Stories for Chip by Nisi Shawl Read Free Book Online Page B

earlier.
    *Unbeknownst to Delany, he came to my rescue during the fall semester of 2000 at the University of Iowa. I was newly married, trapped in a particular way of thinking about mainstream literature, and taking a particularly intensive early twentieth century readings course in American fiction with a top professor, who I thought was tough, fair, and even likeable in his altruistic, colorblind way. The class had to read twenty influential texts in a fourteen-week semester. When you have to read Theodore Dreiser’s
An American Tragedy
(1925), an eight-hundred-fifty-six page naturalist novel, in the forty-eight hours between your Monday and Wednesday class meeting times while teaching two courses of your own, you know the class is tough. I must say that I tremendously enjoyed Dreiser’s book because of its influence on Richard Wright’s classic black social protest novel
Native Son
(1940).
    Nonetheless, I painfully recall the moment I discovered my professor was racist. A silver Ford Taurus had just backed into my wife’s raisin-pearl 1999 Honda Accord. A dear white friend and classmate of mine, who carpooled with me from the Emerald Court apartment complex for the class, made for the perfect witness as the police accident report was filed. I did not know that he would be witnessing two events on that day. Needless to say, we arrived late for class with the most valid of excuses. My friend was treated with respect upon entering, while I received a cold shoulder and an unnerving glare from this white professor. Bear in mind, I was the only black student in this particular class of fifteen. It made me extremely uneasy for the rest of the class period and reticent to participate, which was unusual, given my gregarious nature.
    Class was over when the moment of micro-aggression burst forth. While I was standing next to my friend, this particular professor had the temerity to say, “Never mind the car accident, Mr. Lavender.” (This was the only time I was ever called “Mr. Lavender” by an Iowa professor instead of “Isiah”—which was more typical of the campus’s laidback Midwestern atmosphere.) He continued, “I’m concerned with your insistence upon using reader response theory in your journals, whereas your peers are offering much more sophisticated arguments utilizing the likes of French and German philosophers such as Foucault and Derrida, as well as Nietzsche and Heidegger.” Reader response theory focuses on the individual reader and his/her experience of the text, whereas other literary theories focus on the form of the work or its content or the author or the period in which it is written, or any other number of esoteric ideas. This professor implied that I was not smart enough to apply more popular theories to texts such as post-structuralism, with its emphasis on the destabilized or decentered meanings of authors separated from their texts in order to investigate others sources (like readers, culture, class, politics, race, religion, gender, etc.) for value in the books at hand. His remarks were belittling to me, as if to imply that my level of education was on a ninth grade level like Richard Wright’s 3 —that my education was inadequate at best and that I didn’t belong at Iowa.
    Talk about a gut punch! This man utilized all the power and privilege granted him in everyday life by his white skin to reduce my intellect, to make me feel small, to humiliate me in front of my friend, and to alienate me from the program. And I am certain he was unware of the power of his words and the extent to which they harmed me because further classes went on as before, with the exception that I no longer participated in discussions. I no longer had the desire to try out my ideas in a roomful of my peers—a devastating thing for the intellectual growth of a budding scholar. I am definitely not Frederick Douglass, but he acted like the slave-breaker Mr.