It was the Fall of 1982 and I was just not able to go to class anymore. It began about half-way through the semester, this compulsion to skip class and do anything, almost anything, but attend lectures. I had (what I now think of more than thirty years later) as a profound sense of aloneness, of having to do everything to preserve my ambitions and goals in life by myself. It was hard to be all the way across the country from my family which was in California. All of my friends seemed to have a purpose that I didn’t have. I couldn’t explain to them how alone I felt, there at Swarthmore, when their families were only an hour away from them, or their friends and their social communities, even on campus, seemed to derive from where they were from, from their high school, able to sustain their ambition, to affirm their choices every day.
My roommate from freshman year, also Black, had dropped out by then, and the subtle, and oftentimes not so subtle, indifference to me displayed by faculty who should otherwise have been crucial to my success, to my feelings, and future, left me without any intellectual moorings in the classes. I remember getting an A and always attending the one class that semester in which the professor engaged my ideas and thought that I was smart, that I was not at the school simply as a token to a politics of racial equality.
Even the word token, a substitute, a marker placed down instead of the real thing, a symbol for something real, yet itself, fake, cheap, inexpensive, and easily replaced was a threat to my presence at the school. “Here, have you lost your token? Let me get you another one.” It didn’t help that these were the Reagan years, during which the national politics of race on the Right was full of lamentation for those Blacks who had managed to get ahead and succeed because of so-called affirmative action; the Blacks who supposedly either didn’t really belong due to a lack of skills and acumen or because they had not passed or endured whatever requirements for admission, promotion, and excellence that existed for White people to achieve similar success in the work that they sought to accomplish.
The resistance to Black individual success by society, the absence of imagination on the part of those who considered racial equality a myth or a personal insult to their own excellence, was comprehensive, so much so that the students constantly questioned the presence of Black students in class and socially. That I was always supposed to justify that I belonged meant that once I wasn’t succeeding, when I wasn’t doing well, or if I wasn’t as good as, if not better than everyone else, I simply was not entitled to be there. I wasn’t failing at the class material, but rather at feeling as though I no longer cared enough about what people thought to make that the reason for my success. I needed some other reason to be in class than simply proving others wrong about race, about the capabilities of Black people. Being the exception simply wasn’t enough to overcome the absence of a particular connection to those around me, the absence of something that would define my success as important to myself and others.
This problem of Black student retention could not be easily solved by requiring that I, as a student, find some purpose or ambition beyond tokenism, some way of reaching beyond the politics of racial equality. That faculty are hostile or indifferent to Black students, that they resist the idea that they are complicit in making it difficult for students of color to succeed, is not easy for a university to address directly. After all, if the disciplines in which these faculty work don’t successfully address the problem of racial representation and its equation with racial equality, how can the faculty know how to address racial injustice in the classroom, in the department office, or in the larger society beyond academia? Indeed, teaching and research don’t usually require that faculty do more than provide lectures, conduct seminars, and evaluate student performance in studying course materials. Hence, this problem of Black student retention is a question of the vocation.
I remember faculty who, when I wasn’t interested in a given topic or author, assumed that I simply wasn’t intellectually capable of the work required. At such times, I was frustrated that their default assumption was not that there might be something about me that they could address because they saw that I am like them, had the same curiosity as they did, simply needed someone, needed them, to care about me as they do about themselves. Nevertheless, I now understand what, at the time, they actually understood better than I did, namely, that their shortcomings with respect to mentoring me were about race, were a function of the larger racial politics, a function of the politics of representation and the definition of the Black exception produced in the society around them, a politics that continues to be produced today.
It was not realistic to expect students, peers, to be better at the conversation about racial equality than their parents and the communities from which they come. After all, I wasn’t savvy to the solutions to the racial hostility and indifference of those around me. What could I expect of other eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds? And I certainly couldn’t require the faculty to respond to what was perceived, by me, as a diffuse and often existential anxiety. Instead, I took the burden of the decision upon myself. I left Swarthmore for a semester, worked every day at my father’s store on 6th Street in San Francisco, and tried to find a solution to my own indifference to personal success on terms that I found antithetical to racial justice. When I returned to school in 1983, I had found an answer, one that didn’t require the approval of others, but was measured in my own desire for racial equality in the society.
posted by Utz
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