Teaching, and Learning, Racial Sensitivity

A few years back, a faculty colleague, after expressing concern that his puppies would develop racist tendencies for lack of exposure to minorities, asked if he could bring the dogs to my house to play with my two sons, ages 1 and 3. My children -- like their parents and unlike most everyone else at the college and in our town -- are of the Negro persuasion.

I declined the request. “My boys are afraid of dogs,” I explained. If he knew of any racially deprived felines, I told him, he should let me know.

When I casually mentioned the exchange to minority faculty members, some of them retold it to me, putting themselves in my shoes and performing a number of aggressive acts against my colleague.

The white faculty members I told did not put themselves in my shoes. Many accused me of lying. That’s because the puppies’ owner, who has since left the college, decided to deny -- vehemently -- that our conversation had ever taken place. To remind him that it had, I taped to my office door a photograph from the 1960s Civil Rights movement: a black male leaning just beyond the reach of a German sheperd that is being restrained by a white police officer. Beneath the photograph I wrote: “Don’t let this happen to you. Teach your dogs racial sensitivity.”

“Was that necessary?” an administrator asked me.

I assured her it was.

About a month after that incident, I had another interesting encounter with a different white colleague, this time while in the corridor outside my office.

“Off to the pool?” I had inquired, motioning toward his large duffel bag. He was a thin man, very fit-looking. I had taken him to be a swimmer.

“Basketball,” he corrected me.

“Oh? Where do you play?”

“Over in the campus gym.”

“Open shoot-around?” I asked. “Or is there a league?”

“Actually, some of the faculty get together a few times a week to play.”

I nodded and wished him a good game. He thanked me and walked away. I went into my office and sat at the computer. When I looked up a moment later, he was standing at my door.

“I would have invited you to play, I just didn’t, um, get around to it.”

Before I could respond, he left again. But he came right back. “I didn’t even know whether or not you played.”

I smiled and said, “I’m a black male from Chicago’s inner city. Of course I got game!” Actually, I did not have game. From the age of 5, I had failed to make every basketball team I had ever tried out for, except the teen league run by my church, which had a benevolent, no-cut policy. But I had always wanted to say, “I got game!” to someone who might believe me.

Red in the face now, he again hurried away. I waited for him to return. When he did, he looked pretty shaken up. He apologized.

“For?” I asked.

“Well, it’s just that I wanted to ask you to play, but I didn’t want you to think I’d singled you out because you’re black. That could be considered racist.”

“True,” I said. “And it could also be considered racist not to ask me because I’m black.”

“You’re right, you’re right.” He lowered and shook his head, then looked up again. “I’ve just felt awful every time I see you. I feel awful even talking with you about it now.”

But he should not have. When blacks integrate predominantly white institutions like academe, racial incidents are bound to occur, but they are usually sparked by innocent gaffes rather than ill will. My former colleague with the puppies was, in his own unique way, simply trying to befriend me. Things got a little tricky when, instead of just admitting that, he accused me of fabricating our encounter.

And that’s why I so appreciated the second incident; my colleague’s honesty resulted in an open conversation about race. After we were done talking, I put no photograph on my door. Instead, I went to the campus gym.

There were a dozen white men already there when I arrived, most of them, I was pleased to see, feeble-looking and elderly. As I approached the court, I shot an imaginary ball toward the basket. “Let’s see who in here’s got some game!” I yelled.

And then I proceeded to be trounced. While I lay on the floor trying to breathe, I received looks from the players that seemed a mixture of suspicion and curiosity, as if I were some kind of fraud, not the genuine article. I had seen that look in academe many times before.

The first time was from Lenny Wilkins. Lenny was my roommate when I was an undergraduate at a large, predominantly white university in the Midwest. He had spent the first 18 years of his life in rural farmland so removed from integration that he had not met a black person before I walked into our dorm room. He confessed that several months later, but I had surmised it right off, based on the way his eyes widened when he first saw me, the panicky quiver in his voice when he told me his name, and how he had sat on his bed very quietly watching me unpack.

Things were strained at first.

Lenny was nervous in my presence, while I, on the other hand, did not want to be in a dorm room with a nervous white farmer, or with anyone else for that matter, because, being an older, nontraditional student, I did not want to be in the dorms.

Unfortunately I had transferred to the university from my junior college too late to find off-campus housing, and so this was a necessary arrangement. In time, Lenny and I learned to accept our differences and each other, so much so that one night, three months into our cohabitation and a few bottles into a six-pack of beer, he said, “You’re the first colored person I’ve ever known.”

“I prefer ‘black,’” I said, “to ‘colored.’”

“You do?”

I nodded. “But that’s not true for all of us. Some of us like to be called ‘African American.’ ‘Negro’ was popular for a while, but not so much these days. I’m thinking of bringing it back.”

“See?” Lenny said sadly. “That’s what I mean. I don’t know anything about the colored race.”

Lenny was sitting on his bed and I was sitting on mine. They were positioned like an L, only mine was high in the air, resting on stilts. The beds had been stacked one directly above the other, but neither of us had felt comfortable with that.

“I was a little afraid of you at first,” he confessed. “I mean, I didn’t think you were a murderer or anything. I’d just been told that colored people were, you know, different from white people.”

“How so?”

“Well, that you love fried chicken.”

I laughed. “And watermelon?”

“Yes!” He laughed, too, before adding, “And that you have little tails.”

“Pardon?”

“Little tails.” He held up his hands, maybe a foot apart. Neither of us spoke for a long time. And then, almost inaudibly, he asked, “Is it true?”

I climbed down from my bed and mooned him.

“Was that called for?” he asked.

I assured him it was.

Or so it seemed at the time. But not long afterward, I came to understand that it was not my best moment, just as I have come to see that putting the photograph on my office door was not either. Both my college roommate and my former faculty colleague were groping their way toward some new racial understanding, and if I could have contained my frustration a little better, I might have been a more effective escort as they made their important journey.

I am on that important journey, too. We all are. And in those instances when we veer from the correct path, when we momentarily lose our way, the thing to do is to admit it and to speak truthfully about our imperfections and failings, just as my basketball-playing colleague did.

In other words, when dealing with the complicated subject of race relations, saying “I got game!” will take you only so far.