A Stranger in the Village: Coming of Age in a White College

...And schools such as Howard, Morehouse, and Fisk selfconsciously produced Negro elites who behaved in much the same way as the whites I observe at the college...

...These symbols of intimate grouping and shared understandings are, of course, signs of fraternity...

...As the place where society reproduces itself, schools teach as much by example as by spoken precepts...

...In an innocent moment a year ago, I asked at a department meeting whether the chairman or her assistants tracked the work lives of the department's students...

...An important part of her paper argued that black students at the college decided for themselves whether or not to follow informal practices associated at the institution with blackness...

...THE BLACK professors to whom I speak ponder that question...

...It was an uncomfortable moment...

...They, I was firmly told, find work through parental business networks or school connections...

...The campus is built with granite quarried from pits that provided stone for the oldest and newest buildings on campus...

...Isolated in an obscure valley, the school and its surrounding village sometimes remain white with snow until late spring...

...In her intellectual excellence and her quirky individualism, this student represented a very impressive protest against the college's debilitating ideology of blackness...

...This understanding of blackness —shared by blacks and whites—justifies the alienation of blacks from the college's cultural centers, and explains what is widely perceived to be unequal levels of academic performance...

...I attended both defenses...

...The cheery confidence with which they speak just barely hides arrogance, underwritten at Educational Testing Services, Princeton, New Jersey...

...A black tenured member of this community, I often feel similarly isolated in this snowy retreat from the multicultural mainstream of American life...

...In the hard-edged arguments that increasingly fill the school's newspaper and politics, they test ideas, now giving liberal clichés those analytic twists by which the brightest youth always give their due to tradition...

...During the summer orientation, he harangued the black students about racial identity and their coming alienation at the college...

...Where, I sometimes wonder, could I model necessary strengths in an acceptable way to the black American students who are ultimately my people and my children...

...In the well-heeled achieving society of the college this consensual racism underlies a polite apartheid, a genteel separation between blacks and whites on the grounds of black deficiencies...

...Maarten, Bermuda, St...

...Coming onto campus, I see a parking lot full of new Jeep Cherokees and Nissan Pathfinders...

...Her English thesis was a study of literary genre in the slave narrative...

...Although we can define sickness, it is far harder to define health...

...Although they are from various American suburban high schools in Shaker Heights, Winnetka, Pacific Palisades, and Scarsdale, they are discovering a common social status in their shared taste for Volvos, alpine sweaters, and Swatch accessories...

...I HAVE DIRECTED many senior honors theses, but only one has been written by a black senior...

...They are, as they already realize, being socialized into the world of major brokerages, banks, public-relations firms, corporations, or the most competitive of business schools...

...Colleagues still unaware of his departure would approach me from behind and begin a discussion of Benin masks or kleptocracy in Zaire...

...He nods and laughs...

...And the college's pressures for upper-class conformity alienate some of my working-class white and upwardly mobile Asian students who find themselves outside the school's elitist norms...

...At my first faculty party, the black studies department was explained to me as the embodiment of the black students' worldview...

...A number of black students became interested in Afrocentric religion...

...This is another way of saying that this school cannot produce the kind of elite for black America that it produces for white America...

...THE SCHOOL'S taken-for-granted social ease is consequently threatened in an increasingly diverse and professional academic world...

...Later, in a course on the origins of the American novel, I found her to be as brilliant and dialectical as ever...

...At a critical point in the defense, she argued that she did not see herself as black, and attributed her academic success partially to this view...

...A few weeks later, two or three white upperclass students in a candid classroom discussion told me that rich youths like themselves will cease to attend the college if it becomes any less white and any more politically correct...

...The most conspicuous fruit of the college's integrated life is informal segregation, all the more insidious for its tacit ideology of race...

...Only when pressed do they admit that they are second-, DISSENT / Summer 1998 • 79 third-, or even, in some cases, fourth-generation West Indian...

...And my odd success has had odder consequences...

...Among endless identity confusions —mostly of others but sometimes my own—I wrote my first articles, finished a book, and set out upon a career...

...I now teach five in the relative luxury of a school that affords me a computer and some funds for my scholarly work...

...Although the school's black students are on the high end of test scores for African-American youth, their marks still leave them below the school average...

...A few have recently become theologians...

...I first encountered this woman in my American literature survey class...

...As I begin a lecture on Jonathan Edwards I peer into an audience of deep-brown and rose tans acquired in St...

...This woman wrote a senior thesis with me in English as well as a senior honors paper in African-American studies...

...He was a charismatic figure with a small core of young black men around him...

...Many faculty and their significant others of whatever sex would no longer be acceptable in the houses of older professors who despise their ethnic background and social provenance, not to mention their intellectual, academic, sexual, or institutional politics...

