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My Time Among the Whites

Page 12

by Jennine Capó Crucet


  What finally sold me on the house was not the custom antique tub (though it is an amazing tub), but the fact that so many of the rooms were already painted teal—a color that makes me think of home. I live in it with a man I love who, like me, grew up in Miami, and because he is also a writer, the four bedrooms get put to use. We each have a study to write in, and the extra room is filled floor-to-ceiling with a couple thousand books. It’s a library and a guestroom, and to our surprise and delight, we have visitors often enough that we have them sign a guestbook; we want a record of the fates this house might nudge.

  Last summer, we planted a garden and put the tomatoes way too close together; we made notes for next year. Last fall, to save money, we sanded, stained, and painted the new staircase the carpenter built when the original one wore out. And last winter, our heating bill was outrageous because we kept the house Florida-warm.

  We call the place the Miami Embassy. For now, it’s home.

  IMAGINE ME HERE, OR HOW I BECAME A PROFESSOR

  The short answer is: By Accident. That’s what I usually say, the quickest version of the story I tell most often when asked. Then I double down, and more self-effacing garbage spills out: I had no idea what I was doing when I applied for my first tenure-track job and I didn’t even know what I was getting myself into because I sort of applied for that job on a whim and I guess I somehow tricked a school into hiring me HA HA HA HA. No one ever questions this version, despite the fact that applying to academic jobs is so time consuming and requires such a big emotional and financial investment that saying I did it “on a whim” should be a huge red flag to anyone who knows better.

  Here’s the clear, technical answer to the question “How did I become a professor?”—which I’m laying out here because there was a good chunk of my adult life when I didn’t know the answer despite having successfully completed college and graduate school: I got a bachelor’s degree, then I got a graduate degree (an MFA in creative writing), and I worked a bunch of odd jobs while writing my first book. These included after-school daycare provider, movie projectionist, standardized test scorer, college access counselor, personal assistant to a douchebag (this was in Los Angeles, though douchebags exist everywhere), and, ever so briefly, search engine optimization … person. (I don’t know what my official title was: I looked at a website all day and made lists of keywords and it was incredibly boring.) Once my first book was published and getting some good attention, I applied to a tenure-track assistant professor job in my home state of Florida after googling “What is a dossier?” When I got that job I knew almost right away it wasn’t a good fit for me culturally, but I used my time there to learn and teach as much as I could in the hopes of figuring out if a life in academia was for me.

  There’s one part of my “By Accident” version that’s fairly accurate: I didn’t really know what I was doing my first time trying to land an academic job when it came to the actual process (hence the googling). I’d been out of graduate school for four years by then, but even while enrolled, I’d had very little guidance on what everyone kept calling “the market” (when you hear an academic using this term, most likely they are not talking about stocks—assuming they aren’t in economics).

  I had loved teaching while in grad school. The biggest reason why I hadn’t pursued teaching immediately after was because I knew that, without a book, my options were limited when it came to teaching at the college level and making a living wage, so in the years prior to publishing my first collection of stories, I opted for more stable jobs that paid better than adjuncting and that—despite their regular hours (in fact, because of their regularity)—left me more time and energy to write.

  Also, I’d heard stories from writer friends with credentials far more stunning than mine about how impossible it was to land a tenure-track position as a creative writer, so I figured, why even try? That was another big hurdle to pursuing a teaching position: this idea that it was impossible, that my work wasn’t good enough to get me past even the first round of a search committee’s screening.

  Here’s another hurdle, also rooted in insecurity: I’m a first-generation college student, and the idea of becoming a professor—one of those people who seemed to emanate brilliance and poise, the people who made knowledge!—felt like too big of a leap for me, as someone who comes from a working-class family of electricians. Add to this hurdle the fact that the vast majority of my professors were white, and that most of them were male, and that most of the books they taught and deemed important enough to be covered in survey courses were written by straight white men, and you can see how a Cuban girl from Miami could come to think academia wasn’t the place for her.

  * * *

  There was a time, though, when I thought I could do almost anything. Growing up in the 1990s in Miami, I saw Cubans working as doctors, police officers, and teachers. Cubans were educated professionals in positions of authority everywhere in Miami-Dade County. As naive as it sounds, it took leaving Miami to realize that this wasn’t the case everywhere—that not everyone knew a Cuban pediatrician or a Cuban lawyer. In essence, it took me leaving Miami to realize that I was not white.

