By the time I went off to college, Chicago seemed like the perfect place to practice adulthood. The city took my breath away. The fast pace, the gorgeous architecture, the diversity at every turn. It seemed to me that important things were happening here.
When I walked onto campus my freshman year, my first surprise was Crendalyn McMath. She was my first Black teacher, a marketing professor, and she took command of every classroom she stepped into. Tall with shoulder-length black hair, she wore suits that seemed only to elongate her frame. She was a brilliant teacher who brought stories from her professional experience into the classroom. I was so proud that she was a Black woman, like me.
The gift of Professor McMath’s presence went beyond the fact that she looked like me, though that was special all by itself. The true gift was that I didn’t have to create my own sense of belonging in her class. In every previous classroom, I had been responsible for decoding teachers’ references to white middle-class experiences. It’s like when you’re sailing…or You know how when you’re skiing, you have to…My white teachers had an unspoken commitment to the belief that we are all the same, a default setting that masked for them how often white culture bled into the curriculum. For example, when teachers wanted to drive home the point that we should do something daily, they often likened it to how you wash your hair every morning. It never occurred to them that none of the Black girls in the class did this. Knowing it was true for white people, and having gotten used to white teachers’ assumption of universality, we would all nod our heads and move on. Who had time to teach the teacher?
But Professor McMath was different. One day, while illustrating a point regarding business planning, she decided to use the example of opening a beauty shop. Our conversation moved along as usual until Professor McMath made an analogy to “getting a relaxer.” My head snapped up in recognition, but all the white students looked toward the lectern completely baffled. I was the only one who understood the reference. I smiled at Professor McMath while she feigned surprise at the other students’ confusion. “Come on, you all. You know what a relaxer is, right?” They continued to stare blankly at her until she explained that some Black women choose to get a relaxer, which is sort of the opposite of what happens when white people get a perm. “Relaxers make black curly hair straight…they relax the curls.” She winked at me, and I grinned from ear to ear.
I relished the sense of belonging I felt in her classroom. Suddenly I wasn’t content to feel like I was attending a college made for someone else. I paid tuition like every white student. Something was stirring inside, and there was one particular experience that caused it to burst out in full.
That spring, my roommate invited me on a trip called Sankofa. Sankofa was a three-day journey down South exploring Black history in partnership with another student. There were about twenty pairs of us, mostly comprising one Black and one white student. We traveled all night long from Chicago to Louisiana, arriving at our first stop: a plantation.
We had come prepared to witness the harsh realities of slavery, but the real revelation was how ignorant and self-congratulatory our guides from the plantation could be. For the entire tour, we were told about “happy slaves” who sang in the fields, who worked under better conditions than most other slaves, and whose fingers never bled despite the massive amounts of cotton they picked. The guides’ presentations were filled with misconceptions and inaccuracies, and at the conclusion of the tour, they even gave us the chance to pick some cotton ourselves.
Black students. Picking cotton.
The anger of the Black students and the confusion of the white students was palpable. As we climbed aboard the bus to roll to our next destination, our conversation quickly moved beyond superficial niceties. We took turns speaking into a microphone at the front of the bus. The Black students were livid at the romanticism displayed at the plantation. The white students listened politely but seemed unmoved as they weighed our information against the “experts” at the plantation. They responded with questions like “What about the Holocaust or the potato famine? Don’t most people groups have some trauma in their history?” We did our best to correct the misconceptions, but the tour had driven a wedge in the group. And our next stop would drive that wedge even deeper.
Our bus pulled in to a museum consisting of only one exhibit—a history of lynching. Every wall was filled with photographs of dark-skinned human beings swinging by their necks. A mother and son hanging over a bridge. Burned bodies swinging over dying fires. White children staring in wide-eyed wonder while their parents proudly point to the mutilated body behind them. The cruel smiles of white faces testifying to the joy of the occasion. We came across newspaper stories that advertised lynchings as community events. In another case we saw a postcard. On the front was a photo of a mutilated man still hanging from a rope. On the other side, a handwritten note: “Sorry we missed you at the barbecue.”
There was no sound as we walked through the exhibit. We could barely breathe, let alone speak.
When we climbed back on the bus, all that could be heard were sniffles. The emotion was thick. It was as if no time had passed between the generation in the pictures and the one sitting on that bus. It was all so real.
