The Study of Racialism

http://chronicle.com/weekly/v53/i28/28b01001.htm
From the issue dated March 16, 2007


Not Black Enough
By GAYNELL GAVIN

Late in life, weary of practicing juvenile law, I complete a Ph.D. in English and become a visiting faculty member at Semi-Rural Midwest University — not its real name. While teaching at SRMU, I interview for a tenure-track position at a public, Midwestern research university. Let's call it the University of Generica. Unlike SRMU, UG offers potential for permanence, promotion, and retirement benefits.

At the appointed hour on an early March afternoon, I arrive at the search-committee chairman's office and say, "Hello, I'm Gaynell Gavin."

Mr. A stares and exclaims, "You're kidding me!" Given the abundance of academic-interview horror stories, I barely wonder about this cryptic comment. I'd heard recently of a search-committee chairman who took a colleague's hand after an interview and asked if she thought Willa Cather had ever had an orgasm. So, unfazed, I assure Mr. A that I would not kid him about my identity. Mr. A recovers, and we have a pleasant chat. He is tall, balding, with some sandy hair and a personable smile. Soon the deputy department chairman, Ms. B, arrives.

Ms. B has short gray hair and a direct manner. Given the importance of race to my ensuing narrative, I'll mention that both of these professors are phenotypically white. Ms. B is Jewish. I like her immediately, and her research on the Holocaust interests me. Over dinner at an Indian restaurant, we discuss the Nazis' success at concealing their sexual enslavement of Jewish women, and though Ms. B says that phenomenon is known among Holocaust scholars, we agree that it is not recognized generally in popular culture. An Asian-Indian search-committee member joins us. I am unsure how he is constructed racially in the United States — it gets hard to keep track of racial constructs — so I'll just say that Mr. C is brown, similar in color to my son. I like all three of these potential colleagues immensely.

When we return to the campus, phenotypically white search-committee member Mr. D joins us outside the writing classroom where I am to do my teaching demonstration. The class goes well: Students are diverse in age and ethnicity, and I can feel the students' engagement and that of my observers.

As he drives me to my motel, Mr. D, who is Belgian, comments on what a good group of students UG has and how well the teaching demonstration went. He continues, "I can't believe, though, what we put job candidates through now for this kind of job. You'd think we were paying more than very modest salaries." I reply that surely no one goes into the humanities in academe to get rich. Mr. D agrees but observes that, for many immigrant academics, the United States offers class mobility not available in their own countries. He gives himself and Mr. E, the phenotypically white British department chairman, as examples.

The next morning, I meet phenotypically black African search-committee member Ms. F for breakfast and a ride to the campus. She is a tall, attractive woman with dreadlocks, from Sierra Leone. She does a double take when I introduce myself in the lobby, but we enjoy our meal together. Back at her office, she introduces me to phenotypically black Somalian Mr. G, who has just finished his Ph.D. at UG and accepted a faculty position at another university. He escorts me to my meeting with the dean and associate dean of the college.

When we arrive in the dean's reception area, the phenotypically white associate dean emerges from his office, shakes Mr. G's hand, and, in a distinctly British accent says, "Oh, hello there. You're the new job candidate, are you?"

"No." Mr. G gestures toward me. "Ms. Gavin is the job candidate."

The befuddled associate dean shifts his gaze to me and says, "Oh, sorry, dear," extending his hand.

Is he sorry for his mistake or sorry that I'm the job candidate? I wonder how he could have made this mistake: Mr. G seems bright and perfectly nice, but he is still wearing his grad-student garb of ragged jeans, sweatshirt, and stocking cap, while I am dressed for success in a tailored black suit with an appropriately formal blouse. I take Associate Dean Sorry Dear's hand and assure him he need not be sorry. He escorts me into the office of the dean, Ms. I, a phenotypically black African-American.

She immediately puts me at ease, as we discuss shared research interests. I like her. But she dies unexpectedly a few days later. In the meantime, Somalian Mr. G reappears to whisk me off for my departmental presentation, which is well received, as are my responses to questions. Jewish Ms. B and Asian-Indian Mr. C are enthusiastic, as is the phenotypically white professor in whose class I did my teaching demonstration. After lunch it is time to meet with the department chairman and deputy chairman, British Mr. E and Jewish Ms. B. We sit around a small table, and the department chairman outlines a preliminary tenure plan. Then it is time for the day's last meeting with him and the search committee. Leaving to teach, Ms. B excuses herself.

Like Dean Sorry Dear, Mr. E is a chatty, smiley, gray-haired British gent. He and I move to a conference room with a long table. My hour here goes splendidly until almost the end, when Mr. E says, "I have one last question for you that you don't have to answer if you don't want to."

I go on high alert, maintaining external composure as alarm bells ring internally. What I do not say: I do have to answer if I want any chance of getting this job. What I do say: "Yes?"

