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152 Chapter 11 On Being Special Serena Easton Ithink I thought I was special—immune to the realities of racial discrimination. Because I grew up in the heart of black middle-class privilege in a mostly white suburb of New Jersey, instances of blatant racism were few and far between. Moreover , because of my elevated social class, the “good family” I came from, and my penchant for getting good grades at a challenging high school, I was considered “different” from the other black kids in town. Thus, while other black kids my age might have had to deal with racism and discrimination from whites in the town, these things rarely touched my life in any meaningful way. And so—after graduating from the excellent public school system in my town—I entered a private university in New Jersey with a full academic scholarship, and at twenty-two, I matriculated with a 3.895 grade-point average. I was smart. I was ready to take on the world. I was special. After deciding corporate America wasn’t for me (a decision based on several unpleasant summer internships at a major telecommunications company), I decided to sign up for more school—after all, I was pretty good at school. In addition , I had developed a serious love of sociology and knew that in college I had only scratched the surface of what I wanted and needed to know. I began life as a sociology graduate student in the fall of 1998 at a large public university in the deep South. My first apartment was next to fraternity row. There I was in my parents’ minivan with all of my boxes, passing by gigantic plantationstyle houses, each with rocking chairs on the front porch and large confederate flags either hanging from the houses or draped across the front lawn. As I had lived my entire life in New Jersey and had only seen those flags on Klan vehicles in Eyes on the Prize films, to say that I was frightened is an understatement. This was where I was going to teach while I earned my degree? These were the people I was going to have to teach about race and racism? This place looked like some throwback to the 1950s. I knew that the school was more than 90 percent white, but somehow in my twenty-two-year-old brain and my infinite naïveté, I thought that they would be like the white liberals I’d known in the Northeast and wouldn’t be overtly discriminatory. Moreover, I was special! That kind of racism wasn’t going to touch me. On Being Special 153 It turned out that the students at the university actually did think I was “special ”—the way that people label learning-disabled children that way. In the eyes of these wealthy white eighteen-year-olds, I couldn’t possibly be educated, qualified, or smart enough to be a teaching assistant. I was this northerner, this girl only a few years older than them, this large black woman who evoked a mammy image and reminded them of their nannies and maids who worked back home in their large houses ensconced in well-manicured subdivisions. And while I may have been as articulate as any white male professor, my race and gender were obvious barriers to their respect. I didn’t realize that this was the case until I started talking to my fellow first-year TAs, all of whom were white. As we sat in the mailroom commiserating over how hard it was to teach four discussion sections and be first-year grad students at the same time, I began to realize that their stories sounded very different from mine. In my sections, everything I said was questioned, scrutinized, and cross-examined. Fully expecting my cohort to complain about the same problems, I was stunned when they began looking at me as if I had just grown an eyeball on my forehead. They weren’t having these difficulties in their sections—it was just me. Only I was forced to pull up statistics, photos, theories, graphs, and charts constantly as evidence that what I was saying was true. Valerie Ann Moore describes this phenomenon as the “inappropriate challenges” often posed to female professors and professors of color, where “students demand that ‘certain kinds’ of professors justify their teaching methods, defend their knowledge, and prove their grasp of the material” (1996, 202). She goes on to say, “As a result...

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