Two Feet In | Writing and the Institution

Reflections on my Whiteness III This entry was supposed to be a continuation of my reflection of my own whiteness as I went to college and then into the professional work for. That part will be quick. But, considering #Ferguson and its aftermath, I have to jump to the present instead of so much detail of the past. Private university, mostly white students; English Literature major = mostly white students. When English Literature is discussed, it is almost always the "dead white man" variety, postcolonialism notwithstanding. It's disheartening today to see syllabi of American Lit and even British Lit nearly full of dead white men, ignoring a) more women writers than we like to admit; b) American Native (Canadians use the better term, "First Nations") writers; then c) the constellation of authors of color who are routinely given only token notice. Every Lit professor knows Cisneros, but I'll bet $10 that most can't name ten Hispanic American author...

Part I here White in Arkansas  Once I moved to Searcy in sixth grade, I lived in an all-white neighborhood again, but closer to town. My father managed a Goodyear tire store where he had one black man up front in sales and service, and a few black men in the bays. The school was integrated, according to the law, but the tracking was evident. Whites were in a few "gifted and talented" classes, blacks made up the majority of the on-level and "remedial" (whatever they called it back then) classes. We had a few black students in our class, but it was certainly a majority. My math teacher was old and white and my English teacher was older and whiter -- she had, in fact, been the math teacher's elementary teacher. The science teacher was young and white and didn't know how the heart worked. I asked her once what kept the heart beating forever and she had to come back the next day and tell me it was electricity, which pretty much blew my mind at that age (I...

I knew I was white when ... I liked Denise. I was a boy; she was a girl. We played together at the private school in Memphis where we both attended. When family found out that I liked her, they asked me what she looked like. I described her dark brown hair, her thin body, and her dark skin. The family was confused, as the private school I attended was for whites only, either explicitly or implicitly. But Denise wasn't black. She was just a bit darker than all the other white children. She was white too, perhaps of Mediterranean descent, I never asked, I didn't care. But from the confusion and attempt at explanation of their confusion, I first realized (I was slow back then; I still am) that all the children at that school were in fact white, all the teachers were white, the cafeteria workers were white, the bus drivers were white. We lived in a white Memphis neighborhood named Indian Hills, on a street called Arrowhead (other street names included Cochise Rd, Navaho Ave, and ...