The Academy Speaks

The Academy Speaks: As a proverbial “vanilla brother” (as my Dean affectionately refers to me) at an HBCU, on the daily I am in a position to experience and explore racial identity and its implications on classroom pedagogy. This applies to my own racial identity, that of my students, and how we co-construct one another. Occasionally, such rewarding conversations are prefaced by a tentative, “No offense, but how come white people always…?” from a student (a blog entry for another time). In one such conversation, however, as I attempted to nuance, well, why white people always…, “Keisha” responded by saying with seriousness and slight confusion, “But professor, you’re not white, you’re German, right?”