When I Was White

by Sarah Valentine

  “Can I go?” she asked.

  “Well, you’re brown, aren’t you?” I responded, assuming she was comfortable with that descriptor.

  “Am I?” she asked. I wasn’t sure how to respond. We left it at that, and I did not attend the event. I wondered why my friend, who to my eyes was brown-skinned and a minority, did not identify as such. We were the only two nonwhite students in the Slavic department at the time and traded stories about professors referring to us as “exotic” and making comments about our hair and eyes.

  At the pan-African graduation ceremony, we would receive a black stole embroidered with the Princeton crest; red, yellow, and green stripes; and our graduation year, and we could wear this stole as part of our university-wide graduation ceremony the next day.

  We filed into our seats as the lights in the auditorium dimmed. I sat next to Patrice, a Jamaican doctoral student with long locks and glasses, from the history department. I was excited, and I fidgeted with the program in my hands. In my six years at Princeton, it would be the first time I could stand up and be counted in this group. Was my experience at Princeton more difficult because of my ethnicity? Were my struggles personal or collective, or both? Did we share Africa’s history of disenfranchisement, even if we never experienced that hardship ourselves? Students participating in the ceremony came from different countries, social classes, and educational backgrounds. Some were from wealthy, elite families while some were first-generation college students. Between my defense and graduation, I went home to visit my grandparents. My grandmother, who never went to college and spent her life as a homemaker, had a rare tear in her eye as she said, “When you get your diploma, a little part of me is up there with you.”

  Maybe graduating with other members of the African diaspora meant that our success didn’t just affect the future but also the past and the lives of those who came before us. The ceremony’s theme was “Sankofa: Looking Back to Move Forward.” Sankofa is a Ghanaian term that translates as “Go back and get it” and is the source of the proverb “It is not wrong to go back for that which you have forgotten.” You can’t know where you’re going unless you know where you’ve been. The symbol for Sankofa is a stork-like bird with its long neck reaching backward while its feet face forward. It carries a small egg in its mouth, a precious seed containing the past and future.

  The presenters walked out onto the lit stage and stood beside a table on which lay our stoles. I had entered Princeton as a white student too scared to question my family’s founding myth, and I was leaving as an African American, mixed-race woman with a hard-won sense of self, determined not to take the stories of the world for granted.

  An African dance troupe twirled onstage to the sound of drums, swirling in costumes of blue, yellow, and red. The rhythm, music, and dance were contagious, but observing the formality of the occasion, we all sat firmly in our seats. When the dancers had finished, the presenter said, “Now we will rise and sing the Black National Anthem.”

  The what?

  I rose with everyone else as they began to sing a beautiful but solemn a cappella hymn. I had never heard the song before. I looked around and saw that no one was looking at the programs, in which the lyrics were printed. Everyone in the auditorium seemed to know the song by heart. I grew warm under my heavy robe as I mouthed words I didn’t know and tried to pick up the tune. Would the people sitting around me realize I didn’t know this song? I didn’t even know there was a Black National Anthem. I had not learned this song in school or church. It was never part of my courses on American history. It wasn’t sung before baseball or football games; it did not play at the Olympics when our athletes won gold. I caught some of the words as I hummed along:

  Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us.

  Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us …

  I couldn’t catch it all. The lyrics were dark but hopeful. No dewy-eyed patriotism for the stars and stripes, no glorification of bloodshed or awe at the weapons of war; just the knowledge that our ancestors endured unspeakable horror and that we continue to hope and strive for true freedom.

  How does one weigh the balance of genetics versus lived experience in the equation of cultural belonging? I studied the Russian language for years, studied its literature, culture, history, and people. I lived among Russians on my own and in Russian homes from Moscow to Kamchatka. I could distinguish regional dialects and mannerisms. I knew what Siberians thought of Muscovites and vice versa. I could write, watch soap operas, and dream in Russian. I could talk to dogs and cats like Russians did, even naming myself after my favorite Russian painter. And now I was getting a degree from one of the top schools in the world that ratified my expertise in the realm of Russian language and literature. My knowledge was almost as deep as a native’s. But that didn’t make me Russian.

  Onstage, the speaker announced my name. The graduate next to me, Patrice, swung his legs around so I could get out of the row of seats. I walked onstage, smiled, shook the presenters’ hands, and lowered my head so one of them could place the stole around my neck.

  After the ceremony, I was full of questions and thoughts. I wanted to talk to Angie, who had sat in the audience during the ceremony to cheer me on, about the experience I’d just had. We met near the auditorium doors as everyone filed out and stepped into the early June sun. I was about to speak when she said, “So, if a white person from Africa wanted to participate in this ceremony, they wouldn’t be allowed to?”

  The question was so far from my mind I didn’t know how to answer. It was strange that after such a strong display of black excellence, pan-African community, and culture, that was the thing on her mind. I changed the subject to where we would go to dinner the next night, and we decided on Ethiopian.