...But her resemblance to them ended there...

...IT IS CLEAR from this essay that I am not much of a role model...

...And part of her paper's power stemmed from the fact that it clarified an important trend...

...The American upper class is now a multi-ethnic meritocratic elite...

...In the fifties and sixties, black college students were predictably in the vanguard of a civil rights movement that demanded full participation in the American society and polity...

...The chapel's hymns and polished pews seem to represent those internalized moral and spiritual disciplines that the American WASP elite once taught its children in a (relatively) more homogeneous and secure setting...

...African-American intellectuals have always resisted this country's consensual definitions of blackness in order to discover a mastery that is the same in all academic places and for all people...

...These students move from a world of leisure into the corporate world of work in grooves so sure that their public mention is naive...

...And again the paper seemed to be engaged with this literature in not only an analytic but also an introspective way...

...And yet, what are these students here for, if not entrance into that elite...

...As I watched my white students move through the predictable professional tracks, I realized that despite surface appearances, the school's leisurely life its high valuation of intimate community—has been reproduced in the life of African-American students...

...She may have been a first-year student, but her literary insights and analytic prowess stunned not only me but also the white fraternity boys whose baseballcapped heads jerked back and forth as they took in her points...

...They drew upon the first two years' rich study in the humanities and analytical skills of reading, writing, and argument...

...Despite the seriousness of these goals, they folDISSENT / Summer 1998 75 low the path with a certain ease...

...By less white and more politically correct, I take them to mean racially "integrated...

...They have for the most part adopted the faculty's upper-class academic life-style...

...Yet things have fallen into place for them too...

...78 DISSENT / Summer 1998 The climate of this college encourages black students to see the meaning of their blackness as estrangement from upper-class American life...

...At the same time, the white students have a new sense of class identity that I have not seen before...

...And the explanations, it• seems, must be plausible to blacks, whites, and everyone else involved...

...In the first floor of the administration building, the admissions and development officers are dressed in prepschool elegance that disappeared nearly twenty years ago at the places to which their loafers and button-down-collar shirts refer...

...Surely my white students' most visible day-to-day object lesson must be 76 DISSENT / Summer 1998 the marginality of black Americans to the ongoing life of their upper-class world...

...Few black people stay here, much less acquire tenure...

...Although he and his friends would have never used these words, they were involved in the task of elite ego formation...

...Walking into the classroom I step upon discarded J. Crew and Lands' End catalogs...

...My recent advanced classes in American literature, literary history, and culture have had no blacks at all...

...She wore the striped knit caps that were common to the West Indian cultural nationalists in the college at the time...

...The view of the world that has sustained me for the last ten years does not begin with that assumption...

...Two springs ago one sensed this persisting sensibility in the great spectacle that surrounded the address of Cornel West—and a year before, Jesse Jackson...

...At one time the year's new faculty cohort, accompanied by its wives, went each Sunday to the home of an older settled and usually tenured professor...

...Kitts, or perhaps the Swiss ski slopes...

...Black students have also cultivated the college's value of "community," although they are often bound by symbols of alienation...

...I appreciate this relative anonymity and have exploited it well...

...To the best black students, I can say that intellectual rigor is the same in all places...

...For two years I was relentlessly confused with a recently fired—he was refused tenure— African colleague...

...For when she opened her mouth to comment on Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards, or Ralph Waldo Emerson, she spoke in the high analytic mode that one expects from a senior philosophy major in a more intellectually self-conscious environment than obtains in this school...

...PHILLIP M. RICHARDS was a Fellow at the Institute on Race and Social Division and a visiting associate professor in the English department of Boston University during the academic year 1997-1998...

...The faculty displays a similar "diversity...

...Most of the black students I encounter speak of themselves as Jamaican, Barbadian, or Guyanese...

...Middle-class African Americans in the world of the twenties, thirties, and forties often went to predominantly black colleges...

...With African students, too—despite their relatively small numbers— they seem to have the ability to ward off the most debilitating effects of the black countersocialization...

...In my frozen leisure, I rediscovered the texts of my profession...

...I therefore view my surroundings with an outsider's detachment...

...I do not cite these details gratuitously: my students are being educated as much by the consumer culture as by anything I say about Puritanism...

...Notions of the social construction of race are now legion in the social sciences and humanities, and her paper seemed to be exactly the highly reflective use of this concept that one might want from a bright student...

...I remark to a black colleague that it is apparently a difficult thing to be African-American in this college...

...Such individualism is even less common within the large white population of the college itself, until recently a gray-flannel liberal arts college for the average and slightly above average students of the East Coast WASP elite...

