Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

672 The Praeger Handbook of Education and Psychology
no effort at civility (apparently at this juncture, why bother?). At one point, the agent, frustrated with
her answers, told her “I ask the questions here ...and ...I have the power to send your butt back.”
Indeed.
IV: The Academy
This section comprises my experiences both as a student and as a faculty member to draw
attention to the experiences and meanings that emerge in different contexts.
As a Graduate Student
Ontario, Canada, the late 1980s. It was my first term in a doctoral program. I was the only non-white
student in a required theory course in which there was only one male. Each week a graduate student
had to prepare one of the course readings for the seminar. When it was my turn, the professor (white
and male) spent the better part of the class trying to undermine my efforts to present the reading.
Rather than direct the questions to the others, he continued to isolate me from the other students,
directing his focus and attention toward me, asking me specific questions each time I tried to generate
a class discussion. He redirected the seminar to topics which he deemed important, implying that
the areas that I had chosen to explore were not the ones that should have been addressed. For the
most part, the other students remained silent. After class a number of women approached me in
the woman’s washroom to let me know that they were uncomfortable with the way this professor
had treated me. They felt that “something was wrong” (the students did not characterize what they
had witnessed as a demonstration of white male racism). One student, acknowledged as one of the
“brightest” students in the program, told me that she could not understand why this professor had
treated me “that way.” She admitted that had he asked her the same questions she too would have
struggled to answer them. I later learned that another student was so disturbed by the events that had
occurred, she had told another student that she had considered dropping out of graduate school (she
was in the first year of her master’s degree).
The public nature of this professor’s actions is significant. Crossing social boundaries tends
to reveal the boundaries. The classroom was his place of institutional and social power and thus
it was the place where he could exert his racial and gender domination without it being read as
such. Identified as an interloper to the social order, my presence could not go unchallenged. His
attempts to silence me, literally and symbolically, also sent a message to the other students—that
they were superior. They deserved to be in the classroom. It is important to add that his efforts to
undermine me did not end there; they continued for the duration of the course. Other incidents
took place in his office, in the margins of my papers, or in his final comments on my term paper
which included remarks on my character, not the content of the essay.
Word leaked in the department about his conduct and one night I received a telephone call from a
senior faculty member, (white and female) who asked me if I thought that I was being treated this
way “because of my race or my gender?” That is, was it racism or sexism?
The above question is important because it points to a lack of understanding regarding the
complex ways in which women’s experiences and identities are simultaneously shaped by multiple
axes of power. It also indicates how white subjectivities have the “privilege” of not seeing “race”
as relevant to daily life. More often than not discourses on gender have examined the experiences
of white women, and discourses of race, when dealing with “blackness,” have focused on the
experiences of men. The assumption that it is both possible and appropriate to separate elements
of my identity marginalizes and distorts the nature of my experiences as a black woman. The
term sexual harassment, for example, has made it difficult for women to identify and analyze
the diverse ways in which women are harassed. I was the only person in the class who could be
visibly identified a member of a racial group. No one else in the course was subjected to that
kind of public humiliation. The nature of this interaction illustrates how strategies of racialization