White male domination strikes again

As a queer Asian woman, I was excited at the prospect of taking classes that encompassed race and gender in college, especially at one as prestigious as USC. While I knew that it would be a predominantly white institution, I read of USC’s dedication to diversity and inclusion in the classroom and its alleged diverse faculty. But, many classes relating to race and gender had one thing in common — a white, cis-gendered and heterosexual man teaching it. 

To be honest, it’s not surprising — it’s expected. As Tsedale M. Melaku and Angie Beeman of the Harvard Business Review write, “Academia isn’t a safe haven for conversations about race and racism.” It’s just another white space where white male privilege is the norm and women of color become background noise. 

What makes it even more aggravating is that these white male professors don’t truly understand the intergenerational trauma and raw emotions that women of color experience and feel. Following sociologist Adia Harvey Wingfield’s concept of systemic gendered racism, professors in PWIs dominate conversations about race and gender through the dominant white male perspective which only perpetuates the racial inequality they attempt to discuss. To many students, it covertly sends a message of white male dominance, as the white man’s perspective becomes the only perspective. They control the narrative and render minority voices futile. 

In Beeman’s study on minorities’ experiences in academia, she wrote, “When discussions of systemic and institutional racism do happen, white people often want to run the conversation. In her forthcoming book, Beeman names this phenomenon ‘liberal white supremacy’ — the tendency of white people to constantly place themselves in the superior moral position.”

White professors’ understanding of culture, gender and discrimination come from books and lectures. They come from TED Talks. They come from another predominantly white institution. Not to discredit these sources, but hearing and being taught a white man’s interpretation of how he sees race and gender is not only frustrating but also outdated and invasive. Frankly, it feels condescending and like just another one of those eye-roll and side-eye inducing situations. 

It’s tiring to hear the constant, “Well as a white man, I will never know what it truly feels like…” or “Well, not to speak on anyone else’s experience, but personally…”  It just seems like the most my professors can do is acknowledge and move on. 

The issue is, most students in the class can’t just do that. Our gender and race is a lived-in experience. It’s an experience that didn’t just impact me — it impacted my mother, my grandmother and generations of women that have come before me. While my professor can lecture and call it a day, I, and many other students, are left sitting there, still living with their experiences. But despite these stark differences, the one who can leave his so-called “experiences” behind in the classroom is the one leading the lecture. 

This begs the question, why do predominantly white institutions like USC think a white man is, in any way, truly qualified to lecture on issues that they can never truly understand? Why do we always need the white man’s input? Are we truly that reliant on his voice? In these classes, Black and Indigenous women of color’s voices should be the center of the classroom conversation and focus. But is this even possible? The white man is in charge of your grade, how many points you get for discussing; he’s the one that decides whether you pass or fail — the one that can test you on these issues.

I’m not saying white men’s voices don’t hold value. Neither am I starting a hate bandwagon on white male professors. While we can all recognize that we have a much greater diverse faculty, it’s ironic and frustrating that the white cis-gendered heterosexual man is always the center of healing and connecting conversations on issues they perpetuate and create. The problem at hand isn’t the white man themselves, but rather their entitlement and ignorance.

So the next time I walk into my class, I’ll be looking towards the white man once again, teaching me about my own experiences. Ironic, isn’t it? H.P. Lovecraft wasn’t joking when he said, “From even the greatest of horrors, irony is seldom absent.”