...And in the leisure afforded by their absence, I had time to write and to work with a series of excellent white students who, perhaps predictably, went on to excellent graduate or professional schools...

...They appear understandably in a school that has a row of white million-dollar fraternity houses down the hill...

...Some went to graduate school in the liberal arts disciplines and the professions...

...Yet professors hired in the last ten years have had to conform to far stricter standards for publication than earlier faculty, who often pursued leisurely lives as gentlemen-teachers...

...Her very presence meant that she paid little attention to the black diatribe against my courses...

...8o DISSENT / Summer 1998...

...There is also a growing academic literature, both ethnographic and quantitative, that suggests that black students make precisely this kind of choice in many of the nation's lower-class predominantly urban high schools...

...So uncommon are other African Americans here, that the appearance of a clerk of color in the grocery store is matter for a week's conversation at the family dinner table...

...Thereafter, the black students dropped me...

...The alienation of black students at white campuses is, as a growing scholarship makes clear, a broad national problem...

...They, too, come for success —although I suspect that they are served less well than the whites by the institution's casualness in tracking its graduates' work lives...

...They were often better students of black literature than African Americans because of their self-consciously cultivated ability to detach themselves from a text and to analyze it...

...The school's most successful black students explicitly reject the consensual black ideology and its discourse of de facto segregation...

...Eight or nine years ago, a number of AfricanAmerican students—again, oddly, in the spirit of the college—turned to religion...

...For some reason, I fell afoul of this apparently shared understanding early on...

...Secure in an upper-class entitlement where privilege elides with merit, they dwell in a security that the revivalists in this valley nearly two hundred years ago could not shake...

...Her AfricanAmerican studies paper concerned her experience as a black Caribbean student at the college...

...THROUGH THE years, I myself drifted from the teaching of African-American studies to courses on Colonial and nineteenthcentury American literature or work in literary history...

...However, this fraternity cultivates an oppositional stance to values of social mobility at the heart of American elite life...

...Excluded by the only intellectual criteria that most students acknowledge, the AfricanAmerican students are widely considered to be interlopers...

...They are nowhere to be seen with the clumps of trysting, flirting white students and African-American athletes...

...The image of the supercilious rich white student at my college is not so different from what my lower-class parents might have disparaged as the arrogant frat boy headed for law or medical school at Howard University...

...I am judged by the world around me as a role model for black students, in spite of my better judgment...

...They cultivated a piety that represented both an intellectual and psychological response to their institutional experience here...

...I was welcomed to my department by a small group of colleagues who proudly retailed their entrance into what was once a WASP preserve from lower-class Greek, Jewish, German, and Slavic families...

...The college's backward-looking symbolism suggests that more than institutionalized ease has been lost...

...This is the kind of high intellectual play that the faculty wants from its best students— the ability to set forth and extend a provocative statement of one's point of view...

...To be sure, a number were self-conscious liberals, involved in the school's peace studies or ecology theme houses, headed for graduate schools, work in nonprofit organizations, or bohemian life after graduation...

...Groups of estranged minorities are often close-knit and sectarian at places such as this...

...There a group of anonymous black men clad in the short, heavypatched jackets then favored by lower-class New York blacks mimed the disjointed finger gestures flaunted by urban gangs...

...There—years before the official checkpoints of third-year review and tenure consideration—new faculty members and their spouses were weighed in the social, political, and intellectual balance of acceptability as prospective members of this community...

...They do this whatever the larger trends in the American society as a whole—a society from which this albeit diverse elite increasingly isolates itself for the tasks of social reproduction...

...They—regardless of actual American citizenship —tend overwhelmingly to identify themselves as Caribbean...

...An excellent upper-class white student who is taking a double major in English and political science has told me that she hopes to become a financial vice president in the media—for it is, she asserts, the "money people" who control ideas in America's public life...

...Intellectuals are not governed by the racial codes of social cliques, but by the language of the great texts...

...Increasingly my white and Asian students are conservative...

...In its most conspicuous public spaces the school's student body pointedly displays the deepest social inequalities of American society...

...A few years ago I noticed that a similar picture appeared in the college yearbook...

...And I must—my memory is not clear on this—not have fully approved of some of the extravagant interpretations that I was hearing of Langston Hughes's blues poetry in my African-American literature class...

...I could also pose another...

...It is not surprising that AfricanAmerican students--already marginalized by social class and test scores—would appropriate a deeply consensual image of blackness that appeals to white racist prejudice and youthful black alienation...

...They brought to my classes a variant of the white academic culture that gives the school its reputation...

...Not surprisingly a wistful desire for religious community now pervades the school's most conspicuous and popular mass events...

...The freewheeling individualism by which the rare black makes a place here is especially uncommon among middle-class African Americans...