  The writer Carlos Eire, a Cuban exile who came to the United States in the Peter Pan flights in the early 1960s, makes a similar claim about losing his whiteness—though for him it’s when he leaves Cuba—in his entertaining and often ridiculous “memoir.” (The quotes are for the memoir’s substantial falsehoods, which were brought to light after its publication and National Book Award win, and which later editions recount in a postscript buried at the very back, where readers often miss it. When I teach Cuban American literature and include this text, I have my students do a close reading of this postscript to learn how easy it is to use words to bury the truth, even when we purport to be correcting for it; I’m always tempted to have them rip it out and glue it on a page in the front, where it belongs.) He says “that it would take only one brief plane ride to turn [him] from a white boy into a spic.” Here’s the thing: In time, he would’ve been white again had he stayed in Miami instead of being sent to the Midwest. The version of the city that made me—where Spanish is spoken as much as English, where I grew up under the care and guidance of Cuban health professionals, school principals, and legislators—was, and to a large degree still is, a city that centers the Cuban American experience. Which means in Miami, eventually, we were the whites.

  More proof I considered myself white: Going off to college, it did not occur to me before I left that there wouldn’t be very many Latinx students on campus. Of course, back then, I wasn’t saying Latinx. I wasn’t saying Latina or Hispanic either. I was saying Cuban, because I thought every place was like the one in which I was raised, where distinctions about country of origin were extremely significant and thus were never, ever erased. But if I’d only counted Cubans on my campus, the number would’ve been even more discouraging. In college I became Latinx to find community, to survive. Except it’s an identity category my parents refuse—they find it so broad as to be useless. Because of course a Cuban is not the same as a Puerto Rican, who is not the same as a Dominican, who is not the same as a Mexican, a Venezuelan, a Salvadoran, a Nicaraguan, a Guatemalan; to my parents, Latino/a/x is a white word, an imposed label that makes no sense to use somewhere like Miami. Whenever I fly home and hit Florida airspace, I imagine some form somewhere with my name on it, and after my name is the phrase Hispanic/Latino. As we move south, that phrase disappears Harry Potter–style and gets replaced by Cuban. This back-and-forth, and the friction it causes, marks my holidays, my trips to see my family, my fiction, my sense of who I am. It’s productive and painful.

  If you’d asked seventeen-year-old Jennine what percentage of her college’s student population was Cuban, she would’ve, no joke, said probably 25 or 30 percent, but she would’ve really thought it was closer to 40 percent and just known not to say that lest it come off as arrogant—because some Cubans are arrogant about the tremendous successes many of us have had in th
is country. Back then, I thought we ran everything.

  The fact that I never even thought to check my school’s demographics until after I’d committed to going there also proves I was a version of white: I didn’t even think about race on my campus before getting there, didn’t even know how or why it mattered. Another white giveaway: The reality of those numbers, when I finally learned them, shocked me.

  * * *

  In the fall of 2017, while speaking at a predominantly white college in the American South about my novel, Make Your Home Among Strangers, I asked several hundred students gathered in an assembly to count how many professors they’d had (or would have) who looked like them.

  Think about it: A person typically has maybe four professors a semester, two semesters a year (more if your school uses the quarter system). You’re in college for four years, maybe five if you run into some institutional or personal snags. How many professors did you have with whom you shared various easily recognizable identity categories: your race, your ethnicity, your gender identity, your physical ability? How many times did you see a version of yourself in charge of your learning community?

  I let the question sink in. Based on their shrugs and squints, the white male students thought it an odd question. So did many of the white women. More than ten, I asked? More than twenty?

  Now most students in the room were nodding, though still shrugging, indicating they’d never really thought about it, they weren’t sure what I was asking. The Black and Latinx and Asian and Arab students knew their answers immediately: one, maybe two.

  I asked them all to think about what a wide divide there was between a response of “one or two” and “thirty,” and if this seemed equitable. I pointed out that the relevant research is fairly conclusive: When college students see professors who look like them, they are more likely to stay in college, to graduate. This fact is partly why the visibility of first-gen professors has become so crucial: It’s an identity category that isn’t visible, and so we must work to make it one.

  Eventually a white male student came to the microphone to ask what he specifically could do to fight what he’d just realized was a deeply unfair system. It was clear to me that he was shocked he hadn’t before recognized this obvious privilege, and he genuinely wanted to mobilize it now in order to make his campus more inclusive. I made the suggestion that, given that this particular school would only have three new hires a year for the next five years (a fact I’d learned earlier in my visit), he should work with other students to demand that the school’s administration guarantee that at least two-thirds of those hires be scholars of color. I also said that because of how the tenure system works (once you earn tenure, you are all but guaranteed a position at the school for life, which is why these jobs are all the rarer and part of why academic faculties have remained so overwhelmingly white), this solution would only be truly equitable if the hires were all scholars of color. That’s the real solution, if you’re genuinely serious about righting this wrong.

  A young white woman in the front row, who’d neglected to raise her hand, called from her seat toward me on stage, “But that’s racist.” Her arms were crossed over her chest, her legs crossed, the hanging foot frantic at the ankle.

