Laura Hinton, “On Being Title IX-ed for Reading that Passage …” continued

They yelled, talked over one another, hurled stereotypes at me. Our discussion on Citizen ceased. My appearance as a “white woman” was made front and center of the classroom topic.

I am a survivor of a Title IX inquest. I am a cis-female, aging scholar. I have devoted my career to teaching and writing about intersectional feminist literary theory and contemporary women’s writing at the City College of New York (CUNY). I was hired to teach this content following a hard-won Ph.D. at Stanford, where I fought to have these topics integrated into the curriculum. I have continued to fight to have them integrated into our studies in the City College English Department. I have continued my research into diverse American women’s writing and poetics, publishing articles and books about them. My passion is reading and writing about radical Black women’s experimental poetry, and teaching amidst the diverse student body at City College. 

But I don’t know if I can teach Black American literature any more at City College—especially contemporary Black poetry that uses “racist” language for politically ironic effects. I just faced a protracted investigation under a Title IX charge, filed by a student who had objected to me reading aloud from Citizen, who had called me a “white woman” in the classroom, and told me I was not allowed to “say that word.” The same student wrote a final paper whose main point was to demonstrate that I was a thoughtless racist “white woman.” The letter I received from the “Title IX office,” officially called the City College Office of Diversity and Compliance, did not fully exonerate me. While there was no clear charge against me, this letter, a “report,” suggested I had a “hurtful” class discussion because I had read aloud. It suggested I lacked proper classroom “decorum.” 

“Hurtful.” Lacking “decorum.” The “report” did not mention what I experienced in this classroom, what other non-vocal students experienced as well. I had read from a Black-authored, anti-racist book, which uses strong language ironically. This stellar contemporary-American book seeks to reverse the meaning of racial slurs. A highly regarded book by an award-winning African American woman writer, Citizen, however, is a book I do not believe I can teach again. Nor should I teach many other literary texts by Black authors of similar power through linguistic irony.  

*

In this Title IX “report” by the current City College Office of Diversity, a copious amount of factual information and contexts I provided at her request was ignored or erased. The account she made in the report was vaguely accusatory, if rather imprecise. Had I not been a full professor and tenured, I imagine I would have been dismissed from college teaching based on such a strange report.

This diversity officer who “investigated” and wrote this report was the same City College diversity officer to whom I had appealed for help against sexual discrimination and retaliation for having filed a complaint on this matter. She offhandedly had dismissed my own well-documented complaint of systemic gender and racial discrimination, as well. This person leads the same office that has, for years now, ignored my own confidentially stated testimony of alleged Title IX violations by several faculty members and administrators on the City College campus. She ignored. Me. But not a complaint by an undergraduate student who was having trouble doing well in class.

Who told me off and depicted me as a racist in her final writing assignment.

*

There I was, teaching a Black woman’s literary text, honoring its language—used quite purposefully by Rankine to condemn white racism on the planet. I did not nor I will not censor Claudia Rankine as a writer. I was reading out loud one of her literary passages, as any English professor might do in a given English literature and writing class. I had asked my students to follow along with their own copies of the book.

I came to understand that most students has not actually read the assigned text, the book Citizen. I then came to understand—this was a Zoom class—that most students had not even obtained copies of the book, assigned repeatedly and listed on the syllabus required-book list for months. 

For several weeks prior to this particular day in class, we had been studying several contemporary Black American poets. These poets all use racial slurs and strong metaphors to ironically speak of the horrors of racism. That day in class via Zoom, I had been using the “share” allowing me to show video clips of Serena Williams confronting white racism on international tennis courts. These moments in tennis history were underscored in Chapter Two of Citizen, which analyzes Black women’s rage for the discrimination they face.

In this chapter and others, Rankine uses the “N-word” citationally, that is, she quotes the word as if white racists are saying it. Her use of the “N-word,” therefore, is completely ironic, in that it reverses the meaning of the slur as a racist expression, re-empowering the Black speaker (who utters it with distain). The “N-word” in Citizen comes to mean, therefore, its opposite. The tone to me, in reading the book, could not be more clear.

Thus, it did not occur to me that the African American or BIPOC students who complained about “me” reading aloud Rankine’s passage that include her use of the “N word” did not understand her verbal irony and reversal effect. It did not occur to me that students would think that “I” was actually saying the “N word,” not reading it in the context of another’s writing and this particular book. It did not occur to me that students would not actually read this fabulous book, since all former classes of mine at all levels who had had this book assigned always read and loved it, at times telling me that Citizen was a favorite course book. It did not occur to me that the same students with whom I had been having wonderful classes prior to this day, seemingly sharing sophisticated dialogues on the topic of racism and identity, would then not read, or understand, the context of the book.

In the midst of the “share” mode, I was guiding us through the Williams video clips. Then, a student stopped me. She said: You are a white woman. You cannot say that word. 

Reading is flat. The world is flat. Reading doesn’t matter. 

I could not see the students faces in this Zoom “share” mode. At first I had no idea what I had supposedly done wrong, or what “I” had “said.”

Other students chimed in as I re-entered the Zoom-room interface. Several were demanding that I apologize—because I “said that word.” Some wrote via the Chat box, “apologize.” Some protested against my reading of the book via Zoom itself. Of course, I immediately apologized if anyone had been hurt. I felt very sorry. I was genuinely concerned.

My apology was not enough for these particular vocal students. And I was not permitted to continue the discussion of Citizen. A group of students now dominated the conversation. They were speaking in loud voices via Zoom monitors.

I heard …white woman… white woman …cannot say “that word…” over and again. They cut me off. They cut each other off. Nothing made any sense. I felt disoriented and confused.

Repeatedly, they informed me, without question, that I “could not say that word.” 

*

It was more than embarrassing to have been called a “white woman” so many times in the classroom before the presence of my diverse student body. It was embarrassing to have my appearance, my own skin and hair color, suddenly made the feature of the Zoom-room class talk. And I know this is because I had heard such talk before. In derogatory references to me.

Knowing we had little class time left to explore Citizen as a text. I tried to return to the topic of Rankine and the tennis star Williams, hoping students might begin to appreciate Rankine’s literary critique of racism. When I realized that this group of college students in English did not know what either irony or context was, I dived into the “Chat” box myself, used it as an ad-hoc blackboard. I explained the destabilizing effect of words in poetic literary contexts. I suggested that when Rankine uses racial slurs in the context of quotes within quotes, or citationally, she is transforming ill-meaning words, changing them into an ironic use that rips apart their original racist intent. My students were young writers, some with much potential, I felt. I wanted them to know that words can shift and shape and bend and sometimes even break internally in their supposedly fixed “meanings.” I said all this, or tried to. I tried to be their professor and carry on with class.

Yet I was not allowed to continue class. The same vocal students were insulted that I would discuss issues like context in reading, or suggest how important it is to read the actual language.

They kept repeating, you are a white woman white woman … not allowed to say that word. 

Our classroom was in mayhem. Tears came to my eyes when I realized I could not get this class to change direction. A course and topic I cared about had been ruined that day. Some students were suggesting that I was committing a racist act by reading from Rankine’s book out loud and appearing “white” on the Zoom screen.

One student then said behind her static Zoom photo window, 

I’m sick of your white woman tears. 

I told her this statement is a stereotype. I said I was ending class. I clicked out of Zoom.

*

Do these students think I am like blonde Belgian tennis star Kim Clijsters, her photo ironically displayed in Rankine’s book as Clijsters made fun of Williams’s Black female body by stuffing paper up her own white legs and tennis pants on an Australian court? 

Do we really know a person’s “identity” based upon their appearance of skin color, or how they might appear visually on a Zoom screen? 

Do we know what a person thinks, and what a person has experienced in a lifetime, by only looking at hair or eye color? 

Should we silence certain people from reading a heroic American literary text out loud because of their color, gender, or “look”?

*

I tried to ask a couple of questions about race and identity drawn from Critical Race Theory. I wanted my students to think about who we are and how we might view one another. My questions went unheard—or responded to. Meanwhile, the majority of the students were as silent as hiding mice in a thunderstorm. I tried to engage these silent students, too, to ask their opinions and thoughts. They were mostly cowed. Several later wrote me emails telling me that they felt hurt by this attack on their teacher, or otherwise unable to speak above the more dominant voices. 

You are a white woman, a white woman … not allowed to say that word. 

No one acknowledged in the Zoom classroom that we had already spent weeks reading very challenging African American poetry by Amiri Baraka and Jayne Cortez, two poets well known for using sometimes devastating language and intense metaphors as part of their own critiques of racism.

Students had not done their homework. They were not reading the assignment. Some had not regularly shown up for class. They were not remembering, suddenly, the kinds of conversations we had just been having over weeks.

I became the very source of the racism inflicted upon Serena Williams, and other Black women like her. I was made the target of their ire. The vocal students let loose against me. I was the classroom scapegoat.

I was dehumanized and judged as a “white woman” professor on the Zoom screen because I tried to show students that other views on this issue might exist.

*

Devastated as a teacher after this classroom experience, I reached out to appropriate college administrators. I needed to put on the record what had happened. I took these accusations against me seriously. One administrator put me on an email list with other upper-administration officers. Some of these administrators had words like “student” or “dean of” in their titles. One was the City College diversity officer I already knew, who had rejected my complaint of systemic racism and sexism on the City College campus in the past.

