by André Seewood
White Male Film Professor #1: What the hell does André even know about semiotics anyway?
White Male Film Professor #2: Well, uhm, he did take my film theory course last semester.
White Male Film Professor #1: Oh, he did, did he? Well, I didn’t know that.
Like Mary’s little lamb whose fleece was white as snow, it has been an experience that has followed me throughout my entire postsecondary academic pursuits – and even after the conferral of my doctorate. There has always been a White male in the classroom who has felt threatened – not by my presence in the academic space but by the inquiries, the observations, the comparisons, the theories, and the challenges I expressed with my own voice and intellect within that space.
Yet it wasn’t until I began writing my dissertation and presenting my chapters in a writing group where I was the only person of color for two of four years and found myself facing my inevitable White male challenger that I began to become aware of this curious pattern: myself vis-à-vis a progressive (read: tolerant) White male who seemed to disagree with my every expressed thought, find flaw in my every theoretical supposition or conclusion. This White male progressive so sensitive to contemporary issues of racial injustice, gender inequity, queer discrimination, and leftist political inquiry is an uncanny racial doppelgänger whose raison d’être was to disagree with me, a Black scholar, for the sake of disagreeing with no shame of appearing petty or hypocritical.
And furthermore, it wasn’t until I began to attend academic conferences, job search interviews, and campus visits did the profundity of the deeper motivations behind this antagonism of intellect start to reveal itself to me. It wasn’t only because I am a Black scholar of color that I would experience these hysterical challenges to my voice, to my expressions of intellect, comprehension, and inquiry from these White male ‘comrades de cours’ and potential colleagues, the deeper motivation for these antagonisms was that I dared to express some knowledge, some competence, or an inquiry beyond the boundaries of the subject of race.
Like a light bulb going off in a well-lit room, I was shocked and perplexed, that it was I who was creating the power outage in an erstwhile illuminating academic space. It was I who had to be browbeaten and put back into my place so that the literal or figurative classroom could return to being well-lit and normal again. In short, what I have been experiencing as a Black scholar of color in predominately White academic institutions (PWI) is the ‘Dred Scottification’ of my intellectual voice. Dred Scottification is an informal and deeply entrenched psychic paradigm within mostly White male progressives and some White female progressives which can be expressed as the interdiction, “that no scholar of color can put forth any theory beyond the subject of race that any White scholar is bound to respect.”
This concept of ‘Dred Scottification’ that I am putting forth here might seem to be just another facet of the continuous right-wing political attacks on DEI and critical race theory that we are experiencing in our contemporary moment, but it is not. ‘Dred Scottification’ pertains to the power dynamics, hierarchal structure, and racialized good decorum maintained within the classrooms of PWI’s. These are power dynamics, structures, and decorum that stretch back to the post-Reconstruction era of racial retrenchment and the brutal Western colonization of indigenous peoples where there is always a White teacher/instructor/professor in front of a multi-racial or majority single-raced class of students. It is a racial configuration that signals that true knowledge is certified and disseminated by and through whiteness and its deputized adjuncts.
The overall objective of this article is to catalog some of the most potent strategies of this ‘Dred Scottification’ of scholars of color in PWI’s through my own experiences which I am sure are not unique and to expose how the thin veneer of being a White progressive often obscures deep seated commitments to regressive racial hierarchies of intellect that marginalize scholars of color in the cloistered world of academia. And since nearly all of my experiences in academia are limited to the particular disciplines of cinema studies and French language and literature in the humanities, it would be short-sighted and counter-productive to assume that such strategies are not practiced in disciplines outside of the humanities in varying degrees of intensity and affect. Make no mistake, in the competitive environment that is academia, race and gender are mitigating factors in determining who is the smartest person in the room.
It must be stated at this juncture that the ultimate purpose of these strategies both singly and cumulatively is not to force the scholar of color out of the academy – although no tears would be shed if one leaves – but instead these strategies are used to weaken the independent confidence of the scholar of color. To weaken their confidence in such a manner that the scholar of color acts, says, and publishes nothing without the expressed approval (i.e., a consensus of a White majority-led peer group) and forbearance of Whites and the institutions they control. The goal is not to exclude, but to tame; not to censor, but to foster and sustain self-censorship; not to include on an equitable playing field, but to make a silo on a section of that playing field for some and pretend that it has been made equitable for all. In other words, ‘Dred Scottification’ is a process of intellectual castration; a neutering of the intellect of the scholar of color creating a wound that is cauterized with borrowed White privilege – but it never truly heals.