The first students to break the silence were white. “I didn’t know this even happened.” “It’s not my fault; I wasn’t there.” They reached for anything that would distance themselves from the pain and anger of the moment; anything to ward off the guilt and shame, the shock and devastation.
The Black students had passed beyond any need to appear polite. We shared personal stories of pain—lynchings that happened to our own families—trying to make real those bodies from the photographs. But we weren’t just interested in focusing on Black bodies; we were going to focus on white ones, too.
A tall Black woman, a senior that year, peered at us all as she spoke evenly, almost disarmingly in the heat of the moment. “I just want to say that I’m having a hard time even being mad at you white people anymore. I think I’ve just been convinced that white people are innately evil. You can’t help it. You steal and kill, you enslave and lynch. You are just evil.” Then she handed the microphone back to the next person and calmly took her seat. The white students hadn’t appreciated her words, but the Black students on the bus could have kissed her feet. She had done what social convention and respectability politics said not to do—she had spoken her truth even if it meant hurting the feelings of every white person on that bus.
The tension climbed. Black and white grew further and further apart with each new speaker. The white students defended their family histories as the Black students searched for the words to express how it felt to stare at ours in those photos from the museum. Then, as we pulled into a parking lot to break for lunch, another white student stood to speak. But instead of a different variation on “Please don’t make me responsible for this,” she took a deep breath and gave in to the emotion of it all.
“I don’t know what to do with what I’ve learned,” she said. “I can’t fix your pain, and I can’t take it away, but I can see it. And I can work for the rest of my life to make sure your children don’t have to experience the pain of racism.”
And then she said nine words that I’ve never forgotten: “Doing nothing is no longer an option for me.”
Those words changed the air on that bus. She acknowledged the depth of our pain without making excuse for it. And in that moment, I knew her words were true for me as well. Something shifted inside me on this trip. Something powerful and unmistakable. Doing nothing was no longer an option for me.
Sankofa was the first time I felt the distance between history and myself collapsing. The black-and-white photos I had grown used to were now filled with color, associated with real places, places I had now walked. The inspiration to be part of their legacy was palpable, and the ways Christianity had been used to uphold all the evil of this history was not lost on me. Somehow, I just knew it was time to devote myself to the struggle.
After many more stops, discussions, tears, and prayers, we returned home. But before we got off the bus, our leaders had one final task for us. We all had to share one way in which we would become change agents as a result of the trip. I don’t remember what I said that day, but my commitment was genuine.
I was no organizer, like many of my girlfriends on that trip. But I did start showing up. I helped challenge our college’s administration to hire and retain Black faculty and staff. I attended race-related events like movie discussions and conferences, lending my voice to the cause. I started small gatherings where diversity could be practiced—prayer groups and worship services. Unlike in high school, where I noticed racism but kept my thoughts to myself, in college I started speaking up.
Our college was white, so most students of color found themselves constantly teaching white folks about racial justice. For the most part we embraced this role. Finally, people saw us as the experts in the room. We enjoyed asserting ourselves, our history, our culture, in a space that was dominated by the normalization of whiteness. In our minds, we were fighting the good fight. But I must confess: These first collegiate attempts at seeking racial justice were a little unhealthy.
Somewhere along the way, I picked up the unspoken belief that I was made for white people. That might sound weird, but it’s true. Much of my teaching (and learning) managed to revolve around whiteness—white privilege, white ignorance, white shame, the things white folks “needed” in order to believe racial justice is a worthy cause. Movie discussions on Do the Right Thing or Crash often focused on the white characters, and “privilege walks” focused on making white people recognize the unearned advantages they’d gotten at birth.
I worked as if white folks were at the center, the great hope, the linchpin, the key to racial justice and reconciliation—and so I contorted myself to be the voice white folks could hear. It’s amazing how white supremacy even invades programs aimed at seeking racial reconciliation. Just when I was about to lose myself to whiteness in an entirely different way, along came the second Black teacher of my life.
Dr. Simms taught courses in African American and Mexican American history. Brown, bald, and bespectacled, he wore clothes from Phat Farm and had a small leather pouch that he strapped like a messenger bag across the front of his chest. Standing no taller than five foot seven, but commanding a gravitas that many students found intimidating, the man was an intellectual powerhouse and possessed a wealth of experience that kept him grounded in real life. Many of the white students avoided him like the plague, but I didn’t know a Black student who would dare graduate without taking at least one of his classes. Dr. Simms believed in the power of Black history and Black culture. He believed it could change our lives.
Dr. Simms was right.
