Teaching While Black

Patricia Matthew:

If race is a construct, gender is a construct, and teaching is a performative act, where and how do I exist in the classroom as a real black woman?

"I am expected to woo students even as I try to fend them off; I am supposed to control them even as I am supposed to manipulate them into loving me. Still I am aware of the paradox of my power over these students. I am aware of my role, my place in an institution that is larger than myself, whose power I wield even as I am powerless, whose shield of respectability shelters me even as I am disrespected." - Patricia Williams. The Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Mad Law Professor

This is part three in a series by Dr. Matthew. See Part 1 and Part 2 at her blog.On the first day of class one semester a male student called me Mrs. Matthews. It was the very beginning of the school year, and I'd been on sabbatical the previous winter, which meant I had eight full months to work on two big projects--an anthology about race and tenure in the humanities and my book about the history of the novel and its intersections with 19th-century medical and conduct discourse. It also meant I had had no interactions with students, even in passing. I live in Brooklyn but teach in New Jersey, so when I'm away from school I'm really away from school. The only student I had interacted with was the graduate student helping me with background research for the introduction to the race and tenure anthology. This is probably why, when I heard "Mrs. Matthews," I replied without thinking, "Everything about that is wrong."

I'm funny about people misspelling my last name. I think if it were, say, "Pryzbylewski" I wouldn't get upset about it. That's a hard name to spell, but "Matthew" is easy. Yet people add an "s" on the end all the time--telemarketers, doctors, Verizon, restaurant hostesses, and students. In the classroom, I can tell myself that I get persnickety about it because I'm teaching my students to pay attention to details, but I suspect I'm just funny about my name. And, when I'm at school, I'm funny about my title. Outside of work I rarely use it. In fact, when people ask me what I do for a living I just tell them I teach instead of saying I'm a university professor. But at school I assume that, like my male colleagues, students will refer to me as Dr. or Professor instead of Miss or Mrs. Depending on my mood or the time of the semester, I am either good-natured or sarcastic about this mistake. Early in the term I might say, "I may be large and contain multitudes but I am also singular, so please note there is no "s" at the end of my name," or I try to keep it simple by saying "that's Matthew two t's no s." When students (and when the mistake is made it's almost always a male student making the mistake) call me Miss or Mrs., I'm neither good-natured nor sarcastic. That's a mistake of a different kind. I try not to be too aggressive scary-feminist about the whole thing, but I'm quick to point out the error. Neither of these are high on my list of the problems of a tenured academic, but a recent comment on a student evaluation reminds of how being read as "black" by students has shaped my teaching, for better or ill.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at February 20, 2014 12:34 AM
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