SPARKLE MAG BLOG

Seriously: Just be a honky.

Dear Sparkle Mag —

Somedays I can’t just shake the feeling: I am just your average, white male. A non-race, a race with no decorum.

Each day I wake up and join the 74% of Americans who are white (there are 169,000,000 of us). I like music that is loosely considered “indie rock” and I am health conscious (I eat avocados, mangoes, sprouts, and I avoid salt). Unsurprisingly, I am also a young, white, creative professional. I live in an urban neighborhood that is gentrifying through the processes of other like me. Most of my close friends are young, creative, white people, or white people nonetheless. I live in a city that is incredibly diverse. New York City is 25% black and 25% hispanic, and almost 12% Asian.

So why do I live in a tower of whiteys? Do I feel race shame? Aren’t we all post-race anyway? 

Well, as a teacher at two colleges that are largely minority, I interact with others that are different than me all day long. Sometimes, ridiculously so, I feel like I am this bizarre teacher-puppet who is putting on some boring or bizarre dog-and-pony show to get students to read literature and write better. Sometimes I feel like students do not connect with me at all because I have enthusiasm for a subject they do not, and above all, I come from a completely different race and class background than most of my students, and research suggests that students learn best from teachers that are “similar” to them. Hmmm.

So, what can a white boy from the suburbs do to be successful teaching at a minority college in the city? 

Well, just be a honky I suppose, because that is all you can do. I have to own the fact that most of my students think that I’m from the whitest parts of the Midwest, (last year: “You’re from Buffalo? I thought you were from, like, Nebraska (even whiter)). I can’t pretend to have seen every Dave Chappelle movie, so I’ll slowly begin Netflixing the ones that people talk about in class. Most of my students think that I live in lower Manhattan, a rich whiteboy area — ha, this is a trick: I live in an even whiter neighborhood: Greenpoint. 

Well, beyond all this, at least I am not a white guy with a bad embroidered shirt:

Whitely,

The White Nose