To White Professors

A letter sent by a Bethel College student of color to a white professor with the intent of building relationships.

This letter was sent by a Bethel College student of color to a white professor. It was not sent to the professor anonymously. It was sent with the intent of building a relationship with the professor and in an effort to repair harm and achieve a better education. It is submitted anonymously here to protect the anonymity of the student and the professor. This letter cannot apply to every classroom with a white professor and cannot apply to the lived experience of every student of color at Bethel College. The class that prompted this letter dealt with reading a book about de-colonizing, and the student of color who wrote the letter was the only non-white student in the classroom. This is published here in the hope that students of color may find that this resonates with their experience, and so that white professors may get a glimpse into what it may feel like to be a student of color in their classrooms. 

Dear white Professor,

This class was a lot of work, and I don’t mean that the reading was difficult.

Imagine someone is wearing a blind fold and reaching out to try to grab something, but they have no idea what it is they’re looking for. They think it’s right there but it’s so far and out of their reach. You try to tell them they’ll never reach it from where they’re sitting but they can’t hear you, so you try your best to move the object just a little bit closer. But what good does that do? They won’t ever find it.

That’s how I felt in this class.

I was speaking into an emptiness. There was a huge space between me and everyone else and I had to do all the work in trying to traverse this space and communicate with the class but really no matter how much I would try or how much progress I made through conversation that gap was still unbreachable. And this whole time, I knew it was not and is not my job to close this gap in this classroom in the first place.

I had to explain and defend my perspective, unique in this classroom, for it to be at all present or visible-- for me to be present or visible. That is a lot of work that isn’t pleasant. I often thought about just going and not saying anything, just letting it all go by. It would have been a lot easier, but there were things that weighed heavy on my mind that I needed to say. And I wanted to be visible, and I knew that I had the right to take up space in this classroom.

The class was also isolating because the issues seemed personal to me and only to me. It seemed like the content we were discussing had never been real to the rest of the class. These were just ideas, and we were discussing them as such. Racial Healing Circle Processes teach us that ideas like these are inseparable from our experiences and identities, no matter who we are, and that we need to talk about them that way. Some people want to and can ignore the way they connect with these issues personally, while others cannot and do not. I don’t mean knowing that your land was stolen. I mean recognizing the way in which you are intimately formed by your place in a hierarchy of human value.

When studying content like this, humanizing the issue, humanizing everyone discussing the issue, and having a clear and explicit understanding of how and from where each of us come into this conversation is a critical first step.

I hope some of this makes sense,

Your student