What’s at stake in this essay is to gain a better understanding of the pernicious circumstances that contribute to why the Black college student dropout rate is 14.4 percent and, when they are on campus, more than a fifth of Black university and college students report frequently or occasionally feeling discriminated against; of these, 61 percent have considered dropping out, a Gallup poll commissioned by Lumina and released in February found. And furthermore, to understand how these circumstances have coalesced into strategies that effectively contribute to why only 3 percent of all U.S. university faculty are Black males and only 4 percent are Black females, according to a recent study by the National Center for Education Statistics.
Much of what will be discussed and described in this essay often goes unnoticed to those Whites who have not had such experiences or those Whites who sincerely believe that they are not participating in these strategies even as they do. Yet these experiences and strategies all have an acute effect on first-generation college students of color and a profound effect upon scholars of color throughout their postsecondary academic journeys.
All too often, colleges and universities gleefully promote their acceptance rates, graduation rates, and employment after graduation rates but such seductive promotions and the quantitative methods used to calculate them contribute directly to what can be defined as ‘Survivor Bias’ in academic institutions. Author David Lockwood describes survivor bias as “a logical error of concentrating on the people or things that made it past some selection process and overlooking those that did not.” And where some may interpret what follows as a bitter defenestration of academia or some sort of axe-to-grind grievance that will never be resolved, I contest that what follows is a story of perseverance. The intellectual journey of an underdog as a minority first-generation college student whose ambitions left burning on the pyre of Pell grants and appalling student loan debt struggled against the unfairest of circumstances to attain his academic goals – but also to attain some profound self-reflection in the systemic analysis of their condition. What follows are unsanitized views of the Ivory Tower from a face at the bottom of its well.
Triggered: The Attack of the Hysterical Progressive White Male
It all started a long time ago in my very first semester as an undergraduate. A White male creative writing professor was so impressed by a first-person stream of consciousness short story I had written that to my surprise and chagrin he requested that I read it aloud to the entire class. Midway, as I nervously struggled through reading my work, an older White male student sitting in the back of the class interrupted me and spewed his disgust at having suffered through two divorces and now he was being forced to suffer again in listening to my nervous reading of my short story. He made it clear that he was less than impressed with my work and how he felt that the privilege of his attendance in the class was being besmirched by the attention bestowed upon me and my little story. He cast such a pall of contempt over the entire class that it lasted the rest of the semester and neither I nor any other student of color’s work would ever be acknowledged aloud within the course again. I couldn’t have known it then, but this would be only the first of several encounters with what I define as the hysterical progressive White male whose emotional histrionics are triggered whenever they feel threatened, slighted, or overlooked by an acknowledgement of the research, artistry, or intelligence of a scholar of color within the confines of the classroom at a predominately White academic institution.
Another encounter with a hysterical White male occurred in graduate school right after my presentation on French New Novelist, Claude Simon and the conflict his theories and his work present for today’s postmodern reader at a conference on the author that was held at a PWI. During the Q&A session, a White male near the rear of the conference room (they seem to always love to sit in the rear) raised his hand and when I called on him, he spoke with great astonishment and impatience, “How do you know all of this?” I said, “Excuse me?” He reiterated, “How do you know all of these concepts? How do you know all of this?” As a grad student enrolled in a master’s program in French literature and culture I was bewildered, but finally responded, “I learned it through coursework and research.” He didn’t seem convinced. I didn’t know it then, but that was my Fanonian, “Hey look Mom, a Negro. I’m scared,” moment. I had unwittingly made myself visible to this privileged White male by speaking competently about a rarified subject of literary theory that he assumed a scholar of color was never to be interested in – much less be able to articulate in a manner that even he could grasp. But the question was still vexing, “How do you know all of this?”
At the doctoral level the pattern of the hysterical progressive White male remained the same, but the triggering mechanism exposed deeper levels of unconscious cognition at work. While participating in a writing group after the conferral of my doctorate, I submitted a theoretical essay about a dramatic streaming television series that I had been researching and working on for six months to get valuable feedback from the professor who organized and led the group and the other Ph.D. candidates and Ph.D.s who participated in the group. When a White woman who spoke first saying how much she enjoyed my writing, that I had made difficult concepts easy to grasp, and that my arguments were generative and engaging, I could almost hear the uncoiling of my hysterical progressive White male challenger’s symbolic whip in preparation for his attack on my work.
