Teaching While Black

Am I where I’m supposed to be?

Tomorrow is the start of my 13th year teaching in higher ed. I love teaching and, if student and colleague feedback is any indication, I’m fairly decent at my job. The opportunity to teach young people about things I find interesting and important for their lives is such an incredible privilege.

I also feel a little terrified before each class for two reasons:

First, I’m scared I won’t be able to connect with any of the students. Teaching, like everything humans do collectively, is about relationships; establishing, growing, maintaining, and cultivating relationships. All the effective teachers I’ve had have been people who can effectively build relations of respect, curiosity, entertainment, and challenge. I emulate them in my teaching practice every day.

I’ve certainly failed to connect with students over the years, but never an entire class. I don’t know what I’d do if an entire class was not at all feeling what I had to teach or how I chose to teach them. The stuff of nightmares.

My second fear is that my white students will become openly hostile and disruptive when I talk about racism, whiteness, and white supremacy in biology and ecology.

But like my fear of failing to connect with an entire class, this second fear has never manifested. I’d be lying if I didn’t get a little shook before lectures on the racism of the national park system, or the connection between anoxic zones the Gulf of Mexico, Indigenous genocide, and the institution of slavery, but it’s never gone as bad as I fear.

I’ve learned to cover these topics early on in my courses so that any students who don’t want to learn about such can drop the class. And, over the years, a handful of white students have, I suspect, dropped my class after because learning about white supremacy was not something they signed up for.

The most pushback I’ve gotten from discussing these topics in classes has actually come from white colleagues.

This pushback hasn’t been direct, but rather indirect through resistance to implementing similar material in their own classes after I point out how white the canon is.

“This is what we’ve always taught.”

“The canon is the canon.”

“I talk about diverse scientists at the end of the semester.”

“How can biology be racist?!”

The resistance from my colleagues to teaching about the structural racism baked into the fields of biology, ecology, geography, and conservation is understandable, if not incredibly frustrating and tiring. None of us were trained to may the connections explicit, and most white STEM professors have spent little time contemplating how whiteness functions in their own lives, let alone in their profession.

But they should.

What continues to surprise me, however, is how positively (in general) white students in my class respond to learning about structural white supremacy. The shadow SnapChat group of white students in my Natural Resources class at WVU started to complain about having to learn about structural racism notwithstanding, most white students I’ve taught these histories and context to seem to greatly appreciate learning.

But I lied. I have a third fear the crops up every semester:

Should I be teaching more Black students?

I’ve taught at PWIs (predominantly white institutions) my entire career. Before I came to my current institution, I never had more than a handful of Black students in my classes. Now that number is reliably a dozen plus.

When I earned my Ecology PhD in 2011, I was one of three African Americans who earned that degree in the entire country. And for the 13 years since, white folks have overwhelmingly benefited from my expertise. I’ve had, at most, two departmental Black colleagues as a Black professor, and that was only for one semester in 2021.

I can’t help sometimes feeling like I’ve chosen to be a token only white people can spend.

About half way through my career, I pivoted to teaching explicitly about race and racism in science as a way to create change and hopefully lessen the racist experiences I had and still have in academia.

But I’m not sure that’s enough.

I get so much energy and joy teaching Black students, the pleasant surprise in their faces when the person at the front of the class looks like them, the confidence they display when speaking to their experiences in class. I never want to be without that joy and pride in my teaching. It gives me life and hope for the future, and strength to face the daily white nonsense of academia.

I tell myself that I’m where I’m supposed to be, doing the best I can to make a difference, but I’m never sure that I fully believe it.

Tomorrow the students will come to class and I will have to have a sound plan for learning and charismatic words to begin building relationships.

I’m scared, as usual.

I’m excited, as usual.

I’m enough…I think.

I’m making a difference…I hope.

What’s in my pocket

Two words: BONING KNIFE

I spent the entire past week butchering the two deer I harvested at the end of last year and I could not have accomplished such without my boning knife.

I had a brief moment where I attempted to make cuts with my 6” chef’s knife, but quickly switched back to the tool that got the job done much better.

A boning knife is essential if you’re the kind of home cook who works with whole cuts of meat, and it’s surprising useful beyond just taking muscle groups apart.

If you’re in the market, check out the Vitorinox 6” boning knife. It’s a brilliant tool for taking apart whole animals, whether they be deer or fish, and I never plan to be without mine.

What’s in my ear-hole

Been listening to Beanie Man a bit this week. Perhaps it’s the fact that we’re in the depths of winter and I’m looking for some music that reminds me of warm weather, dancing, and fun, but the nostalgia for one of my favorite Reggae artists hit hard this week.

What’s on my brain

MEAT!!!!

What else is new, right? Now that I have two deer cut up and packaged in the freezer - about 44lbs of meat - I’ve been thinking about how much hunting and fishing I’m going to want to do for this coming year.

Being able to forego the grocery store for our animal consumption is the ultimate goal, and I’m excited by what this past year’s harvest has yielded. As a family, we have a ways to go to stop shopping for meats, but it’s nonetheless exciting to think about what we can accomplish in this year’s wild harvest.

Announcements

Speaking of wild harvest, check out my thoughts about catch and release fishing:

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I’ll talk to y’all next Sunday.

Cheers,

Jonathan