He began each class period with a list of new terms written on the chalkboard—one of which was usually spelled incorrectly. We often teased him for being so brilliant that he didn’t have space in his brain for such trivial matters as spelling. For a class period focusing on slavery in America, we would arrive with Dr. Simms’s terms already on the board: chattel, Middle Passage, slave codes, rebellion, Dred Scott, and five or six more phrases. He would then spend the period defining each one in narrative form, making us feel like we’d witnessed events of the past.
As he taught, Dr. Simms spoke softly and repetitiously, making sure we understood his point. But he also wanted to know what we thought. “Tell me, Kate, what do you think about that?” Dr. Simms would ask. If someone spoke too softly or too hesitantly, he would extend his index and middle fingers together, twirling them in the air as he encouraged the student. “Speak up. We want to hear what you have to say. Speak up so those in the back can hear you.” It didn’t matter whether our insights were profound or middling—Dr. Simms always found a way to incorporate our ideas into his lecture. His gentleness did not stop him from demanding that we think deeply.
Dr. Simms wanted us to be suspicious of the language of America.
He taught us to analyze the news. Did anyone notice how only the faces of Black criminals were shown in this segment? In the next segment, the anchor said there was a crowd—could you tell if the camera angle made it seem larger or smaller? That whole story was on immigrants, but why did it focus only on immigrants of color? He wanted us to pay attention. I remember him often bringing in multiple newspapers—one the English-language Chicago Tribune and the other Hoy, the Spanish-language paper headquartered in the same city. He would have us read two stories on the same topic, then ask, “How are these two stories different? What details did the Trib leave out or Hoy include?”
He also encouraged us to question everyday “patriotic” language. When referring to the drafters of the Constitution, Dr. Simms refused to call them the Founding Fathers. “Those aren’t my Fathers!” he would state matter-of-factly. His declaration invited the question for the rest of us: Are they mine?
We always told Dr. Simms that he ruined our lives. He made us so aware of racial bias, we could no longer watch the news as leisure. We analyzed movies for accuracy like we never had before. Newly conscious that the literature we read carried an angle, we now couldn’t help but seek it out. We thought critically about everything, and it was all Dr. Simms’s fault.
Dr. Simms didn’t just make us recite names and dates. He taught us to care about the past. When he spoke of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, his eyes would fill with tears. It was like he was hearing the announcement all over again. He wept so hard after showing a documentary on the work of Cesar Chavez, he had to dismiss class that day. Dr. Simms wanted us to be emotionally connected to our learning, to sit in the pain, the horror, the absurdity of America’s racist history, and to humanize those who dared stand against the system. Dr. Simms made us believe that we could follow that legacy of resistance, but one piece of his advice stood out to me more than all the others.
“Ain’t no friends here.”
Whenever Dr. Simms said this—in a lecture on Lincoln’s true views on race, or while talking about the mainstream media’s mixed track record in covering social movements—it always made me laugh. Dr. Simms wouldn’t hurt a fly. He exuded gentleness and softness, and he relied on knowledge and humor when responding to critics. I never heard him raise his voice to anyone except to shout “Friends! Friends!” when our discussions became incomprehensible with passion. So hearing him say anything that could be perceived as an overgeneralization or inherently suspicious of others seemed like a departure. And yet, we all knew he was not joking. We already had plenty of examples in our history books and on our college campus, but it would take some time to figure out how deep and wide his life lesson would stretch.
For the rest of undergrad, my professor’s words would come back to me whenever white people acted a fool. When they wrote in our newspaper that the Black students should just leave if we weren’t happy. When I overheard racist comments in the cafeteria, or explained to the residence director for the millionth time that our lobby isn’t suddenly “scary” when Black football players happen to be occupying it. Any time something like this happened, Dr. Simms’s voice would sound in my head: Ain’t no friends here.
Professor McMath, Dr. Simms, and a handful of additional faculty and staff members helped me define what it meant to be a Black student in white spaces. They helped me demand what I wanted. They made it safe for me to explore my own voice. Though I was often surrounded by whiteness, they reminded me that I was capable of responding to racist white people, and encouraged me to seek comfort in Black history and the healing of Black community. They pushed me to rethink what whiteness had taught me about myself, about my personhood, about my vocation, about my place in the world. They were teaching me to speak up until those in the back could hear me.
School was over. Time for the real world. Turned out Dr. Simms was right, even when I didn’t want him to be.