With almost breathless impatience he dismissed my arguments, eviscerated the historiography upon which I had based my research, and with ruthless aplomb stated that I had never clearly defined the concept that was the subject of my essay. When the professor calmly pointed out that I actually had provided a preliminary definition of the concept in the second paragraph of the first page, he dismissed that definition as inadequate. And thus, he brought the knotted end of his symbolic whip’s handle to rest on the nape of my neck as if he were too restrained to complete a coup de grâce.
It was here at what I call my Foucauldian moment that I realized that in this White-led intellectual space I was but an effect of (White) power. That the very fact that in the four years that I had been participating no one in that writing group had ever had their work torn apart so incredulously, particularly after it had just been praised so highly, revealed that an important trigger mechanism for the hysterical progressive White male who feels threatened when the work of a scholar of color is praised in a classroom, or in this instance a White-led intellectual space, is that gender and race are the dual fulcrums around which the hysteria of the hysterical progressive White male turns and generates its power.
That a White woman, that putative epitome of beauty and grace whose vulnerability and helpless naivete (and the alleged coveted trophy of any male scholar of color) must be protected by a White male lest she risk being penetrated mentally – or heaven forbid – physically by a scholar of color is the optimal trigger for the hysterical White male. A trigger tied to White patriarchal entitlement and primal racialized fears.
In other words, a White woman’s praise for my work in that White-led intellectual space was the straw that broke the camel’s back. It was for this reason that I had to be whipped and put back in my place in front of the entire writing group by the hysterical progressive White male who had previously professed time and again to have little interest in film or television studies. No scholar of color can be allowed to put forth any theory beyond the subject of race that any White scholar is bound to respect. As Foucault once said, “the individual is but an effect of power,” and so, “Hey look Mom, a Negro. I’m scared,” is but an example of such an effect. The hysterical progressive White male attacks the work of a scholar of color as a means of stifling, deflecting, diminishing, and disparaging the work to undermine the confidence of the scholar of color; to in effect ensure that the work of a scholar of color outside the subject matter of race is to be understood as second-class scholarship.
So, from just these three anecdotes derived from the three stages of postsecondary academic progression, the undergraduate, the graduate, and the doctoral, there are several distinct threats that can trigger some White males and to a lesser degree some White females into an hysterical intellectual assault against scholars of color within predominately White academic institutions:
- If the scholar of color openly demonstrates an accurate and/or insightful comprehension of difficult or rarified concepts expounded by canonical White authors, thinkers, and artists that their White doppelgänger has either not read or not fully understood.
- If the scholar of color openly challenges or questions the theoretical soundness of certain well-known concepts from canonical White authors, thinkers, and artists that their White doppelgänger has read and understood but never from the perspective of the marginalized or underrepresented.
- If the scholar of color openly expresses a theoretical concept or interpretation regarding the formal properties of an art, a construct, or a principle by framing or without framing that concept or interpretation through the lens of race in a way that makes their White doppelgänger feel guilty or complicit.
- If the work of a scholar of color, who happens to be a Black male, is openly praised or gains attention within the confines of a White-led classroom or academic space; the triggering effect is particularly acute if such praise or attention comes from a White woman.
In the immortal words and cadence of James Baldwin from the film “I Am Not Your Negro” (Peck, 2016), “This is the evidence…” It is within these four trigger zones that the scholar of color must learn to negotiate (read: curtail) their expressions of intellect, comprehension, inquiry, or challenge within predominately White academic institutions – lest they must suffer the wrath of the hysterical White male, and to a lesser degree White female for having left the silo of race and therefore stepped beyond their place.
The trouble is that there is actually no way to successfully negotiate your way as a scholar of color around these four trigger zones and still practice the knowledge you have acquired beyond the subject matter of race within a predominately White academic institution without sacrificing your intellectual freedom in whole or in part to the noblesse oblige of Whites who may be triggered by any one or all of these zones. This dire circumstance is the two souls of Black folk writ large in an academic setting: How do I “subduct” the knowledge that I know beyond the subject of race with the knowledge that I know on the subject of race and vice versa and still retain my individuality? More importantly why should I have to do this?