I provided a full account to the upper-administration at the City College that same day of the class. I was concerned that an important class of theirs had been disrupted, all possible lessons lost. I was concerned that I was being chastised for reading a passage from an important work of contemporary poetry, based on my color and gender. Some students had been out of control in this process, and said some cruel and inappropriate words to me.

These students clearly needed help. They had targeted me because they needed attention and care.

These students had violated the stated rules of community conduct for our City College classrooms and were having trouble doing their assignments and, in some cases, coming regularly to class.

I thought a counselor might be able to help the students, especially the ones I felt were at risk at the college.

I knew we no longer had a viable counseling center at City College. So I asked these administrators how the students could get the help they clearly needed, and what the college resources for them might be.

Not a single administrator responded to my questions about resources or getting help for the students. Silent were those administrators with “student” or “dean of” in their title.

The diversity officer told me I could file a Title IX complaint. A Title IX complaint!—against my BIPOC students? That was the worst idea I ever heard! I told the diversity officer that such a complaint based on Federal Law could do my students real harm. I envisioned them not returning to college if an official investigation against them were to ensue. This suggestion was a poor one, not a way to solve a problem with at-risk students. These students clearly needed humane understanding and care. We needed an intervention, perhaps by a person of color with counseling expertise who could “reach them.”

No, no, I said. I cannot file a Title IX complaint—which is like throwing the book of US law against flailing students. Students at risk. Students needing genuine support. Not retribution. 

Not a single administrator responded to me.

Not a single administrator offered to help these students, although more than one had words like “student” and/or “dean of” in their official titles.

*

I did my best without administrative support, and I finished up the course. Then one of the vocal students wrote a final paper that did not follow the assignment but, in the process, portrayed me as a racist. It suggested that I was a “white woman professor” and a liar, too. Highly untrustworthy. This student posted her final paper describing me as a racist on our public WordPress site, which I create for all my courses and leave open to search engines so students have easy access to them.

I took this student that suggested I was such a racist down from the Wordpress site.

I wrote and again asked the group administrators for suggestions. Ones with “dean of” and “student” in their titles.

Again, not a single administrator responded to me. And clearly no one cared about this student.

I was later criticized by the City College diversity officer for not fully commenting on this paper that portrayed me as a racist. I was also criticized by the City College diversity officer for taking down this final paper from the public Wordpress site, although it depicted me as a racist “white woman professor,” one who lies to students, and who says aloud racial slurs in class willy-nilly.

*

I was a “white woman” on the college Zoom screen. I had made a fatal error. I had read a Black woman poet’s passage that contained the “N-word.” I had exposed my white insensitivity to racial prejudice by reading aloud, reciting, what a Black woman had written—while I myself appeared “white” on the Zoom screen.

Another class with the exact same curriculum had finished up the semester so well. We had had very meaningful discussions of Rankine’s Citizen. We were all kissing each another good-bye through the Zoom screen at the end of our final class. 

In the other class with the vocal students who attacked my reading and my appearance, students stopped saying anything. They kept their cameras off.

The students didn’t say a word goodbye.

I said goodbye and gave a reading quiz. 

No one said a word. 

*

Context is everything—in a text, in a class, which comes within other weeks of classes. The fact that student cameras were largely unused in this class that semester added to the tensions. Student cameras had not been required at CCNY for Zoom classes during that pandemic semester of distant learning. Once the administration made that policy, most student cameras in lower-division courses went off.

Suddenly, no cameras students were owned—or in working order—by most undergraduates. The lower the course number, the fewer faces one tended to see on line.

I kept encouraging students to use their cameras if at all possible. I told them…It will help you to learn and stay tuned in. 

But most did not use their cameras. That’s just how it was. One had to accept this fact.

As a result, the day of this class with students vocalizing their complaints at me, for reading outloud that passage from Rankine’s Citizen and appearing on the Zoom screen a “white woman,” I had very little visual information or social-speaking clues to go on. Words came at me on top of each other, mixed up, through my laptop audio speaker. I had trouble getting my bearings and who was saying what, why. It was disorienting. I was in “share” mode and I saw no faces—although there was mine, looming up in all its light whiteness on the Zoom screen.

The college policy certainly had been well-intentioned, based in current anti-racist pedagogies. These take into account the limits of bandwidth in poorer households, also the possible humiliation that a given student might feel sharing a less affluent home background. But I thought we should make generous exceptions to the use of cameras as needed—which was not the college policy’s effect. I am not alone in concluding that it is difficult to teach and communicate openly with students when they are not visible on camera, especially younger undergraduates taking courses mostly as requirements.

To teach to a classroom of mostly blank or static squared photographs is not a scenario for classroom success. It is not.

I have come to see that we embrace our embodied speaking styles through facial expressions and seen embodied gestures. 

I have come to observe that many unprepared or otherwise disengaged students would keep their cameras off because they did not want to be seen, or called upon—just like “wall-flowers,” as I call them, do in a traditional on-site classroom. They sit against the back wall. These students I had always made an effort to bring in to the course conversation.

But via Zoom and with non-used cameras, the student non-visibility based on “anti-racist pedagogies” was only serving to enforce more student disengagement, more disinterest, and often unpreparedness for students at risk. Grades were suffering for these students, because their work reflected the inattention, the lack of feeling part of the room, that visual contact helps to invite.

Even if it was a Zoom room, it was still a classroom community. Seeing one another equally would have made a difference I believe if we had been in-person. I also could have easily spotted the lack of textbooks around the room.

*

Too many of the vocal students in my classroom were off screen that day. They were arguing. A couple were yelling at me. Their words came from little oblique, unknowable square blank Zoom boxes or photo stills of them smiling like fashion models who have never had a bad day. The paradigm was disconcerting. 

What I heard, coming at me from various voices through my own laptop speakers, was “You are a white woman… white woman… you cannot read that word.” I couldn’t always be completely sure who was saying what. Their words were hurting me. I knew the stereotypes, the assumptions, being made.

They see me. I don’t see them. But I hear students. I have to stay “on camera.” I am The Professor.

My special Zoom lights purchased to make for a better picture highlighted my pale skin.

White Woman White Woman.

No longer a college teacher, I was a stereotype. I was a symbol of The Racist of whiteness in American culture.

I’m sick of your white-woman tears.

Sick. Of. 

This whole conversation left me depressed and stricken.

*

Like most of us, my hair or skin color is not a choice. If so, I would have made a different one. It has been most inconvenient, to say the least, to have become a professional academic, particularly with deep sustaining scholarly and educational interests in non-white literatures, while looking light skinned and blonde based on my genetic features. 

My body type was long an issue for the men I had worked with during my career, most overtly when I was a young, un-promoted assistant professor. These men included my supervisors, some of whom sexualized me for my “white woman” appearance though no fault of my own. These men also made derogatory statements and conveyed assumptions about my intelligence, my scholarly pursuits, and my inclusion into le club of their English Department—based on my visual appearance as well as my feminist scholarly work.

These men harassed me in hallways. They made sexualized, derogatory comments on the sly when others weren’t around. They sought to humiliate me, physically, emotionally, mentally. They routinely silenced me in professional meetings. They voted against my two promotions and tenure, although I had published more than most candidates for these positions in my department up until that point. Their behavior was so harmful and derogatory, my promotion to full professor so hopeless in appeal after appeal, that I was advised by an attorney to file a Title IX lawsuit. The lawsuit (settled in my favor) allowed me to obtain full promotion and backpay for years of non-promotion. I felt left with no choice. I could not live with their biased behavior towards me.

Even though those men are almost all retired now or gone, my current colleagues now view me as a “troublemaker”—because I fought for my rights as an employee at City College. I am a pariah; they exclude me. Thirty years after starting as a beginning professor at City College, I still am not permitted to join hiring search committees (even if the hiring is directly in my field) so I can influence the next generation of teachers and scholars. I am not allowed to run a program, or receive course releases for department administrative work, although I am highly qualified to do such work and the college needs my contributions. My feminist studies courses are not officially integrated into the curriculum, although I have requested that they be repeatedly. My courses are sometimes cancelled, my course requests ignored. I am often forced to teach at the student-entry level, those lower-divisional courses many students don’t take seriously. I am overlooked for internal awards and scholarly privileges.I am disrespected as a colleague and professional.

The reminder of my department’s bias against me, which was articulated once by an English chairman’s criticism of my “white woman” appearance, comes flooding back. Students had told me I was a “white woman,” not allowed to speak. 

*

The situation for women and non-binary faculty, as well as non-whites, is a difficult one at City College. For example, my division has never seen a woman or a person of color or a gay or non-binary person permanently appointed to its humanities and arts deanship. This fact is in spite of the long history of the humanities at the City College. And the white men in my department and division are treated as the resident geniuses. They remain, to this day, those magical beings who do everything right, whose publications are congratulated and celebrated, who are permitted to assert thoughts out loud in meetings, whatever they may be. These men can be unpleasant if they feel like it in a department meeting. They can be whoever they are—without penalty. If they are hot, they can wave their shirt to breeze themselves in the air. They can laugh, or make jokes. The room will respond with laughter. Or—they can just sit silently and be respected. They are the “white men.” They are the real presence in the room, the real humans. 

With a couple of exceptions, these men “run the show.” Yet a few women in the last recent decade or so have been permitted to “play” with the men. They even can now serve as chair of the department, as long as they continue the status quo. Unfortunately, this seems to include belittling and marginalizing me as a scholar and teacher.

