I’ve spent a significant percentage of my life in school, eventually earning a Ph.D and then moving to the other side of the desk as a professor. In the entirety of my studies—literally decades of coursework—I had no exposure to race-critical studies and almost no exposure to gender-critical studies.
Looking back now, this lack is certainly what I regret most about my time in school. A lot of the blame is on me, because those courses were available and I could have enrolled but chose not to. I had no real understanding of what they were, how they pertained to my life, or why I should take them, so I didn't. That choice is telling on me.
However, the problem also lies with the schools, with what they prioritize and what they don’t. Which studies are housed in a department and which are housed in a program. Which faculty are tenured (or tenure-line), and which are contingent. Without question, my own education would have been immeasurably improved if I had been required to take critical race studies and gender studies. I’d certainly have become a better person, and reflecting back now, I feel a lot of anger and a lot of regret about this.
The 2016 election results caught me completely off guard, and as part of the process of trying to understand why, I realized just how little I understood about this country. Seeing the racism and sexism now too blatant to ignore, however willfully one might try, I realized how much of a privileged bubble I’d been living in.
This happened during my first semester as a full-time professor, and I felt a responsibility to acknowledge that things were different. Different for me, my family, my colleagues, but also different for my students. Responsibility feels like too weak a word—it was more like an imperative to acknowledge and then to confront what was happening.
I started devouring books about racism, sexism, and other forms of identity-based oppression. The more I studied, the more I realized how these forces shaped the music we looked at in class and the people who made it. I realized how racism and sexism shaped student behavior, how they influenced student expectations in the classroom. I realized how racism and sexism shaped my behavior, how they influenced my expectations in the classroom. I realized how these and similar forces were present in every aspect of my life, and that I, as a cis able-bodied white man, benefited enormously from them. How I had supported them. How false the assumption “this is just the way things are” actually is. How the way things are has to change, and how that change has to come from largely from me as beneficiary and stakeholder.
I’m still reading, listening, writing, and talking about these issues a lot. Returning to the pre-Trump status quo isn’t an option, and a post-Trump world is not a post-MAGA one—Biden’s tenure has to be more than simply the end of Trump’s.