...Schedules and careers are loosely managed, the protocols of academic life having been passed down to them from older friends or siblings, guidance counselors, relatives, parental business contacts, and a whole network of outside sophistication far more influential than the advice of any academic might be...

...The white upper-class exterior of the college's world, however, belies increasingly disruptive changes in the last decade...

...There with a young family, I finished a difficult dissertation and taught seven courses a year...

...They not only exist outside the school's norms, but they often appropriate those norms in ways that only place them further outside...

...Let me try now to give this problem a local formulation and definition...

...A number were drawn to a staff member who taught courses in African-American religion and directed the school's Higher Education Opportunity Program...

...Schools such as Howard, Hampton, Fisk, and Morehouse produced the first generation of black professors in the white academy: Allison Davis, Charles Nichols, John Hope Franklin, John Davis, Martin Kilson, Saunders Bedding, Preston Williams, and Kenneth Clark...

...At the time, the majority of African-American students I encountered were taken up with the Afrocentric study of black religions...

...The examining group was not altogether surprised at her argument for a number of reasons...

...Like the DISSENT / Summer 1998 77 white students, blacks, too, come here for the school's reputedly cozy community life, although they rarely end up in the fraternities, sororities, and clubs...

...This segregation not only explains, but also justifies, patterns of AfricanAmerican student withdrawal, cathartic militancy, or religious absorption...

...Instead, they might be said to undergo a countersocialization...

...And my classes include the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Slavic, Irish, Jewish, and Italian immigrants as well as the traditional—but declining—scions of WASP wealth...

...My previous teaching assignment was in a tiny state university on the tornado plain of northeast Arkansas...

...Like other members of the village, we are known by face...

...My students and aides tend now to be wholly white and Asian...

...however, our race gives our visibility a strange twist...

...On the wall of the African-American cultural center is a picture of the center's late-sixties founders, dressed menacingly in leather coats...

...So pervasive is the mystique of upper-class whiteness in the campus that I wonder whether they themselves distinguish the West Indians from the African Americans who came from such a different ambience...

...I suspect that those students who identify with real or attenuated West Indian choices are seeking a path out of the social, political, and cultural cul de sac that African-American blackness represents at the college...

...White professors I know inevitably come up with the names of African and West Indian students when challenged to produce examples of black success...

...No one can give African-American students a rationale for cosmopolitan intellectual life that is not deeply painful—possessed of no reward beyond its own intrinsic satisfactions...

...This marginal position has to be explained in a school that values community and tolerates increasing ethnic difference among nonblacks...

...It is thus no surprise that intellectual excellence is the only resistance to this racism, which now thrives in the integrated world...

...Huddled at their own tables in the dining hall—increasingly segregated by sex— these black students encounter the central reality of their college lives: their superfluousness to the lives of an increasingly diverse American elite...

...I see only a small group of West Indian, African, and perhaps a few Asian students when I exit the library at eleven and twelve at night...

...The rigorous intellectual self-definitions that one encountered in the earlier generation of the black intelligentsia in the sixties and seventies had often been forged at Lincoln, Howard, and Morehouse...

...They came to Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright without the crippling feelings of alienation, inevitably experienced by an outsider in a closely knit community...

...That is one way to think of the issue...

...For reasons I have already suggested, most African-American students miss the intellectual culture of the school's mainstream majors, its newspapers, and student-government associations...

...Conversations with faculty turn upon the convention that AfricanAmerican students are black in the sense that they are outside of the school's intellectual and cultural world...

...As the college's taken-for-granted rituals of solidarity have eroded, its vaunted world of homogeneous, comfortable society has been displaced to nostalgic symbols whose meaning often escapes the newcomer...

...Most of my students, even in the advanced African-American literature seminars, were white...

...things fall into place for our students...

...For a while the year's first convocation carried the weight of the school's Baptist heritage: its promised world of religious community...

...At their best, these students are still remarkably adept...

...Despite relatively small resources, Howard and other black colleges continued to provide an overwhelming majority of the black students entering graduate schools in the professions or arts and sciences...

...The West Indian students have established their own student organizations...

...The black students are coiffed in shrublike Afros and staring into the camera with hard, intimidating looks designed for a soft, upperclass white man—perhaps a roommate's stockbroker father from Scarsdale—who I am sure will never set foot in this place...

...In the crowds of students pressing for tickets, one felt this new-moneyed elite's deep attraction to the now lost values of a teacherly religious community...

...For better or worse, my experience has plunged me into the white academic culture of the school...

...The students, who are hard working and well rounded, come to the college, they tell me, expecting a friendly community of like-minded people...

...This student body, however white, is by the school's traditional standards a diverse lot...

...This procedure has now, of course, been discontinued...