Mr. E smiles benevolently. "With the exception of two women and two people of color, we are a department of nearly all white male faculty members at an institution with an ethnically diverse student body that includes a large number of African-American students."

What I do not say: Well, you white guys sat around hiring each other for decades, and you didn't consult me. Not a single one of the "people of color" you mention is African-American. Although I am clearly very well qualified, is it your plan to try fixing this mess at my expense, and are you asking me to help you feel OK about it?

Notably, Mr. E's reference to two women and two people of color equals not four individuals but three, since Ms. F is both a woman and a person of color. Mr. E is rolling along. "How do you feel about a nearly-all-white department teaching our diverse student body?"

In the silent but palpable tension that fills the room, I decide to tell the truth — not the whole truth, but the part my interlocutor wants to hear — so I reply, "I think it's an issue."

Mr. E continues in his benign British lilt, "Why do you say it's an issue?"

"I believe it is in the interests of a diverse student body to see diversity reflected among the faculty members."

Mr. E is beaming; search-committee members are not. Belgian Mr. D, who pointed out last evening the class mobility not available to himself and Mr. E in their own countries but attained in the United States, intervenes: "I want to thank the committee for struggling with this issue." He looks directly at me. "Further, I want to thank you for the courage and honesty of your answers."

I start to feel relief that this phase of the ordeal seems to be ending, but African Ms. F says: "I see you are very sensitive to issues of racial justice, but I have to tell you that you remind me of my missionary teacher in Sierra Leone — your skin, your eyes, your hair — my God, you even dress like she did. When I look at you, I just feel a huge disconnect!"

What I do not say: And what might your therapist say on this subject? Do you feel a huge disconnect when you look at the skin, eyes, and hair of your department chairman, whose country colonized yours, Mr. C's (India), mine (the United States), that of my Irish ancestors, and much of the rest of the world?

Ms. F races on, "Don't you think it's odd that we have no African-Americans in this department? I am not African-American. I am African." Her voice rises. "We try to recruit African-Americans, but it's even harder to retain them than to recruit them. There are so few in higher education that they get hired away. I've been on nine search committees, and I'm not going to be on any more."

What I do not say: Shouldn't we be talking about educational and other social policies that tend to ensure that few African-Americans make it into postsecondary education? What I do say: "I understand that this issue is difficult, but as an outsider, I am not in a position to give substantive guidance in this instance. You are the ones with decision-making authority, and you are the ones who must exercise that authority."

Asian-Indian Mr. C (one of the two "people of color" to whom the department chairman referred a few fateful minutes earlier) is sitting next to me. He leans forward a little and speaks to me: "You have shown nothing but integrity while you have been here, and it has moved me. Thank you." I appreciate his kind words but remain shocked as everyone — even African Ms. F — bids me a warm farewell. Might she forgive my resemblance to her missionary teacher?

Jewish Ms. B returns from teaching, blissfully unaware of the debacle she has missed. She walks me to my car, saying how glad she is that my visit went well. I consider throwing myself into her arms and sobbing but restrain myself.

As I drive 150 dazed miles back to the little apartment I rent, the surprise of the British department chairman and African Ms. F upon seeing me and Mr. Sorry Dear's mistake about my identity start to add up. In a country where, admittedly or not, white remains the norm, why would the search-committee members have presumed that I was black? I can only guess. Perhaps my recommendation from an African-American-studies director primed their expectations. Maybe they assumed that someone who does research on the construction of race and whose courses include African-American literature is black. Perhaps some of them (consciously or not) consider African-American literature inferior and cannot imagine a white person teaching it. Or maybe, as has been suggested to me, my name, Gaynell, "sounds black."

There are reasons I've been so dense. Before being invited to UG's campus, I mentioned being a member of a mixed-race family during a telephone interview, when I was asked whether I'm comfortable in an ethnically diverse environment. True, we didn't discuss my family's racial composition; but I did submit a published essay, required as part of my application materials, in which I identified myself as a white member of a mixed-race family, and — silly me — I figured some search-committee member would read it.

En route to my apartment, I call the man with whom I lived before moving to my current campus, and who is planning to move with me if I get the job at UG. Like Ms. B, he is a Jewish adult child of Holocaust survivors. After my tearful tale, he says, "I don't want to move hundreds of miles with my children to be with you in that job. And honey, you don't want that job."

"Yes, I do," I wail. "Things just got a little crazy at the end."

I call a friend, a professor who finds my story over the top even as academic horror stories go. "Look," she says, "it's good this stuff came up while you were there, so you could address it. They were obviously very comfortable with you. They think of you as an insider, as one of them already. Their inappropriateness is a hideously strange compliment. I think they'll offer you the job." She tries to lift my spirits by introducing a little round of our favorite game, Did You Say? "Did you say, I have octoroon grandchildren?"