  I placed my hands on the podium (to keep from moving them while I talked, an innocuous holdover from growing up Cuban in Miami that’s sometimes read by white people as “aggressive” or “fierce” and by affluent people as “trashy,” so I’ve learned to keep it in check in certain situations). I asked her what she would call the de facto system currently in place, the one that’s led her college to have a faculty that is almost entirely white. “Isn’t that system racist?” I asked.

  She ignored my question and called me spiteful, said, “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” an evaluation she tossed off after having sat through an hour-long presentation about the impact of inequality on a person’s sense of their own humanity. An evaluation that triggered the kinds of insecurities planted in me and designed to keep me from ever getting to that podium in the first place. I quickly reminded myself that she was likely a first-year student at the school, in her third week of her college career. I was a tenure-track professor of Ethnic Studies and English at a major research university, invited to her campus because of my most recent book. What I mean is: It’s safe to say I was closer to an expert on this topic than she was, but of the two of us, I was the only one who recognized this. What I mean is: I still had to remind myself that I had the training and the authority to be right.

  She said, “The pendulum can’t swing the other way.”

  And I said, “A pendulum analogy doesn’t actually apply to this,” but before I could elaborate, she started to cry, saying, “You’re wrong. That’s so wrong,” as she wiped her face with the heel of her hand, everyone watching her as the tears flowed and soon grew out of her control—her chin trembling as she raised her voice in both volume and pitch. And then I remembered a former colleague of mine, a Chicanx historian tasked (along with me and other Latinx faculty) with figuring out why that school had such an exceptionally poor retention rate when it came to Latinx faculty, how in one tense meeting with various white administrators, he leaned my way and whispered, “There is no more precious commodity than a white woman’s tears.”

  I said to the student, “Of course you feel that way, you are white. Doing the right thing is going to seem like unfairness to you.” She’d been benefiting from this system her whole life and could not yet see it. For her and for many of us, the inherent unfairness of the white-dominated culture we live in is so prevalent as to appear naturally occurring. Any meaningful correction to this system would seem like it was going out of its way to benefit people of color, which it would—because that’s what a systemic solution to a systemic problem requires.

  She continued to talk over me as I spoke, her arms crossed, her legs crossed, foot jumping—all I heard as I tried to keep talking were the words spite and spiteful. And so I stopped explaining and let my hands go. I said, “You know what? Let’s be real. Your school won’t do this. You can relax. You have nothing to worry about.”

  The auditorium was suddenly very quiet, the other professors and administrators sitting up at so raw a truth falling out of my mouth. As a reflex I looked to the people of color in the room, to gauge if I should say what I really wanted to say. There were young women who could’ve been me in this room, and I wanted their experiences centered in this conversation for once. It could change what they chose to major in, how much more quickly they would get to that podium after me someday. They were leaning forward, unblinking, waiting.

  I continued to address their classmate, “As long as there are enough students who think like you do right now, you don’t have to worry about people like me trying to teach you anything, okay? Don’t you worry. You’ll be okay. You’ll be fine.”

  I almost said, I’m not here for you. At least, not in the way almost everything else on her campus was there for her. I could be there for her. How many books had I read in my life about characters completely different from me culturally and historically that I’d still managed to learn from, even enjoy? And in this case, my novel was about a young woman experiencing her first year of college, being read by someone experiencing her first year of college, but this young woman hadn’t seen herself in my narrator because my narrator was not white like her. That fact says more about the failure of both her imagination and America’s dominant culture than it does about the merits of fiction. She could choose to look for commonality, the same way those of us whose experiences aren’t centered in our educational systems do every day, as a matter of course, as a strategy for survival—but that choice was hers to make, not mine. Her response to my comments proved that she didn’t know how much she needed me, and if her college never required her to take a class where these issues could be carefully and compassionately explored, she might never know. And in that moment, that was fine. I was there for a version of me that needed to see a f
ellow Latinx woman call out an ugly truth and keep going in the face of it. I decided the Q&A was over, thanked the crowd, and left the stage.

  She remained seated in the front row, friends consoling her. I resisted the pull to walk up to her, squat down, engage her even more. I ignored the tears of this one white woman the way we all should ignore them when much more is at stake and turned instead to the group of four women of color and two white women who’d materialized near the front of the stage, students who mattered just as much, each of them clutching my novel—about a girl a lot like them, doing exactly what they were doing—across their chests as if it were a new kind of armor.

  My armor in college had been Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior. To hear a version of what was happening to me in college happening to the narrator of Kingston’s novel-memoir gave me the courage to keep going. The epigraph of my novel comes from that one. To have written a book that could do the same for other people—I can’t put into words what this means to me. I can only describe the sensation, which is one of filling up inside that rises past my heart and into my throat, wrecking my ability to talk.

 

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