Today’s “acceptable women” on the faculty most likely mentored with an “important white man” on campus, stepping into similar positions. They will be daughter figures to such men. These women will sound soft-spoken, quiet. They will keep their voices low when they do talk. They will be careful and indirect, in revealing or not revealing their plans and ambitions. They will not be forthright in professional groups. They will perform writing and scholarship in acceptable, usually white-male dominated, English or American fields. They will be called “successful”—in the parochial world that is City College. Maybe in the world at large.

They have that “can-do smile,” as one man said of one woman faculty member in a meeting. These cis-female heterosexual white women act to support the college as a unit, which means the largely white-male coded enterprise of the university. I have never heard any of these women discuss or challenge racial assumptions when bias is clearly in the air. I have never heard any of these women use the word “diversity” in contexts in which policy and hiring are being decided.

These women appear to get along well with those magical beings, the cis-males who are also the real white power in the room. 

These women must not ask too many questions or sound too bold.

Or they, too, would be vilified, overlooked for positions of power at the City College of New York. They know that.

*

My own body has had a history of being weaponized against me at City College. Regular attempts had been made to exclude me, to overtly silence me. Starting with. The body.

Over my dead body will I be a conventionally “feminine,” contrite and silent woman. Over—my—dead—.

I’ve been character assassinated for who I am and what I look like. 

*

There I was on the video. The woman leading the Zoom classroom. I am being told by my beloved students, those people I feel I work for and have so cared about, as individuals and as a group, that I am not allowed to read a Black woman’s literary text in their classroom. A white woman. There are codes. Rules. I broke their rules.

I have been silenced. Claudia Rankine, too, has been 

silenced.

I have been cancelled. Cancel culture had arrived in my Zoom classroom. And not because I did anything unethical or wrong.

*

As Americans watch the execution-style murders of Black citizens by local police, videotaped by bystanders or powerless loved ones, or, perhaps, by the victim himself before being pronounced dead; as we watch the daily disrespect directed at people of color even in globally diverse New York City on subways and streets and buses and in businesses and on jobs; as we watch the finances of CUNY—a college system designed to serve urban New Yorkers, who are mostly people of color and/or might come from new immigrant families—downsized to a pittance, how many among us can say, like bewildering Republican Senator Tim Scott (SC) did say after President Joe Biden gave his national address before the US Congress earlier this year, that racism doesn’t exists in America? Who can say that? Scott said this. A Black man from South Carolina said this. 

Racism obviously exists. Racism shapes every minute of the world people of color circulate in, try to live within, try to breathe in. It infiltrates every mainstream American institution. I do not blame my students for misapprehending me. I wished they had quieted down and let me speak about issues of reading, irony, context, and Black literature. Just let me speak. For a minute. So I could be who I actually am, and not what I look like to you. I am a challenging and interesting professor, who cares about you. I am not appearing before you as a stereotype of a “white woman.” I am a real person with my own authentic ethics and values, ones you probably agree with.   

To understand my positioning within the classroom that day is to consider what the larger cultural context of “the white woman” might mean to many Americans. As Terri D. Conley has shown through a published psychological study, women who appear white, unlike men who appear white, become racially “marked” in US society. Surveying people of color on college campuses, Conley’s research team discovered that many people do hold considerable stereotypes about “white women,” and that these all come directly from the American media images and visual entertainment.

I would add that all Americans, including many white-appearing women themselves, have similar understandings of what it is to be, to appear to be, a “white woman” in American culture. And whatever I may “look” like, I do not share these beliefs. I do not embrace them.

…there I was on a Zoom screen, my “white woman” face on camera, my own hypervisibility determining the stereotypes about women who might look somewhat like me.…

To understand these stereotypes, I want to re-visit a short history of entertainment culture and US representation, specifically about the “white woman” as she first appears in American classic cinema, or “Hollywood.” Ever since the early Hollywood studio set up industrial shop, and made budget films by the dozens per month, it was inventing and re-creating and circulating the image of what is known as the Hollywood blonde.

Conley’s investigatory data interestingly includes an interesting perception on the part of the people of color from different ethnic groups and races surveyed: that “blonde” femininity is specifically how many non-white Americans perceive gendered whiteness itself. The “white woman” is a “blonde.” I want extend Conley’s findings to suggest that white “femininity” is also perhaps viewed as figure not only of white femininity but of white racism. The “blonde” figure is a bold one, in that “she” filters, embodies, and communicates as well as absorbs a number of the racist ideologies embedded in whiteness, and its hegemonic dreams.

The “blonde” in US popular-culture media stands as a conflicted symbol of racial difference as well as white-female embodiment. Take the “bombshell blonde” of white commercial cinema in the the early days of classic Hollywood, as perhaps represented in the 1933 classic King Kong. The film, of course, is the product of the overtly racist Hollywood milieu of its time period, both on and off the screen, when Black actors typically were relegated to minor servant or “mammy” roles. And the female “blonde” is portrayed as both “bombshell” and as fair-haired “angel” in this film. The figure of white femininity alludes in this film symbolically to Venus and other sexual goddesses in the scene on the boat in which she is outfitted, wearing what she calls her “prettiest” dress—one whose lines appear to draw a V-shape around her womb area down to her pubic bone (for the occasion of a screen test for the motion picture in which she will appear as “white heroine”).  

I am arguing that this “feminized” figure so well illustrated in the classic version of King Kong is not only invented by a white-male-centered arena of early-classic US film, but also that this feminized white figure radiates the racial markings the industry itself wrestles with, and usually tries to condemn. Sexual-racial difference makes for good entertainment. It also has to be out-ed and eliminated. Like the “Kong” figure in the film, “her” figure is very threatening.

Fay Wray plays the “blonde” actress named Ann Darrow, a “white woman” who is model of white-cultural femininity early in the film: she both faints in a food line and she makes it clear she is no woman to be “bought” no matter how impoverished she may appear to the film director who offers her a job. Virginal and innocent, she faints a lot throughout this film, so that another heroic white male can set her back on her feet.  A symbol of Hollywood cinema’s internal racism and white hegemonic ideality, her figure is “purity itself” but bifurcated. She’s “blonde”—but because female blondeness also can represent a sexual siren, the semiotic activity in her image on the screen is changeable. Her identity cannot be fixed, not quite; it is always in flux. Her “blondeness” invokes not only white racial purity—being as white and white as white can be; it also signals the racial uncertainty concealed in this film, because of Ann’s wayward cultural femininity and the erotic energy she signifies. 

In other words, “her” power to arouse the white man in the heterosexist love story makes her the very emblem of gender and racial difference, that oscillating uncertainty principle as fetish and monstrous in King Kong as the “exotic” island that the huge ape comes from. Ann is both a sign of white man’s property and wealth, and a sign of white cultural hegemony’s on-going slippage away from “proper” and proprietary dominance. Another way to view the embodied chameleon-like charisma of the white “blonde” female body in this film is through the constricted and yet playful role she offers: strong and determined, afraid and dependent upon “a man” to restore her equilibrium. Her image encodes the battle for white empire in King Kong. It is an empire that will be lost over and over, while the cinematic narrative continuously attempts to re-impose it, or seek its white-colonial restoration.

In the well-known story, Ann is hired by an American director to make an “adventure film” on the remote, vaguely located island loaded with references to the Freudian “dark continent” of Africa. The natives appear Black with African features in the film, and their mis-en-scene landscape features primordial beasts like dinosaurs, as well as the gigantic Kong—whose visible monstrosity alludes to the strangeness both of this “unknown” territory and Black culture, too. Kong is not only a projection of the bestial fantasies and phobias of whiteness as it confronts blackness. He is also a he-man caricature of human cultural masculinity on steroids. Kong pounds his chest upon slaying any perceived competitor for Ann’s flesh. Kong’s sexual appetite for a young “bride” must be sated, so the local villagers in all their “primitive” strategies offer their own virginal women as sacrifice. When they see Ann’s “blondness” and “beauty,” they offer the white men “owning” Ann several times the price in exchange of one of the Black village maidens. Ann’s “blondeness” is a financial but also sexual and racialized transaction, as they literally say they want “to trade.” As the film director character admits to his crew, “there aren’t too many blondes around here.” And if the racist implications valuing the “blonde” white woman over multiple Black women are not already clear, they are once stated out loud—not by the white “adventures” and purveyors of American visual entertainment, but by “the Chinaman” shipmate, another racialized caricature in this film, when he reports Ann has just been abducted from the ship by “a crazy Black man.” 

Bestiality, the monstrosity of the giant gorilla, white-coded myths about Africa itself, and the strange ways of the “Black savages” to the white colonial “adventurers”/ American filmmakers, are all written onto the blonde female spectacle as “she” spends much of the time in the film screaming her head off.  No one can forget Wray’s powerful screams in King Kong. Or the way that big guy with his masculinist longings for female flesh, Kong, handles the figure of Wray portraying Ann. He toys with her body menacingly, shakes her around in the grip of his huge hand. That is, he does so until her white-male rescuer does his colonial heterosexist job, getting Ann back, rescuing her and preparing to marry her. 

Yet promise of heterosexual nuptials under white entertainment codes of romance and the end of the narrative film are still not fulfilled. One more time the “blonde” (“heroine”) must face Kong’s ruthless treatment, this time in New York City, where the director’s commercial entertainment marketing plan goes awry, Kong breaks his chains, and, in that famous scene at the film’s conclusion, crawls up the Empire State Building waving Ann’s limp body in his hand. Everyone knows how the story concludes. The “blonde,” the hyper-white feminized damsel in distress, is restored to white safety at the same time that white hegemony is restored and the infiltration of darkness and monstrosity is overcome. White people in the 1930s film audience can leave the movie house dropping their empty bags of popcorn shredded on the floor for the Black janitor to clean up. Tension is relieved, for one more white night in Hollywood fantasy. 

