Confessions of a Token Black Professor - The Atlantic

As you cross the Androscoggin River into Lewiston, you pass on your left the waterfalls that once set the mills to humming. On your right, affixed to a pockmarked brick mill—now defunct, it had spun tens of thousands of bedspreads a week—a 30-foot-wide neon sign reads HOPEFUL.<br>And so I was. My wife and I drove by that unlit sign on the hot May afternoon when we moved from New York to the interior of Maine. It was 2020. The 100,000th American was about to die of COVID. And I was starting my dream job.<br>Explore the September 2026 Issue<br>Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.

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Arriving at Bates College, we passed the empty quad, took a left, and pulled our U-Haul up to our new home: a century-old colonial just off campus, ringed by a tangle of blooming lilacs and wild blackberries. Someone had just mowed the grass. As we began unpacking, alternating between unloading boxes and marveling at the house—twice the size and half the rent of our Queens apartment—an older man crossed the street and introduced himself as a retired faculty member. We made Norman Rockwell small talk. His wife, crouched in a shaded corner of her garden, waved with a pair of pruning shears.<br>The setting was impossibly idyllic. And it was not the first time in my academic career that I’d had occasion to reflect on my good fortune. My path to the professoriat had been a fairy tale. In 2014, I went straight from my bachelor’s degree at Haverford to a fully funded Ph.D. program in comparative literature at NYU. Five years later, during my first season on the infamously brutal academic job market, I won a tenure-track position at Bates, teaching interdisciplinary humanities courses in the school’s popular environmental-studies program. I got the email on December 23, 2019, a Christmas miracle. Topping off this epic run of luck, I signed my contract mere weeks before the country reported its first case of the coronavirus, meaning I was spared from the pandemic freezes and rescinded job offers that would effectively shut down academic hiring.<br>When I defended my dissertation on Zoom that spring, one of my advisers joked that seeing me with a tenure-track job in hand was like “watching the last dinosaur being born.” It was at once a compliment and a grim acknowledgment of reality. I had won the lottery in an apocalypse. I was going off to the kind of secure, prestigious, fairly remunerated academic job that was rapidly going extinct in a world where most people teaching college courses were stuck in the permanent underclass of contingent labor.<br>The summer before my first semester of teaching was bliss. I went for long runs along the Androscoggin and the pine-studded Lake Auburn. I arranged books in my sunny campus office and bought snake plants for the windowsill. My wife, who had spent years working at Glacier National Park during college breaks, was thrilled to again be living in a place with real, capital-N Nature. We drank hard cider at a hilltop orchard with views of the White Mountains, made blackberry pie from our own bushes, and posed for photos on the giant boot in front of the L.L.Bean store. Every effort was made to push New York City, with its money lust and voguish pop-ups and puffy-vested financiers and pandemic chaos, far from our minds. We studiously applied ourselves to the task of becoming, if not true Mainers—that requires being born there—then at least credibly Maine-ish.<br>I believed in American higher education with the dewy fervor of a young missionary. I came from a long line of people possessed by the unshakable faith that college was a ticket to a better life. My grandmother, holler-born in the mountains of West Virginia, didn’t finish high school. My mom made it through an associate’s degree before I came along and she had to abandon her education. I saw my academic success as the culmination of several generations of familial sacrifice, paid for by the deferred dreams of others. And I saw American colleges and universities as embodying what was best about this country: the belief that an education is liberating, civilizing, a democratic good for all rather than a luxury to be gatekept. I imagined myself teaching at Bates forever.<br>Everywhere in Lewiston, the signs of ghostly wealth, long gone, were visible—the grand factories, endlessly repurposed in the latest revitalization scheme; the paint-peeling mansions on the hill and the cars rusting in formerly stately yards; the addicts on the corners dozing off or holding cardboard signs that pleaded their case. To all appearances, it was a town that had gone bust. That is, until you arrived at Bates, a 133-acre Eden of manicured greens and august buildings smack in the middle of postindustrial purgatory.<br>Our neighborhood was an informal extension of campus: a mix of homes owned by current or former professors, as well as other properties, such as the faculty house we lived in, that the...