Posting a Photo of Herself in a Hijab Caused an Uproar. She Doesn’t Regret It.

Alyssa Schukar for The Chronicle

Larycia A. Hawkins has no regrets — even though she’s still smarting from the consequences.

In December 2015, Hawkins, then an associate professor of political science at Wheaton College in Illinois, posted a photo of herself wearing a hijab on Facebook. Though she is Christian, Hawkins wrote that she stood in solidarity with Muslims because they are also “people of the book” and they worship “the same God.”

Her gesture followed what seemed to be an uptick in anti-Muslim sentiment. After a terror attack left 14 people dead in San Bernardino, Calif., the presidential candidate Donald J. Trump called for a Muslim travel ban. Jerry Falwell Jr., Liberty University’s president, said at a convocation, “I’ve always thought that if more good people had concealed-carry permits, then we could end those Muslims before they walked in.”

Hawkins wrote her post and went to bed. What she didn’t see coming was the intense backlash, including from her own institution. Wheaton, a Christian college, placed Hawkins on administrative leave, then began formal proceedings to terminate her employment. Eventually, Hawkins reached an agreement with the college to part ways. She’s now an assistant professor of religious studies, with an associated appointment in the politics department, at the University of Virginia.

A documentary about the controversy, Same God, is airing this month on PBS. Hawkins spoke this week with The Chronicle about the post, its aftermath, and why she’s worried about what’s happening on college campuses. This article has been edited for clarity and brevity.

What was the environment at Wheaton like for you before the post?

It was my first academic job. I was excited that I could challenge students on a personal level to think about what does it mean to pursue justice as a person whose perspective is informed by a religious system that centers the most vulnerable in our communities.

What was difficult was a sense of apprehension, perhaps, that some of the classes that I was planning to teach might stir the pot. One of the first courses I taught was called “Race and the Politics of Welfare.” I remember being told, “We’re not going to add that to the catalog. We’re going to run it as an experimental course. Because we’re not sure that that’s going to fly here.” It became one of my most popular classes.

Around 2010, I proposed teaching a course called “Race and the Obama Presidency.” A colleague said, “I’m not sure that we can fill that class.” I remember my jaw just being on the ground. This is what I do. This is my expertise. It was just that sense of unexpected pushback about courses that are not only timely but fit that credo of relevance that was very important to me.

Have you reflected on the day you wrote that Facebook post? Would you have done anything differently?

I get asked a lot whether I would have done anything differently. And the answer is no. I posted it from the perspective of saying, “This is who I am and who I want to be.” It was an invitation for us to press into our humanity at the time when candidate Donald Trump had just announced that he’d enact the Muslim ban if he became president. That’s what had happened two or three days before.

I like to say, “The writing was on the wall.” The question is, when the writing’s on the wall, do we have the eyes to see, ears to hear, and how does that change us? Does it move us? It’s easy to become dulled to the happenings and pretend that they’re far away. It was all very close in December of 2015.

I don’t regret the Facebook post. I don’t regret that choice of embodied solidarity. Therefore I can’t regret the consequences, right? I was willing to take the consequences. Even if it was a difficult journey. Even if there are still consequences that flow from that initial decision.

Tell me about the consequences.

Where do I begin? I suppose two things. One would be loss. A second thing would be limbo. Like I said, Wheaton was a difficult place to be a black woman. But Wheaton was also a place where I found my voice as an academic. Every day that I get to teach before students is a day of hopefulness. I don’t believe the children are the future, in the words of Whitney Houston. I believe the children are our now. I learn from them every day. But I lost that. I lost my kids, right? I lament that loss.

I lost colleagues. I created a program. I lost that. I lost friendships. Some of the students who I mentored the most, I’ve never heard from again. That’s glaring when you don’t hear from certain people.

There’s the limbo of being back and forth between Charlottesville and Chicago for three years. It was traumatizing to be back in the classroom. I didn’t want to teach too many classes because I thought, “What if I break down? What if I start teaching and all of this trauma comes out?” I smile as I say that, but I had no clue.

I had to ease my way back in. I was an adjunct for a year, which is another form of embodied solidarity. Shoutout to my contingent faculty. Now, being at the University of Virginia, in a program that has embraced me, those things feel amazing. But I still don’t have an office that has my name on it. I’m still in limbo. I say that as someone who’s very grateful to have a place.

I’ve lost financially. Living between two places is expensive. Psychologically, I could not let go of my Chicago home. It took me three years. I just moved this summer. Most of my things are in storage. I live in a small basement studio. So I still don’t have a home, even though I’ve gained a home in Charlottesville, Va. I don’t have a place that’s Larycia’s.

It just looks different. My life looks very different. So I’m adjusting. I brought my KitchenAid mixer because I was like, “Dammit, I’m going to bake cakes again.” I’m trying to regain that sense of Larycia the professor who loves to have all of her classes to her house and bake them a cake and cook dinner for them. Because that’s who I am. In the meantime, I’ve accommodated. I take them to a local restaurant.

There are aspects of the academy that I think are beautiful and brilliant and aspects that replicate the worst parts of the neoliberal system. It’s about who you know. It’s about your pedigree. It’s all about the money. It’s about the Benjamins. Academia is no different than any other institution on Wall Street, in that way.

To be faced with those ugly sides means that I embody the contradictions. The ivory tower is in many ways an iron cage. So I try to be honest about those contradictions as I live them and not become too comfortable with my privilege.

You’re now at the University of Virginia after being the first tenured African American woman at Wheaton. Is it different, as a black woman, existing at an evangelical versus a secular university?

Wheaton looks and runs just like any other university except that you have chapel three times a week and professors are expected to be spiritual mentors, inside or outside the classroom. Those aspects I literally love. Whatever setting I was going to end up in, I planned to make that part of my persona as a professor.

But being a black woman in that context also meant that my body was fully a lightning rod, a site of active resistance, a site of active contestation. When issues would arise on campus that had anything to do with race, gender, sexuality, class, I was expected to be an expert on all of those things. To speak on panels. To speak in specific hairy situations. And that was not what I was paid to do, necessarily. Yes, there were ways I wanted to serve the community, but very quickly, as many women and people of color and LGBTQ faculty or differently abled faculty find out, you have an additional burden.

My own race and gender operated, in some ways, to undermine my own scholarship. In some ways, that’s my fault, and in some ways, it’s the system. It’s hard to be that body, the voice that no one wants to hear. But that’s also very in line with the black-church tradition that I grew up in, to be a prophetic voice, to speak truth to power.

Have you watched similar types of things that happened to you happen to other faculty members?

Yes. Some of them are at religious institutions. At least one is at a major state institution. Increasingly, folks in the natural sciences are being called upon to think about how to integrate broader social lessons into their lessons. The gen-ed curriculum is increasingly revolving around big questions rather than take a stats class and check a box.

I think we’re at a time in higher ed where some of those directives, those lines, are being crossed already. The question is, “Are we ready as an academy to welcome some of those changes?” What can very easily happen is a kind of Gestapo forming around content at universities where you might not expect it. That sounds preposterous and far-fetched, but I don’t think we’re actually very far away from that, given what we’ve seen with speech on campuses.

There’s already policing of content happening. We can go down the list from people on the right to people on the left who aren’t welcome on certain kinds of campuses. I foresee a day in the academy where this is going to come to a head in a very ugly way. If we can anticipate that and begin to press into those conversations and questions right now, I think we’re better off.

Emma Pettit is a staff reporter at The Chronicle. Follow her on Twitter @EmmaJanePettit, or email her at emma.pettit@chronicle.com.