For once, I am too dispirited even to play Did You Say? I respond literally. "In the postmodern bauble-ization of race, I have some value as a departmental diversity bauble because, in that blood quantum system, my grandchildren are quadroons; they should be even more impressive than octoroons, and my son is mulatto — now there's an endearing term."

I turn to my yoga-teaching sister. "Your problem," she says, "is that, with all your degrees, you never learned to lie. When the department chairman brought up race, you should have said, 'Well let me complicate that question.' Academics love to complicate everything. Then you should have said, 'My paternal great-grandfather was black. My research and writing explore what it means to be a blond, blue-eyed woman who appears white but is descended from a black grandparent, and, of course, under this country's traditional one-drop rule, I am black.' Then," my sister adds, "that Brit-boy department chairman... "

I interrupt, " ... would've dropped on his knees to kiss my shiny white heinie ..."

" ... and hired you on the spot," my sister concludes.

I do a small, informal, unscientific phone survey. A friend tells me that she was on a search committee when an interviewee for a faculty position in African-American studies identified herself as biracial. The search committee's attention was consumed in a covert attempt to determine her precise racial composition, and the applicant was pronounced by an omniscient search-committee member to be "white passing as black." A mixed-blood professor of Native American studies says that she always straightened her naturally curly hair while on the job market to "look more Indian." A Latina friend with coloring similar to mine — light hair, skin, and eyes — says it hurts her in the academic job market to be perceived as white, despite her Latina surname. A phenotypically Latina friend confirms that academic ethnic chic increased her marketability as long as she played by the rules of ghettoization. "My area was Romantic lit until my mentors convinced me to switch to Chicana lit to be sure I'd get a job," she reminds me. "It worked."

Another colleague reveals that he was urged by mentors to mention his slight American Indian ancestry in his application cover letter; he mentioned it as a factor contributing to his interest in ethnic American literatures. "My interview went great," he reports, "and the search-committee chairman is great, but we're sitting alone in his office, and he says, 'So, tell me more about your Native American heritage.' I say that although it has contributed to my scholarly interests, it is only one small part of my ancestry and life. The chairman says, 'Well, it's good we have that because without it, you're just another white guy.'"

A few weeks later, the chairman of the search committee calls to say that the death of their dean has slowed everything down, but that the hiring process is still moving forward. He tells me that the search committee was impressed with me, and that I should be hearing from them before the end of the month. But despite the committee chairman's reassuring message, I worry, because with the dean gone, Associate Dean Sorry Dear may be in charge.

Well into the following month, the search-committee chairman calls again to tell me that, although the committee had recommended me, an offer has been made to someone else.

I thank him like the good girl I've been taught to be. A week later, I write to the UG provost telling her that as a proponent of well-planned, well-implemented affirmative action for equal opportunity, I offer my experience, which might indicate room for improvement in UG's hiring practices. I do not mention a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling on academic admissions indicating that, while race may be one factor considered in admissions, it may not be the sole or overwhelmingly determinative factor, nor do I suggest to her that the same might apply to faculty hiring. In reply, the provost writes, "I am in receipt of your letter. I have passed it on to the new interim dean. Thank you for your interest."

I should have some dispassionate intellectual interest in the paradox of privilege and its loss, but my professional detachment fades when I look at a photo my son has sent. My 4-year-old granddaughter, wearing a bright pink skirt and rainbow-colored poncho, stands in a pair of gigantic high heels, smiling delightedly at her little brother. Dressed in only a diaper, he is laughing while trying on a pair of gigantic, multicolored flip-flops. With curly hair, and skin and eyes a shade lighter than her father's, my granddaughter might be considered visibly African-American, or at least fashionably "ethnic." Had she been a job applicant at UG, presumably her appearance would not have been the racial disappointment that mine was. Her little brother has lighter skin, green eyes, and blond hair, apparently similar to Ms. F's missionary teacher; but he carries the dimples and cleft in his chin of his father, his father's father, his paternal grandmother's father — generations of black American men.

I comfort myself with the thought that while initially my grandson might not fare well as a UG job applicant, he could make a statement about African-American paternal descent like my sister says I should have made — but he would not have to lie. Meanwhile, as immigrants to the country where black and white generations of my family were born, UG's British department chairman and associate dean have found for themselves the American dream. But with the skin, eye, and hair color with which I may have polluted my grandson, as a job applicant, would he be black enough for them? Trying to imagine him as an adult, it is hard for me to think of anything but the soft wisps of his hair against my face when his small head rests on my shoulder, sunlight filtered through his wheat-blond curls.

Gaynell Gavin is a writer living in Lincoln, Neb.

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Volume 53, Issue 28, Page B10