In another much later-classic US film, the Lora Meredith figure played by actress Lana Turner from Douglas Sirk’s 1959 version of Imitation of Life represents a blonde-bombshell “white women” gone too far, her “imitation of life” as a fictional actress and figure of white hegemony becoming a figure of its own falsity. Here, the Hollywood blonde is to blame for racism in American culture. Here is the white woman as clear figure of privilege and narcissism, basic stereotypes of white femininity today. A figure for white narcissism in general, Lana/Lora, in her bleached “performance” blonde hair, a body wrapped up nicely in those extraordinary “Sweater Girl” shoulders and glittering dresses showing off her tiny bee-waist, illuminates her white oblivion to the fact of racism. Lora/Lana—both the “actress” and the actress—cannot be separated from the structures of this “imitated” film figure and its white-female representation by Hollywood. In scenes of sexual harassment with white-male Harvey Weinstein-like predators behind the entertainment industry of the 1950s, scenes showing Lana/Lora’s sexual belittling by men who want to run her career may be affirmative to white women melodrama audiences seeking a career and facing harassment and diminishment on the job. But director Sirk built into his melodrama a critique of white racism as figured just so by Lana/Lora. He does this in contrast to the creation of a figure of victimization, the non-performative, non-imitative, Black maid, Annie (played by Juanita Moore). 

Thus, as Annie faces much graver problems of poverty, social disregard, and racialized invisibility than does Lana/Lora in her career and this film plot, as well as facing trouble from her “passing” daughter rejecting her own mother’s dark skin color, Annie’s life leads to illness and early death. Lana/Lora’s ignorance of Annie’s life as an African-American mother and her employee is made tragic in this film. But after Annie’s death, in a funeral she has pre-arranged, Annie shows that she knows something of performativity, too. Annie’s funeral parade with her now-unseen body hidden in a coffin is driven by four white horses to the sound of Mahalia Jackson’s wailing, gorgeous, singing spiritual—quite a melodic melos-symbol for the “lost” body of African American maternity and culture. The Black daughter, Sarah Jane (played by Susan Kohner, who was not an African American woman), returns briefly to her mother’s side, wailing at the coffin. Then in the last shots of the film a contrite but satisfied Sarah Jane slides easily into the car containing the precious “white family.” In the car, Lana/Lora’s bright-blonde daughter Susie (played by Sandra Dee) is seated next to her mother; and Lana/Lora’s love interest Steve is in the front seat, playing daddy and future husband and clearly in charge of all the women. The “passing” Sarah Jane can now stop pretending she’s “white.” She is white. She’s finally been integrated into the American white-family vehicle and the “progressive” wing of the Hollywood industry allows her to be both victim and white-female at once. The Sirk version of Imitation of Life concludes when these white ideological premises about skin and normative family life, sexually, and racial difference, are completed by Sarah Jane’s move into the car’s rear seat. 

*

The figure of the “blonde” and her symbol as a “white women” in general is this conveyor of racist messages and bits of stereotyped information, which her “femininity” can neither absolve nor ignore. This figure weaves through countless other media narratives in US pop-culture today through multiple television cable news outlets. She is not always a blonde these days, but often is. In political-media culture, consider the blonde “chilliness” of “white woman” Hillary Rodham Clinton, whose very power as first lady, senator, secretary of state, and twice US presidential candidate—breaking so many of those proverbial ceilings for women—has made her the “white woman” America wants to forget. Her “cold and calculating” media image, her supposedly disingenuous “white female” personality, her arrogance and narcissism right out of the Hollywood blonde, has repeatedly been dismissed in real life by HRC’s personal friends. HRC can laugh and make jokes with the best of them, they have said. Nevertheless, Clinton remains the image of America’s most uptight, arrogant, uppity “white woman” on the planet—or at least the country. 

She is a “natural ally” of Wall Street, people say. While few male candidates for major office survive ridiculously expensive US campaigns without Wall Street corporate endorsements and money, only HRC has been thus targeted as so-very-Wall-Street complicit. HRC’s obvious brilliance, and her sustained life-time commitment to women’s issues and African American political concerns, has been eclipsed on the national stage by the US mainstream media’s frigid, controlling, big-money-corrupt “white woman” stereotype—a made-to-order image. The closer she came to the presidency and the height of international power, the more these stereotypes about HRC circulated in the media. Meanwhile, in the last election cycle, a competing liberal male figure Bernie Sanders played very nicely against and upon such an image of an American white woman.[1] And so could Donald Trump. HRC became the monstrosity of a Kong-like creature. Lock her up, everyone chanted. And not just at Trump’s rallies.  

Contemporary US entertainment media may have morphed in recent years into social media and its internet culture. But the stubborn figure of the “white woman” as cold, snobbish, rich and controlling—and racist to the core—now plays out in the plethora of “Beckys” and “Karens” roaming media communities. The populate reported events as recurring memes and motifs. Wikipedia informs us that the figure of a “Becky” is a type of “white girl who loves Starbucks and Uggs,” and also id “clueless about racial and social issues.”  And a “Karen” is a grown-up “Becky.” “Karen” is an entitled “white woman,” according to Black Twitter, who has to “tattle on Black kids’ lemonade stands,” using her “privilege at the expense of others.” 

Real-life “Beckys” and “Karens” are certainly out there in the world. (I’d better get rid of my comfy old Uggs; good thing I stopped going to Starbucks.) There’s the horrific story of real-life “Becky’s barbecue,” in which a white woman called the cops on a group of African Americans having a barbecue in an Oakland, California, park; she falsely assumed they were breaking the law. Then there’s the more recent story of the African American Central Park birdwatcher, who asked a “Karen” to leash her dog, because the unleashed dog was frightening his birds. So “Karen” called the police, was media-shamed, lost her job, became notorious, then apologized. The theme of the pathetic, entitled, “white woman” in these “Karen” stories is great for the media because it sells a lot of subscriptions. This American media loves the “white woman’s” hypervisibility. “She” is like visual entertainment media itself. But “she” is the one taking the blame,” for the money pouring into media pockets. The US media loves her bad manners and her artifice. “She” is a displacement of the media’s worst sins, and American racism itself. 

We must not forget that the Hollywood “blonde” and the frightful “white woman” has been deployed by the Republican Party as currently controlled by Trump (thanks to party leaders’ lack of integrity or ethics). The bright-bottle-blonde hairstyles gathering around Trump at his Florida residence Mar-a-Lago in party photo-ops are more evidences of latent Hollywood culture being used to represent, promote, the now-former president’s white-racist nationalism. While Trump’s former fashion-model wife may not be a literal blonde, other female figures close to him are, or have made themselves into those visual stereotypes, including daughter-in-law Lara (I want to say Lana/Lora) Trump, and daughter Ivanka, a former fashion model who became his close West Wing advisor without a qualification to her name. Ivanka wears her trademark Republican-blonde hair convincingly, with those willowy, coiffed silky straight tresses (that no woman with actual blonde hair would be able to maintain for five minutes); she pairs these tresses with slinky power suits or dresses, Jimmy Choo stilettos and maybe a tote bag under her own designer mark. One might say that the Trump Brand represents advocacy for the genocidal racism of Black and Brown people, a philosophy that is nicely packaged and wrapped up by the Trumpian blonde. We should never forget that “blondeness” for Trump politicians and followers, including the Fox News blonde, is an illusion to the “pure race” theory right out of Hitler’s playbook. Today’s American Republican “blonde” may well directly descend from those photographs of the little blonde Goebbels children, famous for having been murdered by their parents just before the latter committed suicide in Hitler’s bunker—those little ones supposedly so loved and idealized by Uncle Adolf, his signifiers for racial “purity.” 

*

The scholarly territory studying the representation of the “white woman” as a “marked” group is not a bold one, treading as it does into the “racist” ideologies the figure stands for. “Her” figure is easily hijacked by the fascist Right. How can we really discuss these stereotypes about “white women,” since they are such media darlings and so hated? How can an analysis of these stereotypes, as they might even inform non-white American social groups, be useful—at a time during which such harm is perpetuated against people of color by the likes of Trumpian whites?  

Yet it is important to discuss this “white woman” as stereotyped figure: because “she” is not real, “she” is not “herself”—although plenty of white-appearing women imitate the imitation. And why would they do that? Being like the Hollywood blonde brings monetary and security rewards for some of these women. It fills in the blanks of these women’s insecurity, as well as their fear of others like any other white racist. These women undoubtedly have mixed motives. And they are mixed up as well as mixed in motives—voting, as so many white-identifying women did for Trump for president in 2016, even after his sexual harassment of women and predatory lifestyle had been made well-known through the US media.

Here I go back to the scholarly study by Conley, which suggests that “white women” are not racially “unmarked” as white men are in US culture. The cis-male white appears, within the ideology of whiteness, as “the generic human,” as if he is “un-raced.” This appraisal of the white male is not only true for US white social groups but, according to this research, Americans of color. No surprise here. Most of the latter, like the former, are following the same mass-media icons, images, and the racial-sexual binaries they portray.

“White women” do not share the same supposed “neutrality” in their image value, Conley explains. The title of the article reporting this fact says quite a lot: “Beautiful, self-absorbed, and shallow: people of color perceive White women as an ethnically marked category.” 