  Twenty-eight

  I spent my last days at Princeton wandering around the town with a sense of nostalgia and deep, gnawing confusion. The stately brick and Tudor houses—some more like mansions—the maple-lined streets, and manicured lawns were beautiful, I thought, and I envisioned a future for myself in which, armed with my prestigious degree, passion for teaching, and undeniable expertise in the field of post-Soviet neo-avant-garde Russophone poetics, I would one day inhabit such a fine dwelling and lead a peaceful, affluent, intellectual life.

  Even as I fantasized about my professorial future, a nagging thought burst to the forefront of my mind: Shouldn’t I hate all this? The smug superiority that oozed from every beveled window, the hypocrisy of a town that prided itself on its quaint charm but outsourced its upkeep to workers who couldn’t afford to live there. The false humility of a university whose motto was “In the nation’s service,” but who hoarded its multibillion-dollar endowment like a dragon.

  Like most elite universities in the country, Princeton did not admit blacks or women until the second half of the twentieth century. In my search to discover how my identity fit into my life, I came across a 1910 report titled The College-Bred Negro American edited by W. E. B. Du Bois. The editor queried various elite institutions as to whether or not they admitted black students.

  The replies were dismissive. Johns Hopkins responded, “No colored man has ever been a candidate for a degree here.”

  A representative from Bryn Mawr asserted, “[No] person of Negro descent has ever applied for admission to Bryn Mawr College, probably because the standard of entrance examinations is very high and no students are admitted on certificate.”

  Princeton’s response was a study in ambivalence: “The question of the admission of Negro students has never assumed the aspect of a practical problem with us. We have never had any colored students here, though there is nothing in the University statutes to prevent their admission.

  “It is possible, however, in view of our proximity to the South, and the large number of southern students here, that Negro students would find Princeton less comfortable than some other institutions.”

  I heard the same argument from Russians about why rac
ism did not exist in their country; an absence of black folks equaled an absence of racism. In the universities and in Russia, no one thought about the circumstances that occasioned the lack of black people in the first place.

  I learned through other sources that Princeton admitted its first four black male students as undergraduates in 1945 as part of a military-sponsored program. The university took over two more decades to admit women, beginning in 1969, not primarily to further gender equity or because it believed in the intellectual equality of men and women, but to keep pace with its rival Yale, which had become coeducational a year earlier.

  I could not find any data on when the first black women came to Princeton—whether it was with that first graduating female class of 1973, or if others who were light-skinned had managed to pass under the radar before that, as Anita Hemmings had done at Vassar in 1897. When Hemmings’s roommate found out through a private investigator that Hemmings was African American, the roommate was so traumatized that Hemmings was made to reside in a separate room until graduation. Hemmings was considered the class beauty, and rumors circulated that her dark hair and olive features came from Indian blood. Hemmings and her husband, who was also light enough to pass, never disclosed their racial heritage to their children.

  I found a short description of one incoming freshman’s experience at Princeton University in the 1930s, which suggested again that, though nothing in the laws of the college prevented their admission, African Americans were decidedly not welcome.

  A student named Bruce Wright applied, was admitted, and even won a scholarship to Princeton’s undergraduate program. Presumably, there was no box to check on the application for race or ethnicity, and the admissions office did not know they had granted a coveted spot in their program to a black student. When he showed up for registration and his race was discovered, he was promptly dismissed by the dean of admissions, Radcliffe Heermance, who claimed his entrance scores were not high enough to grant him a place in the freshman class.

  Dean Heermance went on to write a letter explaining that no colored student ever attended Princeton, but there were many Southern students, which was a tradition at the school, and that Wright would be uncomfortable since “as you know there is still a feeling in the south quite different from that existing in New England.” Though the dean admitted he had “very pleasant relations with your race, in civilian life and in the army,” he could not advise Wright to attend Princeton, stating that he would be happier at a school with members of his own race. In the margin of that letter, Wright wrote: “Damn the pleasant relationship; I want to go to college.” In a moment of insight and maybe even compassion, the dean wrote: “A member of your race might feel very much alone.”

  Wright became a judge, eventually serving on New York’s Supreme Court. Princeton’s class of 2001 made him an honorary member, and he was profiled in the documentary project Blacks at Princeton: The Black Experience at Princeton from 1746 to the Present.

  I entered my graduate program at Princeton having checked the box under race or ethnicity marked “White.” After coming out, my friends told me that our program administrator had asked them about my race when I arrived in the department. She wanted to double-check that I was the person listed on my admission form. My classmates covertly scrutinized me and concluded that since I didn’t sound black or seem to identify as such, despite their suspicions, I must be white. Or white enough.

  The difference between Anita Hemmings and me was that I lived in a different time. It was still true that African Americans at Princeton or schools like it “might feel very much alone,” but we were not forbidden from attending. When I formally changed my name and racial identity with the university and my department, no scandal ensued. I was met with unsympathetic dismissiveness by most of my professors but was not cast out. My white friends joked with me and celebrated my new identity albeit in a racist way. The administrator, who had since moved on, would have had her suspicions confirmed. The university hadn’t banished or refused me, as it would have done to students like me who were black and female only forty years before. Should I resent the bitter history of exclusion, or just be glad that the university, along with the country, had made progress? And what about all those who had endured segregation? Could my achievement and the achievement of those like them ever make up for the generations who were denied?

