{"id":1397,"date":"2004-02-29T11:34:55","date_gmt":"2004-02-29T15:34:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/nateptest\/2004\/02\/29\/brown-student\/"},"modified":"2004-02-29T11:34:55","modified_gmt":"2004-02-29T15:34:55","slug":"brown-student","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/2004\/02\/29\/brown-student\/","title":{"rendered":"“Brown” student"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

So I had this interaction with a student the other day that was kind of weird.  Let me set it up for  you.<\/p>\n

Last week (about 10 days ago) was the first time I had all of my
\nofficial new students in my sections.  So I had a list of names
\nand people with those names showed up for 90 minutes in my
\npresence.  There were 30 of them, and I got to know them pretty
\nmuch if they piped up and spoke a few times.<\/p>\n

This is pretty normal — when I get 30 or 50 new people in my life, I
\ntend to remember the ones in my line of vision or who make themselves
\nnoticed by talking.  I get to know all of the students after a
\ncouple of weeks, after I’ve had a chance to figure out section dynamics
\na bit.<\/p>\n

So this student came up to me after class the other day, asking some
\nadvising questions (I’m also an undergraduate adviser in the
\ndepartment).  I worked at answering them, and then, as they had
\nsome relevance for the course I am teaching in, I asked her, “Who is
\nyour teaching assistant?”<\/p>\n

“You are,” she replied.<\/p>\n

“I’m sorry,” I said.  “I didn’t remember you for sure, and I
\ndidn’t want to make a mistake in assuming you were one of my students.”<\/p>\n

“I’m not surprised that you forgot me.  I’m brown, after all.”<\/p>\n

I should interject here that the student in question has the complexion
\nof someone whose ethnic background is Latin American.  Her name is
\nalso a fairly common Hispanic first name for women, and her surname is
\ndefinitely Latino.  Most of which doesn’t register for me,
\nespecially in the deparate attempt of the first weeks of class to just
\nconnect
\nnames with faces; I’m just trying to figure out who a student is, not
\nthe whole back story.<\/p>\n

“What do you mean?” I asked, somewhat taken aback to be accused of racial discrimination so brazenly.<\/p>\n

“I’ve just had other TFs who can’t remember who I am because I’m
\nbrown.  There was one who remembered everyone in the class except
\nme.  There was one black girl, and he remembered her name. 
\nHe remembered the names of all the Asian people….”<\/p>\n

“Well,” I noted, “it’s probably more that you didn’t speak up much in
\nclass the one time we’ve met so far.  I just got 30 of you, and I
\nhaven’t memorized all of your faces and names yet, but I do tend to
\nremember the students who participate in our discussions.  As for
\nbeing brown, I’m from California and have taught for a number of years
\nthere, where I had plenty of brown students, and yellow students, and
\nwhite students, and black students, so I doubt it had anything to do
\nwith your being brown.  Probably that you didn’t speak up much.”<\/p>\n

“I guess so.  It’s just that I’ve had TFs who didn’t remember me because I’m brown.”<\/p>\n

And then we went on to discuss her advising question.<\/p>\n

A few notes here.  I find the blindness to her own
\ndiscriminatory biases kind of surprising.  She seems to imply that
\nAsian students, for example, are all the same, as a way of highlighting
\nthe overt discrimination that she encountered — if they are all the
\nsame or look it or something, and the teacher remembers their names,
\nthen it must really be discrimination that the one brown person didn’t
\nget noticed.  Also, she seems to assume that I am just some
\nbrown-haired white guy, without knowing the larger facts of my life,
\ni.e., that I also belong to a minority group.  If we wanted to
\nplay the victimology game here, I’ve got more claim in that regard than
\nshe does, even if I am a white guy.  But I’m not interested in
\nthat game, because it’s not productive to my life as an individual
\ntrying to grow into a certain sort of fullness and I don’t think it’s
\nthe basis of an effective, engaged politics.<\/p>\n

I mentioned this to my advisor afterward, and her reaction was more
\nindignant than mine.  “I would have told her, ‘You don’t want to
\ngo there,'” she said.  And part of me wanted to do that.  But
\nI’m not senior faculty with tenure, first off.  Second, I wanted
\nmy student to understand that my non-recognition of who she was was
\npredicated on her less-than-stellar academic performance than anything
\nelse.  There were better alternative explanations than that I
\ndiscriminated against her because of her ethnicity.<\/p>\n

Now, this student has prejudiced me against her in a worse way. 
\nI’m aware that she tends to leap toward certain explanations, and that
\nher style tends to the combative, prejudicial, and negatively assumptive.  Which
\nleaves a bad taste in my mouth in dealing with her. But I will also
\nprobably target my teaching to take out those foundations from under
\nher and get her thinking rather than emotionally reacting.<\/p>\n

I’d be interested to hear how others would have reacted.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So I had this interaction with a student the other day that was kind of weird.  Let me set it up for  you. Last week (about 10 days ago) was the first time I had all of my official new students in my sections.  So I had a list of names and people with those […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":709,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[44],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1397","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ivorytower"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5G3PH-mx","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1397","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/709"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1397"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1397\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1397"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1397"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1397"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}