White Guy Habitus in the Classroom

A couple of years ago, junior faculty in our department—most of them people of color and/or women—requested a meeting with senior faculty and a senior administrator to discuss concerns they had with teaching. One of their main concerns was that they felt they were being judged negatively by students, especially when they taught emotionally charged and politically volatile courses such as social inequality or race and ethnic relations. Students, they stated, tended to ding them on course evaluations for “lack of objectivity” in lectures and assigned readings. Furthermore, they observed that students did not always give them the respect that they believed they deserved. They were concerned with these patterns, both for pedagogical reasons and because they knew that student evaluations were part of the way that they were compared to their colleagues for merit ratings, promotions, and tenure decisions. Students’ views of them were important, and they were consequential. The administrator and senior faculty acknowledged that race and gender biases on the part of students—especially in a course on social inequality, sex and gender, or race/ethnicity—tended to place faculty of color and/or women faculty at a disadvantage. Their advice was to be rigorous teachers and to insist that their students use formal and respectful forms of address (e.g., referring to the teacher as Professor so-and-so, or Dr. so-and-so, rather than by the more familiar first name address). This advice, although surely intended to help women and/or faculty of color successfully navigate often subtly racist and sexist classroom dynamics, was not satisfying. It seemed to me that by ignoring the race and gender dynamics of the classroom in which white males are the professors, we were missing an opportunity to understand an important part of the reproduction of race and gender inequalities—