  I felt all these things along with guilt, shame, and self-righteousness. The serene and stately beauty of the East Coast was the only location in which I had really pictured living. New York–style intellectualism was the only model I had, and I was taught that there was none better. Even though by the end of my graduate studies I had traveled throughout Russia, Europe, and a bit in Asia, I couldn’t imagine life, especially the kind of life I wanted to have, in any other part of the country. I supposed my preference for overcast, rainy skies and my belief that they alone cultivated the mind had influenced my choices for travel and study.

  In high school, I was a proud regionalist, asking with rhetorical sarcasm, “How can anyone think or study when it’s always sunny? It’s just not an intellectual climate.”

  I didn’t know there was inherent racism in that statement, the kind that led proponents of environmental determinism in the nineteenth century to believe that the tropical climates of the Southern Hemisphere led the people of those regions to be uncivilized, lazy, promiscuous, and overall degenerate while the bracing weather of Northern Europe encouraged the stronger work ethic, intelligence, and civilized behavior of the superior race.

  These notions weighed upon me more because I was about to leave the East Coast. I had been accepted into a Mellon postdoctoral program for the humanities at the University of California–Los Angeles, beginning the following autumn. When I told Professor Savich the good news of my acceptance and that I had been selected for the position by the faculty of UCLA’s Slavic department, he snorted, “I’m surprised they chose you; it’s a very patriarchal department.”

  Earlier that same year at our national conference, I was following up with a faculty member from another university on a question I’d asked during a panel. Savich, who had attended the panel as well, joined us to interject, “I see you’ve met Sarah. She always speaks her mind.”

  I’d taken it as a compliment at the time. I thought scholars were supposed to engage in critical debate. Later, I came to realize he was implying that I didn’t know my place. Screw him, I thought. I’d taken pleasure in proving Ivor Savich wrong when he’d underestimated me in the past, as when I applied for an interdisciplinary fellowship at Princeton’s Center for the Study of Religion. The project was funded through the Templeton Foundation; it was a big deal. When I asked Professor Savich to look over my proposal, he conceded that the topic was ambitious and intriguing but would never be accepted by the center’s director, who was a well-known professor on the sociology of religion.

  “I applied for a similar project, and he rejected my application,” he said. “He’s a sociologist and doesn’t understand literature.” I submitted the proposal and the project was accepted.

  Despite Professor Savich’s skepticism of my abilities, I had looked up to him; he epitomized the kind of intellectual I aspired to be. Harvard educated, he was the leading authority in his field. His work was respected, and although our personalities clashed, I admired his meticulous, insightful scholarship. But I realized I was glad to be leaving the circumscribed world over which he and others like him lorded. As I thought about Los Angeles, which may as well have been Mars, I started to picture new possibilities for myself. Since high school I had been programmed to shoot for the Ivy League. Maybe, I thought, there was more out there for someone like me. Later that week, I packed my suitcases, sold my futon, and said goodbye to my housemate.

  Michael was a professor at the University of California–Riverside and already lived in Los Angeles. My moving there felt like destiny. We’d lived together for a few months in Princeton, but in Los Angeles, I wanted my own place; I wan
ted a chance to discover the city for myself.

  Twenty-nine

  Warm sun, bright flowers, beautiful people—Los Angeles was a city of dreams, energy, possibility. The entire landscape of my world changed. The Tudor, brick, and stone of the East Coast transformed into terra-cotta, whitewashed stucco, and red-tiled roofs. Maples and pines became palm trees and succulents. Muggy, humid summers became a fierce dry heat. Gray skies became a cloudless blue.

  Here, Asians, Latinos, and other brown folks were the majority. Each neighborhood felt like a different country that I could visit without a passport. Los Angeles was the whole world, and I felt at home in it. Leaving my family back home, the East Coast and the Ivy League behind, I finally felt like I could breathe. I found an apartment on Westside Rentals, one bedroom in a small two-story building with a nosy landlord. It was on the edge of the Fairfax District adjacent to West Hollywood, a stone’s throw from the Grove, CBS Studios, and Little Ethiopia.

  My academic world changed. Princeton’s campus was small, centralized, and built in the style of the collegiate Gothic of Oxford and Cambridge. A tall wrought-iron structure, the infamous FitzRandolph Gate, stood between the campus and the town’s main street, providing a physical and symbolic barrier, setting the school apart from—and perhaps above—those who had not gained admission. When I had arrived on campus as a wide-eyed first-year graduate student, those gates felt like a portal into an exciting and select world of the best artists, philosophers, and scientific minds the world had to offer. By the time I left six years later, beleaguered and nearly broken, the thick iron bars reaching skyward, the imposing columns of sculpted stone crowned with predatory eagles, and the elaborate spiky iron filigree surrounding the school’s crest seemed like the entrance to a Gothic prison, the inscription reading “Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here.”