For a time, it was fashionable for whites to teach African American literature or Muslim women's literature. On the other hand, I remember trying unsuccessfully to convince a white English department chair that there was a need for a Women of Color course or a Black Studies course. In 2000, at this University of Wisconsin campus at Parkside, after an ugly scene of abuse of power, I was given an office in the education department, ultimately, where I was among a few other colored faculty, including a black female chair. I had taught at the college levels for decades by then, but my presence in the English department would have send the wrong message to the predominately white student body.
I had taught African American literature courses at Loyola University Chicago where I received my doctorate in modern American literature before arriving at the University of Wisconsin Parkside. In fact, I had been teaching literature since the 1980s. Bypassing the chair of English, I introduced myself to the white male South African chair of Ethnic Studies who agreed to me teaching an African Diaspora course, as well as that Women of Color course before the spring term. In the meantime, the women (white) of the campus didn't want to have anything to do with me; they never invited me to a meeting.
It wasn't long after I arrived at another University of Wisconsin campus that the chair, not the chair who hired me, but one keen on informing me that I wouldn't be staying long. She happened along in her car one day, and asked me to hop inif I wanted a lift. I had been shopping for a small, collapsible chair.. I was leaving a little shop in the town where I just purchased a small, collapsible chair. I noticed she had a friend in the passenger seat, so once I settled into the backseat, she glanced back at me, saying something about how fortunate I was to find something portable. Easy for you to move when the year is up, she added.
I sat along in my home one day recalled the moment this woman approached me, waving a publication of the Callaloo Journal, a Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters. A smile filled her face while her hands flipped through the pages of the journal, landing on the first page of her article. I stood nodding and smiling but finding no evidence of sisterhood in her sharing gesture. While I stood next to her, I recalled that her credentials indicated that she was a scholar in the study of Anglo-Saxon literature.
At the end of the fall term, she praised my accomplishments in the classroom: Above the call of duty! When I returned in spring, however, I heard nothing of those accomplishments and neither did anyone else, for I had only a few students signed up for my classes and only one older white female faculty dared speak to me the whole term.
Another white faculty's scholarship was in history, Western history; however, she taught courses in Muslim women's literature.
I doubt if the literature of African American and Muslim women is so fashionable now.
I taught African American women's literature at the University of Wisconsin Madison where, again, a black woman scholar in black studies hired me and then left. I was scheduled to teach what was Professor Nellie McKay's course, African American Women's Literature. McKay had come to the city and established African American studies decades before. I had talked with her once, by phone, when I was still at Parkside. I asked her what was going on? Why so much fear and hate?
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