Now I want principally to remark that for much of its history, Palestine and its native people have been subject to denials of a very rigorous sort.
Edward Said
When I first read Edward Said's The Question of Palestine, I was homeless. A newly-minted, forty-something PhD without housing! From Chicago, I went to California, again, this is the late '90s, where I had lived for three years back in the mid-1970s.
I met with faculty from one of the Cal State system campuses, after I was encouraged to come out and perhaps teach in a department that specialized in black nationalism. My thing? No. but it was something of an opportunity. Maybe. We'll see.
But it didn't work out. I was not the professor these black faculty were looking for, and I saw in them a group of alpha males. For openers.
Many years later, homeless again but seeking employment at a college or university after returning from teaching in Ethiopia, I accepted an offer from an HBU in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. This religious, conservative, black woman administrator knew I wasn't one of "them". I knew the history of Tuscaloosa. George Wallace and knew I was, even though I had only been south once, and that was in 1969. I accompanied my grandmother to the funeral of my great-grandmother in New Orleans.
But here I was in a hotel, with two cats and some suitcases, more filled with books than clothes. The campus that hired me was Presbyterian, while I had been raised and educated Catholic. But no longer anything! Then those dreads of mine!
The older black administrator remained suspicious as if I might be a secret criminal or terrorist come to infiltrate their well-landscaped campus--on the other side of the railroad tracks from the U of Alabama. One black faculty of English told me that she didn't vote for me. I didn't vote for you! And I had read her poems and knew of her work prior to coming there. I agreed to teach American literature, knowing that it would be not my version of American literature; but, rather one that was cleansed of any reference to the violence of white supremacy.
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