It should be noted that Conley’s psychology study was limited by number and location. The “participants,” if I am reading the data correctly, number only 110 people, sixty-four percent of whom identified as “female.” Contained within the sample study were the representation of three self-identifying ethnicities in various percentages: African-American (sixteen percent), Latinx (thirty-three percent), and Asian American (fifty-two percent). Limited were the physical sites upon which the individuals were approached; these were “large, urban, West coast colleges,” without college students themselves being “specially targeted [a]though we presume that most participants were students … based on the age mean,” Conley writes. Not only does the data suggests that these ethnic-racial categories of non-white Americans on college campuses view white women (as opposed to white men) through the tightly controlled series of media “stereotypes”—while “white men are viewed in multifaceted ways,” but white women are viewed as “unidimensional.” But also the data in this report suggests that all three non-white groups perceive white women to be holding these stereotypes: “attractive...egotistical…blonde/light haired, dumb, snobby, sexually easy.”

So the white woman, according to this study, is both “egotistical” and sexualized—available for predators. (That explains the Trump vote mentioned above.) Again in Conley’s study, two out of three non-white groups (more female than male, according to the study) listed additional commonly held stereotypes about white women. These are: “conceited, rich…racist… untrustworthy.[2] So the “entitled” rich “white woman” is left holding the racist bag for the white man in this depiction. She’s to blame for white racism. Or at least she makes a convenient target. But don’t talk to her about her entitled racism because she will not tell the truth.

White women, these two groups also perceived in Conley’s study, were believed to be mostly concerned about “their appearance and self-absorbed.” Also, the study suggests, “blondeness” for these non-white groups is associated with “white femininity,” or the self-same horrors of the “white woman” herself.  Recall that “white femininity” itself is a falsity, an imitation. The whitest of white womanhood, the “blonde,” conveys that narcissistic attitude of being “self-absorbed” (“untrustworthy, immoral,” in the language of the survey). Lana/Lora many decades ago was the perfect-pitch representation of all these stereotypes of white womanhood, in Lana/Lora’s steadfast ignorance of Annie’s life, her selfish and false values, and yet her sexualized use by the spectacle of the film to woo audiences, just as the Lana/Lora character is used, abused and sexually demeaned by the film’s male characters.

White women may adopt and mirror these ideologies about themselves, among themselves, making themselves seem to be “the blonde.” But as they work hard to seem “fragile,” and yet also “snobby,” to seem both vulnerable and emotionally dependent and yet also distanced from other people and representational forces, more than a Clairol bleach bottle is required. They must play the dependent role in heterosexual coupling, in the workplace, in the family—all to feel they are doing their job to regulate the sexual as well as racial divide upholding white heteronormative culture.

No wonder the Beckys have to stop the Black barbecue in the park! The Beckys, the Karens, like all the white women from nearly a century of rolling American media images, have to work so hard to keep the world absolute and binary, to keep the “white world” they imagine it is their job to uphold so neat and tidy. Sexual difference and racial difference ideologies run underground, unacknowledged. By whites and non-whites together. Certainly, the structure of race itself cannot be questioned, even if it is based upon its own racist colonial organization. “Race,” like gender, has to remain oppositional. And all interrogations about either must remain suppressed. 

*

If the “blonde,” the “white woman,” is historically and in contemporary US culture still the regulator of controlling images of race, “she” is an image many Americans of color are happy to slap around—maybe just to get the “white woman” off her “high horse,” so to speak, to annihilate her power however it derives from fetish value. “She” is American racism’s white sovereign flag. “She” is the worst of “whiteness,” as it replicates itself generation after generation. 

Bossiness and bitchiness, fragility and emotionalism—all those stereotypes about the “white woman” from the American media might have been stirred in my reading out loud of a racial slur in a Black-authored literary text, especially before a Zoom room of an inattentive, unprepared young undergraduates who were also people of color. Many young African American or BIPOC women students are particularly frustrated, and for good reason. In the media, on the streets, in families, in schools, in job situations, they all confront racism as well as gender bias every day of their lives. They experience a kind of double-whammy of social hatred based on their perceived gender and color appearance.

Students of color have an essential need to speak about white racism in my experience, as well as well as gendered bias. They need to talk about the burdens they bear confronting both. Most students are open, well-prepared to do so, without generating other offensive rhetoric or stereotypes in the process.

But enter in: an Office of Diversity and Compliance, also known as “the Title IX office,” such as the one at my own college. They are called “Title IX offices” after the section in US Civil Rights laws that govern any colleges and universities receiving federal aid—which is pretty much every public institution of higher learning in the country. Unfortunately, the administrators in this office have not shown that they understand how we teach “diversity,” or how we might create and enhance for women, minorities, non-binary and disabled people a socially safe environment. One would think that university Title IX offices, charged with enforcing Civil Rights on campuses across the nation, would be filled with top-notch experts on diversity matters; and that these experts would sift through delicate accusations and records of supposed violations with judiciousness, thoroughness, and thought. And yet what is happening on most college campuses today is that university administrators under Title IX offices are being used to harass and even professionally condemn teaching faculty. In the process, such offices at the upper reaches of a university administrative world are attacking the freedom of speech we now have in college classrooms. They are censoring in truly frightening ways any attempts to have genuine dialogues and intellectual exchange. They are doing so all in the name of supposedly minimizing the fear of protracted lawsuits and “protecting” the institution. But they are deeply harming the institution in the process.

In recent years, offices of “diversity” are, in fact, offering what has been called “chilling effects” on campus, rather than offering legal remedies that would make sense under Civil Rights. By refusing to engage in fair, intellectual inquiries in response to cancel-culture style executioner squads aimed in most cases at college instructors, they are killing the entire enterprise of higher-education. Many institutions these days “farm out” what are often ridiculous complaints to fancy law firms that may not have higher education or students’ educational needs in mind at all. These legal bureaucrats do perfunctory jobs, to give the appearance of “diversity” in action. They are not sensitive educators with classroom experience. Most do not know what we do and could not do our college teaching jobs. They result is arrogant and often sloppy work that serves no purpose—except to dissuade real educators from tackling real material that raises serious if controversial social issues.

My own impoverished institution—continuously defunded by the city and state of New York—simply uses its own haphazard “officers” of “diversity,” to do the worst of the worst jobs. Poorly funded, the City College Diversity office clearly cannot or will not do real investigations any more; for real investigations take employee time and money. Instead, the office works through bullying, pretending, and ignoring authentic claims that merit a serious approach. To outright dismiss allegations of the most serious nature is one technique to deal with a lack of funding. To “fudge” in a “investigation” on finding and analyzing real facts is another technique to appease the neoliberal money gods in my university’s hallowed corridors. They make a calculation to tamp down potential lawsuits. But they often miscalculate. And at my institution many mistakes have been made by this office and many lawsuits have ensued as a result.

But note that in the case of a CUNY college, to create the conditions of a lawsuit by inept Title XI offices is not the worst scenario. This is because, whatever mistakes are made by these poorly-financed and staffed, badly managed offices, the New York State Attorney General Office by law has to defend. Dysfunction at CUNY so-called “Diversity” offices is simply pushed onto the State AG to sort out, a waste of tax-payer funds. Instead of using state money to better support and educate New York State’s diverse higher-ed student population, money is used to clean up the failures of the CUNY “Title IX office” in holding back lawsuits.

*

When I was investigated as a faculty member this winter by the City College “Title IX office,” the diversity officer in charge did not take into account most of the materials and testimony I had offered at her request. Then, she produced a document, which she called a “findings,” but which I read as a rather random series of “complaints” about me by one student, a quote from the CUNY Title IX policy, and other paragraphs meshed together in such a rhetorically senseless way that the document appears to be a cut-and-paste job without the paste. But I can see that the nonsensical nature of this document, in all its vague disconnected ambiguity, serves a purpose. No one can actually dissect or critically understand such a piece of writing written about (or against) a teaching professor. Innuendos proliferate. Facts, however, are pretty non-existent, or used in de-contextualized finger-pointing ways.

To obscure while nevertheless criticizing a teacher in a classroom without solid evidence or well-presented arguments is to dissemble. This is the neoliberal university at its most destructive.

“Diversity” as an office, at least at my own institution, is now a fetish term. It is a purposely misleading term, a symbolic “identity” that does not exist. It is a fetish in that it covers up the lack of “diversity” through administrative processes that it uses as a glossy shield—covering up the lack of care for true diversity progress by the university. Assisting the process of fetishism is its “job” of producing documents that are rhetorical-legal hogwash. As part of the neoliberal agenda, this fetish also participates in a hidden kind of authoritarianism we now experience as instructor-employees of the university. Professors and university educators, those who teach thought itself, are the natural “enemy” of the “Diversity” office’s fetishistic goals. How dare we ask questions? How dare we ask our students to do the same in a class setting in which race is under discussion.

Sadly, scholars like myself who have focused on gender and race for decades within the very fabric of our teaching, research and written work (what the state has given us salaried positions supposedly to do) are then not allowed to lend assistance toward a supposed university goal: which should be the creating of more authentic, thoughtful, and caring forms of diversity and empowerment for students and all members of a college community. To a structure based on appearance and fraud, our knowledge is treated as a danger, a threat. “Diversity” becomes a byword for the false front it no longer represents. It is a word now for its own emptiness and failure—at the Neoliberal U.

