university I work for — I realize that not much has changed in thirty-plus years. Professors freely equate academic performance and ability with race. Students of color are still left out of many conversations. Some are included because they’re deemed exotic, as I had been considered in my time; others make the cut by virtue of their mannerisms and their speech, as these help to somehow mask their skin color in the same way that the European-ness I cultivated in my time at the University of Geneva granted me access into certain circles I would never have been considered for based on my race alone.
“Plus ça change,” I think, as I read each post. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Except for this one thing: the posts themselves. That students are putting themselves out there, even anonymously, has created a language that is shedding light on higher education and helping people of the older generation like myself confront the pains from our past, analyze those instances, and finally understand why certain perceptions, certain remarks that came our way were so wrong.
Over the past decades, I have gone back a number of times to the University of Geneva. I’ve visited the new buildings, navigated the website. I know that my old professor has been further decorated and is still around, and I now wonder if, on my next visit to Geneva, I should seek him out and say, “Do you remember me?”
If I do, I’ll have the present generation to thank — for giving me the words, the tools and the courage to start a conversation that should have happened more than thirty years ago.