*

The City College of New York may be part of one of the most diverse urban college systems in the country, that of the City University of New York. I am employed at the original CUNY campus, with its proud history of educational access to the urban working classes throughout New York City and the Tri-State area. My particular CUNY campus is located in the heart of west Harlem—just uptown from fancy ivy-league Columbia University, and yet worlds away from such privilege and wealth. My campus is not surrounded by chic restaurants and student meet-up diners. It is surrounded by bodegas and old men playing checkers on tables set up along sidewalks, along with impoverished street vendors selling cut fruit and cheap supermarkets.

And yet in spite of City College’s location in Harlem, NY, and the college’s historic stated mission, the politics inside the college repeat racist and gender-biased narratives and language on an everyday basis. These politics enact a violence overt “Leftist” policy would overtly seek to thwart. The victims of this violence are especially people of color, people who identify as non-binary, or cis-females in the college community who do not adhere to stereotypical social codes that “re-perform” (to invoke Judith Butler’s term) those static binary gender expectations reproducing cultural “femininity” as an appearance.  

These violent politics that have so long swirled within the walls of this university are misty, not easy to discern. They are more identifiable for what they do not embrace. They do not embrace gay cultures and transgender people. They do not embrace or accommodate the physically disabled, so that on-campus classes are extremely difficult for such persons to either lead or to attend due to unmitigated, old building designs that are non-negotiable if one has a handicap. They do not embrace non-white or non-heterosexual cultural symbols, thus giving less value to cultural topics that might signal minority or gay/non-binary “intrusion” into the whiteness field of study. They do not embrace the persons who might identify as non-white or non-heterosexual. “Out” lesbians and gays need not apply. I’m not saying there are not exceptions, or tiny moments reflecting social progress. What I’m suggesting is that the traditional white and cis-male heteronormative leadership of the college and its unquestioned sexist-racist-able/ist values have long subsumed City College without serious address, let alone a much-needed structural overhaul.  

Leadership at the highest level generally reflects the failure to seriously address City College’s significant diversity problems. I mentioned above the crisis I perceive in our humanities leadership based on gender and race bias, one I find that is repeatedly endorsed by campus power elites. But now I want to consider another example of an even higher-level position, that of the City College presidency. City College has had but two women presidents in its long history. One identified as Black, the other as white. And both were treated miserably. Both were run out of town on a rail not terribly long after being hired to the office.

When both women presidents were hired, their gender was celebrated. They were heralded, praised (the first even had the last name “Moses”). They were considered “firsts.” Important women! To lead us out of whatever leadership vacuum had been left standing at City College, like stagnant water.

Each of these women presidents at City College seemed ambitious and with plans. They came to campus with high hopes of making progressive transformations under their leadership. And yet both quickly were undermined, either by the college faculty, or their very own deans, or both. The college, per se, went against them politically. Both were forced to resign—literally hounded out of office—their professional reputations in tatters.

Neither of these women were bad presidents. In fact, for all their minor faults, their failures were exaggerated and their reputations vilified. As I look back in time, over all my years on campus, I can now judge that these two women presidents probably were the best we have had. Not only did both women presidents try an open-door approach to leadership, reaching out to and being readily available to faculty, students, and staff. But each showed serious concern about the diversity issues abounding on our college campus. Both worked to change and improve conditions for women and minorities at City College during their periods in office. The second president, Lisa Coico, actually took the initiative to create a major task-force on inclusion and diversity on campus, which revealed in detail just how badly treated many women and minorities had been. The task force was very public and conducted serious research work. A well-developed report was published and made widely available to the campus community. It suggested that we develop policies that then no one wanted to hear about, no one wanted to follow. 

When this second woman president was out, her job open again, the official search committee seem to fail at finding an external qualified candidate for the college presidency. No qualified women or minorities need apply. The message rang clear. Thus, in a lack of suitable candidates, an insider, yet another white male, was hired to lead the college. Our current president was once hired as an assistant professor just about the same year I was. It is not likely he was not sexually harassed, having his college career put at a hault and his tenure in jeopardy. It is not likely he was demeaned by department colleagues for his clothing, body type, and “sexualized” appearance. Allowed to rise from entry-level professor to college president, his narrative is different than mine. And it is his City College Diversity Office Title IX-ed this year. It is this City College president who signed off on the non-lucid vaguely accusatory report written about and against me as a professor.

Does anyone know or care who I actually am, what I do or have achieved?

Is what I have achieved considered to be my greatest evil?

* 

Overall, the status of women at the City College of New York has been so poor historically that many women, white and non-white, literally betray a kind of battered-woman syndrome. Either they go along with the battering, or they hide in corners and give up. Those who can often leave as soon as possible. They use whatever tools they can to survive.

I often have witnessed women faculty of color who are psychologically and professionally demeaned within groups on campus. These women are often scholars in new and important fields, bringing new materials and resources to then profession. What actions occur against them take place generally in any situation they can: tenure and promotions meetings, and sometimes within funding battles. They occasionally also occur in classrooms, in hallways, in encountering bullying behavior by others.

I’ve defended more than one of these women of color scholars and their fields of expertise in job-action meetings. I’ve also defended our lone-remaining African American male colleague and remaining Black literature expert in similar proceedings. But I have rarely been able to make a true difference. Disappointingly, academia turns out to be a very conservative place. Should not I have known that from the beginning? Whatever made me think my activism would make a structural difference? And since it only appears to annoy most colleagues, who mostly appear deaf to my appeals and resent my complaints, should I give up?

Probably. But I believe that openness on and about issues of social equity is foundational to any democratic educational place. I somehow believe openness itself is at the heart, however broken, of the American college and university system. I keep resisting the neoliberal micro-cultures that swarm and invade and have taken over my own college these past decades. I feel that my actions and openness are part of my teaching. I feel I should not give in or give up.

*

But it is painful. And my personal-professional history is painful to me to absorb and recall. My stories appear to me worse and worse, as I move backward in time. From the first moment I stepped foot on the City College campus as a job candidate, I was gender-harassed. My body was sexually commented upon by a senior male faculty member who also was a member of the hiring committee deciding whether or not to offer me a very competitive job in my field of study. There I was, at my campus interview, having been brought from the Bay Area of California to New York City, and there I was, going through intensive screenings, series upon series of meetings, all of which were supposed to show my job-worthiness and intelligence and readiness for a professional position. And for a short moment, in between meetings, I happened to be standing alone in a hallway. While standing alone, this man walked up to me, paused, put his face close to my face, put his body close to mine, and said quietly right up to my ear, “Don’t worry, you’ll get the job. You have the sexiest legs.” Then, he quickly walked away. He turned a hallway corner before I knew what had struck me. It was like a truck had struck me. This moment I recall as a surreal blur, but I remember the emotion of revulsion I had, the profound embarrassment I felt, the realization I was a body and not a professional candidate. The experience was what I might call today a walk-by sexual harassment assault. It was technically non-violent, but it was meant to demean, humiliate, and discourage me. I felt hit in the gut. I felt sick.[3] 

So I was offered the job. As a single parent who had also finished the four-year Stanford scholarship I had started the program with, I needed work. I said yes to the job offer. I foolishly thought that this episode was an anomaly. It was not. Indeed, this man, like many others in my department and division, would later continue to harass and also to vilify me, both privately in hallways and before my other colleagues in groups. This behavior by the cis-male establishment at my college would go on and on, even past my tenure and promotions, occasions in my job history during which they would wage war against me, sputter their disrespect and distain for me, literally try to “get rid of me.”

That hallway “assault” on my appearance would morph and be spun, and as I have aged, it has been transformed into other ways of showing hatred and dismissal of my professional value to my department. Sexual harassment and demeaning remarks about one’s appearance are not about “sex.” They are about controlling and harming another person. They are perpetuated by misogyny, divisional binary thinking, and certainly a general old-fashioned fear of women succeeding in the workplace. The motivation behind sexual harassment like this is really not very complex. In my case, they were simply techniques to try to deflate my career, and perhaps to send me away for good. I had to be reminded I was just a body, not a mind. I had to be discouraged from what I teach, read, and write. And how I think about community, the university, and diversity.

My white appearance—seemingly ironically—has also been an issue with the men who would sexually harass and demean me. I was particularly targeted by a white cis-male department chairman, who was to be in charge of my tenure case. He said I was “too blonde.” The “white woman” is a “blonde” figure, and we know what “she” represents! He said my “eyes” were “too blue.” He sexualized my appearance. He said my “skirts” were “too short,” that I was “showing cleavage.” 

Devastated by these sexualized remarks by my chairman about my body, I consulted a couple of trusted colleagues at the time, who assured me that my clothing choices were “appropriate.” While I felt like quitting the job, instead, I asked for a meeting in the dean’s office. I naively thought we could resolve any issues. And at least I wanted them on the record.

A senior female professor who was witness to that meeting with the comment-making chairman and the dean at the time later tearfully confided to me that “no man will ever say those things to a woman in this department again.” But this same chairman then colluded with the dean, to make sure my tenure case would fail. They almost won. Tenure was denied at meeting levels they both controlled. I appealed. I fought like hell. Nearly a year later, I won tenure. And my reputation as “troublemaker” was set for life, through gossip and ignorance about my case. I became the politically “hot” woman. “Hot potato.” The one who scalds you if you get close.

Or call me a witch.

* 

It was not just my “white woman” appearance this chairman objected to. It was my scholarship and teaching in gender studies as a white-looking “white woman,” with all the stereotypes he clearly carried in his brain. He was speaking with me alone, outside my office, as if he was going to give me future advice after I had once again been turned down for an internal scholar grant. Suddenly, this chairman got down on his hands and knees, crawled around my body on his knees, looked up at me, and put his hands up together in a position of mock prayer. He said in a mocking “little” voice (very dramatic): “You are a sentimental heroine. You are saying, ‘Please sir, give me some money.’”  

This chairman’s ridicule of a grant proposal I had written for my feminist-theory book project on the sentimental novel in comparative literature did not stop me from publishing it later on in a prestigious Feminist Theory series at a university press, and then receiving strong reviews in national journals for this work.[4] But his message was clear: my analysis of gender and power in the history of the novel was a threat. I was the arrogant “white woman,” thinking I deserved institutional support for a complex, wide-ranging, too-ambitious analysis, which integrated philosophy, representational theory, gender studies, and pop-culture. I had challenged certain ideals of the western-novel tradition. I was punished by his hyperbole, his sarcasm, and intellectual dismissal. And he would unfortunately represent most of the men in that era I had to work with, who would observe my classes, write-up reports about me, and vote (or not vote) on my tenure and promotions over the years.

*

… i am in those university meetings with white men in charge … my sentences, cut-off … my language, meaningless… 

…i am a placeholder… a doll… an imitation of a scholar…my voice “arrogant” … “It’s not for what you say, but how you say it.” That is what is wrong with me, according to a younger male colleague. My [female] [arrogant] voice. It’s all wrong…

… I am dis-engaged … from my profession…Shut up! Censor yourself! 

You should censor a Black woman writer. Or not. Have a student read the passage. Not you. “White woman,” you are not allowed. You cannot read or speak. You are rude. Arrogant. Entitled.  

Who do you think you are? “White woman!”

I’m going to Title-IX you.

You are “too blonde, too blue,” the eyes… “showing cleavage” Get out. Get out. Tenure denied. Promotion denied. Hide your freaky body and white-blonde hair. 

Women like you do not deserve institutional support. Or a place here. 

You are not a real professor. 

You are the spectacle of racism …. You are embodied on camera. On video. You. 

*

Punished every day of my career for teaching literature through the lens of gender and race issues, for upsetting the canonicity of the White Male Tradition, for being blonde and blue eyed due to my genetics, for making an honest effort to be inclusive in my literary teaching and studies, I must think I am so great. You must think you are so great, arrogant “white woman.” How dare you think you can challenge the structure of literary studies? How dare you think you can be a professor? You. Sex. All about—appearance. Self-absorbed.

Oh, you “white feminist,” you are a performance. You are fake. A pretense. (This is what one of the vocal students in my classroom that terrible day would write about me. And she would write about how all “white feminists” are fake, just “performative,” insensitive, unreal.)

Untrustworthy. Me. 

Lana Turner, Lora Meredith?  White bitch. Me?

White blonde women… should be contrite and avoid confrontation…. 

Be a yes-girl. Decorum shall be observed….

All women should always apologize.

White women             

must follow 

             White Man’s rules. Remain

at all times

contrite.

Receive this condemnation. This is your punishment. For being. You.

*

As one might guess, I did not become a Full Professor of English very easily. And when the US Federal judge told the lawyer for CUNY to “settle” in my favor, that I merited promotion—that illegal bias was at play in my case—the CUNY attorney said I would come to “regret” the lawsuit. Mob-boss talk.

Years have passed. The severe retaliation and internal actions against did not stop. It has changed and re-channeled itself into further retaliatory, damaging, and hurtful ways. Even if it’s a difficult group, who wants to be excluded from the group? I am excluded. Yet the actions against me pale compared to what happened to a woman of color who had applied to the job of dean many years ago, to lead the humanities and arts at City College.  

It was obvious to many—and this was many years ago now—that City College was well overdo to have a non-white and/or non-male person in charge of the Humanities and Arts division to which I belong. So an African American woman was on the college president’s short list for that deanship. And she was on this short list along with two white men. Seemingly out of nowhere, a group of faculty members, my colleagues, signed a petition to protest to the president this woman’s candidacy. This Black woman candidate was removed from the list, by a woman president who was herself politically vulnerable (for being a woman) and who would soon would lose her job anyway (to be replaced by a white male).

A list. They removed her name from a list. 

When I found out what had occurred, I asked for an investigation. I went to the Diversity Office at City College. I wrote up a lengthy “complaint,” which was required. I did not want to write the “complaint.” But I felt I had to tell what I knew. The City College diversity officer in charge at the time, however, goaded me into writing it all up. I had spoken with her repeatedly in her office about my own issues as well as this one. She insisted I officially file the “complaint.” She said, I cannot help you if you do not file a complaint.

Thus, I did it. Finally. I spent weeks writing the document. I took time from my own writing and research to do a thorough job. I researched and attached copious memos, course lists, and other bits of evidence to make my case. I gave a list of witnesses, as required, who agreed to share their own testimony.

I walked into the office and gave her my huge document pile. This diversity officer looked wan and annoyed.

She sat on my “complaint.” She refused to investigate any of these serious allegations for over a year. I waited months, then years. There were stalling techniques during this time. She made an appointment with me by email. Then, she stood me up. She was rude. She treated me dismissively. Finally, when I did speak to her officially, in a long phone interview, I generously gave hours of my time—I think that call was about three hours.

Still, nothing happened. Nothing. At all.

So one day, this diversity officer was fired. An interim who did nothing took her place. Then another permanent diversity officer was hired.

This new diversity officer initially seemed to want to get down to business. She was very nice to me. I had more meetings, and many hours of conversations with this new diversity officer. She seemed anxious to tackle my case. I provided updates with additional documents. I checked in with my witnesses to make sure they were ready and able to testify.  

Time went on. Again, nothing happened.

Finally, the now not-so-new City College diversity officer wrote me a short email. She dismissed my complaint with less than a paragraph. It was sent in the body of a short email, not an official letter or “findings.”

There were no details, no attached letter, no real response. 

She was dropping my case because she said I “had no witnesses.”

I later confirmed that several of my listed witnesses had, in fact, attended appointments in her office. Some of them said they had had never heard from her. 

No witnesses, she said. 

*

It is near the end of January, a cold hard pandemic winter. I check my CCNY email. From the same City College diversity officer who had dropped my own “complaint” with a lame excuse and few words. From the same City College diversity officer who just last month had asked me if I wanted to file a complaint against the students in that undergraduate English class.

Dear Professor Hinton, 

I hope you are well. A student has filed a Title IX complaint against you…

I won’t discuss the exact complaint I eventually got, although it took a while to receive any details or the name of the complainant. But this complaint by a student concerned the Zoom class during which I read a passage from Rankine’s Citizen that included the “N-word.” The student was one of the vocal ones, and one of the students who had not read the text.

I consulted an attorney. He said this complaint was “probably going to go away.” Meaning, the Title IX complaint held no substance legally and seemed ridiculous to him.

Yet a formal investigation ensued. The same diversity officer who had dismissed with so little effort my own complaint of systemic racism and gender-bias on campus—she took this students’ complaint quite seriously. 

Although she hadn’t read the book and had used biased stereotypes against me in writing and in class.

I worked hard to provide a good amount evidence of no wrong-doing on my part. I defended myself as a college instructor. 

Again, I told and retold my story. I was repeating myself. This diversity officer had received all my emails as part of that administrator email group I had reached out to when the classroom incident occurred. She had received the Zoom recording I had sent. She said she had watched it. I kept redirecting her to my emailed details. I kept providing her with clear testimony as to exactly what had occurred in my classroom. I even provided a record of my grading to answer any questions about that topic.

Months went by. No questions were asked of me. There was no interview—with me. I also thought to provide letters from the students who felt fear during that debacle of a class. So I sent copies. I had to research my own files for all this information. Additionally, I provided full evidence through numerical calculations that my final grades were carefully and fairly considered.

The diversity officer was well aware of the stereotypes based on gender and color appearance that were thrown at me, including by the complainant. But nothing I said or did mattered.

After many months, I finally received this diversity officer’s Title IX report, those “findings,” that odd, mixed-together stew of a piece of writing that balanced ambivalence with accusation. I found no “findings” in this document. I can only say what it did not mention. 

It did not mention that very vocal students in raised voices had taken over the class, repeated to me before the class that I was not allowed to read a passage by a major African American writer assigned for the class because of my gender and color, as it appeared on a Zoom screen.

It did not mention that other students had felt intimidated by these students, and later expressed worry and fear to me by personal email.

It did not mention that the vocal students told me over and over that I was a “white woman,” and that as a result, I was responsible for doing them verbal injury and had to “apologize.”

It did not mention that I had, in fact, apologized once, quite clearly.

It did not mention that the angry, vocal students admitted to not having read the book in class. 

It did not mention that I was portrayed as a racist “white woman,” and a racist “white feminist,” who was only “performing” her support for women of color, in two student papers turned in after this class, and that the class blog site was taken up by this topic as if it were fact.

The “findings” did admonish me. Kind of. Again, to have better classroom “decorum.” And it told my chair to admonish me further, although it left open the means and ways.

My chair. My department. They love me so much, as this diversity officer so well knows.

Burn the witch. Go ahead and say it.

*

The misuse of Title IX under US Civil Rights laws continues to flourish not just at City College but seemingly at many colleges and universities these days. Real diversity does not matter, nor does foundational reason and fairness.

At my own neoliberal university, students are starving for social services like that basic operative counseling center that doesn’t exist. Who among us does not need counseling support, especially stressed out academics and college students striving hard to do difficult work? Many of my students lack housing and nutritious food. Many of them have lost employment, too, as a result of the pandemic economy in New York City. These students are suffering. They live under duress.

Meanwhile, their course curriculums at City College are being ripped to shreds by state and city cutbacks, while class sizes of the courses that remain grow and grow. Even in non-pandemic times, we could not fit into the actual classrooms available on campus—classrooms that are dirty, not equipped with working technology or computers, that are physically falling apart. I was actually thrilled to teach on Zoom for a while, because the technology worked. I could show video clips, like those of Serena Williams on those tennis courts cited by Citizen… 

So how is my neoliberal university spending its remaining tiny bits of money amidst all those cutbacks and cut-outs of educational resources?

Money is spent to make up “findings” that my own employment attorney called a document of “trash.” Money is spent to write mix-up pieces of writings to appease certain people, but not really to investigate facts concerning diversity or classroom teaching. Pieces of odd writings are being used to intimidate the faculty.

Against the faculty. Not helping students at all. To keep us all at odds. And silenced.

Colleges like my own in their misuse of Title IX undermine our hard-won Civil Rights, the great American legacy so many valiant citizens fought for, even losing lives. They demanded we have the opportunity for equity under the law. These people who fought for Civil Rights are the ones I most admire in our collective history. They acted to create a nation more just, not one existing in the white-racist colonial mirror.

University institutions using Title IX for questionable reasons are making our precious Civil Rights laws a joke. They are squandering them.

The public university under neoliberal practices always coughs up a budget when it wants to flex its authoritarian muscles. When it wants to discourage, demean, and sabotage tenured, not to mention untenured, faculty, it finds the means to do so.

Yet the public university under neoliberal practices never seems to have a budget to actually educate students. Or to pay full-time professors.

*

Other universities across the country ritualistically engage in what Carly Prnitzke Smith and Jennifer J. Freyd have called “institutional betrayal.” This betrayal occurs, they write, when victims of sexual crimes or sexual-racial harassment file complaints in university contexts asking for institutional intervention, but then the process by which the complaint is handled is either insensitive, or corrupt, or both.[5] This betrayal adds to the climate in which the same kinds of biased, illegal acts continue.

A cultural climate of harassment, retaliation, and discrimination like that reflected at the City College of New York always continues if there is no leadership. It continues if authentic intervention by committed and thoughtful leaders is not made. 

Countless university teachers across the country have now faced, survived, and not survived various forms of “institutional betrayals,” not only including ill-treated legitimate claims but now Title IX investigations that have no evidentiary substance or legal basis. Only a few of these “investigations” get written about; most of us are too scared, too fearful to speak about them—there might be further repercussions. We are living in fear as college professors.

Very few of us have tenure anymore. Very few of us college faculty members can speak up. Or feel that they must.  

But a few very courageous faculty have reported these events and investigations against them across the country; they have had their experiences written about them in the national media. One such professor (untenured, I believe) is Professor Lauri Sheck, an award-winning author and a professor who teaches literature and creative writing at the New School of New York. As a women who appears white, she, too, was subject to a prolonged investigation under Title IX when a student complained that Professor Sheck had quoted James Baldwin using the “N-word” in an oral text in her classroom. The student in this case apparently also was white, according to the reportage. Sheck had quoted this highly esteemed, Black literary author in the context of a textual discussion about race in her classroom. Quoting authors and texts is what we do as English professors in general. She was asking students to consider the meaning of the exact wording used by Baldwin himself, and why he used it, again, according to all media accounts. As a result, Sheck was forced to go through a protracted investigatory process that eventually would exonerate her, but which showed no transparency, offered her no rights during the process, and at a certain point may have threatened her reappointment to the non-tenure position she had long-time held.

Sheck discussed this troubling effect of such investigations in one of her published interviews, saying such actions by the university refuse to “assert the university’s commitment to academic freedom.”[6] Like Sheck, I believe such investigations undermine all that the American university has supposedly stood for, in its supposed mission of encouraging critical thought and open speech. 

Yet another professor on the national stage, Professor Laura Kipnis of the Department of Radio, Television, and Film at Northwestern University in Chicago, was also investigated under Title IX. Her case to me seems an obvious and overt misuse of Civil Rights laws. Kipnis had spoken out critically about “the new codes” under applications of Title IX on university campuses that are “vastly increasing the power of university administrators over all our lives,” as she has written.[7] I may not agree with some of Kipnis’s professional positions on Title IX, but I certainly do agree with her overall assessment that condemns Title IX’s “chilling effects” on campus when so clearly wrongly applied. Kipnis herself was subject to the Title IX complaint when two female students complained about Kipnis publishing an article on this issue. Like Sheck, Kipnis has spoken out about experiencing a non-transparent, drawn-out investigation, in this case for merely asserting her own viewpoint in writing. She, also like Sheck, was eventually exonerated. But it was a difficult process in which she felt she had no rights.

And Kipnis is correct when she writes: “Anyone with a grudge, a political agenda, or a desire for attention can quite easily leverage the system. And there are a lot of grudges these days.”[8] She is also correct that the current overreach of Title IX campus “codes” and uses encourages “students’ assertions of vulnerability,” in an ironic twist that enforces a kind of fragility upon students that might leave them unprepared for the world that exists beyond the university walls. Thus, while students are encouraged to act “vulnerable,” so fragile that certain topics are now banned from many college classrooms for fear of “triggering” students, the very same students are encouraged to file harmful and aggressive complaints against their teachers—no matter how out of proportion such complaints are to actual Title IX violations.

Even in the most limpid of cases, long investigations are being pursued by many universities, according to Kipnis. She knows this first hand. Since she began writing publicly in higher-education journals about these issues under Title IX, Kipnis has corresponded with many professors across the country. These professors, who do not come forward publicly, admit to her that they live “in fear of some classroom incident spiraling into professional disaster.” She confirms that censorship is the result of this instilling of fear among the faculty: “professors … now routinely avoid discussing subjects in classes that might raise hackles.”[9]

Like I am now afraid of teaching my most beloved subject, Black women’s poetics and race theory.

Speech is being silenced everywhere in the neoliberal social and political world we now find ourselves in. And reality is being distorted in ways so overt that our US democracy, that “work in progress,” appears to be progressing backwards. So how are we to teach students to speak about ideas, words, and learn that diversity is also in the multiple ways we use language and thought? And that “identity” is not a label. A person is not a stereotype.

Looking white and a woman, I still thought I would be allowed to speak, to teach. To read. Out loud.

I feel stymied. And the freedom of discourse I thought could blossom in a college classrooms 

is faltering. 

Students are being stunted and not allowed to grow into their potential. Students are being falsely appeased and diminished, just as I have been systematically diminished as a woman scholar of gender and race studies. 

Systematic. This stunting of students.

Pretending to “support” students like pretending to “support” diversity. But not doing what will help students thrive and gain an education.

Who wants BIPOC students in a city like New York to thrive? Who wants them to be smart and educated enough to read, to analyze, to discuss race and class and gender openly and without fear of retaliation by a white-coded organization, the neoliberal university?

 Who? 

(I find myself echoing Amiri Baraka, “Who…who…”?) 

On purpose. Stunted. Of intellectual growth. Educations diminished. BIPOC students. African American students. First-generation immigrant students. 

City College of CUNY is in failure mode. Its supposed “Diversity” office is part of that failure. 

Perhaps the American university at large is too full of its own internal contradictions to be a place worth savaging, as some of my colleagues writing other pieces in this issue have suggested. Perhaps it was all a silly dream, that “the university” ever could be something different than white-coded and authoritarian.

 That it could be a cultural space open to productive discourse.

 That it could be a place in which diversity is not a fetish word but a reality in action.

[1] For an account of media attacks as well as Bernie-camp attacks on HRC, see Susan Bordo’s brilliant if tragic account in The Destruction of Hillary Clinton (Melville House, 2017).

[2] See Terri D. Conley, “Beautiful, Self-absorbed, and Shallow: People of Color Perceive White women as an Ethnically Marked Category,” Journal of Applied Social Psychology 43 (2013), 45-56, at

https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/96379/jasp980.pdf?sequence=1

[3] I have written about this experience recently, publishing one section of that piece, entitled, “University Toxic,” in Wendy Chin Tanner’s and Tyler Chin Tanner’s wonderful illustrated poetry-cartoon collection, Embodied: An Intersectional Feminist Comics Poetry Anthology (A Wave Blue World, 2021).

[4] My book is The Perverse Gaze of Sympathy: Sadomasochistic Sentiments from Clarissa to “Rescue 911,” and was published in 1999 by the Feminist Theory series at SUNY Press. 

[5] See Carly Prnitzke Smith and Jennifer J. Freyd, “Institutional Betrayal,” American Psychologist 69.6 (September 20), 575-585, at 

https://pages.uoregon.edu/dynamic/jjf/articles/sf2014.pdf

[6] See Lauri Scheck’s interview in Colleen Flaehrty, “Another Professor under Fire for Using N-word in Class while Discussing James Baldwin,” Inside Higher Ed (August 7, 2019), at 

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/08/07/another-professor-under-fire-using-n-word-class-while-discussing-james-baldwin

[7] Laura Kipnis, “My Title IX Inquisition,” The Chronicle Review (May 29, 2015) at

http://laurakipnis.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/My-Title-IX-Inquisition-The-Chronicle-Review-.pdf

[8] Ibid, paragraphs 24-25.

[9] Ibid, paragraph 26.