The next section of this essay discusses the classroom and its hierarchal space where the knowledge and/or experience of a scholar of color can all too easily be perceived as a threat to the White male professor in charge of that space.
The Tabula Rasa Expectation and the Hysterical Progressive White Male Professor
The Tabula Rasa Expectation is a prejudicial misconception that students of color, (read: Black students), have rarely been exposed to, nor can they fully comprehend certain well known theoretical concepts of canonical White authors, thinkers, and artists. The expectation of ignorance is drawn from the fixed notion that all students of color come from poorly funded public educational institutions where classes are overcrowded, and the students are poorly taught under violent circumstances. Even if such a description were true, which it is not, the Tabula Rasa Expectation does not allow for the growth or expression of the independent intellect, the recognition of internal discipline, or any acknowledgement of the autodidactic efforts of students of color. Which is to say, that such a misconception forecloses on any possibility that a student of color has some knowledge of rarified concepts, or has encountered the authors, their works, or their theories in those public educational institutions, or through mentorship, or by their own initiative and autodidactic inquiry.
Even worse, scholars of color and those students of color who are now pursuing postsecondary educational goals, are often still treated as if they have not had any exposure to the canonical authors even though they may have had to read their works and/or have encountered these ideas and theories several times over in bachelors, masters, and even Ph.D. curricula. And if we think about the Latin meaning of the phrase ‘Tabula Rasa’ that of a scraped tablet or clean slate, it may be easier to comprehend how in conjunction with Dred Scottification, the Tabula Rasa Expectation ensures that the White person at the head of the classroom space need pay little attention to how these canonical ideas and theories by White authors, thinkers, and artists strike the minds of scholars of color differently than the minds of their intended audience. Which is to say, that scholars of color are both explicitly through grading and written commentary and implicitly through classroom decorum and its hierarchal arrangement encouraged to learn these concepts, “the White way”.
I’d like to recount an encounter with White male professor where I refused to be treated like a tabula rasa and his stunning response to my refusal.
In the first semester of my Ph.D. program, I took a course in media histories and theory which inevitably contained analyses and discussions of many of those old media/film theory essay evergreens like, Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Laura Mulvey’s Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, and Andre Bazin’s Ontology of the Photographic Image, to name a few. Those of us who have been students of some form of media, cultural, or film studies are bound to have had to read at least one of these canonical texts at one time or another. And while it may have been true that as an undergraduate it was my first time reading such texts, by the time I entered my Ph.D. program I was thoroughly familiar with these works, and I was beginning to chafe under the unquestioned weight of the alleged significance of these author’s theories.
As I began to take issue with Benjamin’s famous concept of ‘the aura’ of an original work of art, questioned Mulvey’s overly passive view of the female gaze, and questioned Bazin’s enigmatic concept of the ‘the real,’ I drew more and more annoyed glances from the White male professor as if to say,” “How dare you speak when not spoken to,” or,“ How do you know all of this?” According to the Tabula Rasa Expectation, I as a scholar of color was not supposed to know these texts so well, and most importantly, I certainly was not supposed to question the sanctity and soundness of these canonical authors’ theories and conclusions. These were interesting counter-perspectives that a White female in the class spoke up and said she had not even considered. Suddenly, with no deference to the substance of my critiques, the professor told me to, “Watch my tone,” and just for a second I thought I was living in 1857 just below the Mason/Dixon line where I could have been lynched for speaking when not spoken to and not in 2015 where such a line of racialized decorum should no longer exist. Unbeknownst to me, I was headed directly towards a collision course with a hysterical progressive White male professor.
Our collision began in earnest a few weeks later, during my presentation on French filmmaker, Robert Bresson (Pickpocket-1959, L’Argent-1983) I made the claim that Bresson never used any Black actors in lead or supporting roles in any of his films, but that this structured absence did not impede the spiritual affect of his films which is communicated via the formal rigor of his work which I had described in detail. That was the straw that broke the camel’s back again, the hysterical progressive White male professor – sitting in the back of the room – had apparently had enough. He immediately countered by saying that using a Black actor in a French film would change the theme of the film and furthermore that French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard never used any Black actors in his films. To which I then reminded him that Jean-Luc Godard used several Black actors in his film Masculin Féminin (1966), even including a scene from Leroi Jones’ (aka Amiri Baraka) play The Dutchman (1964) as filmed by Anthony Harvey in that film and that there were African actors with speaking parts in Godard’s Weekend (1967).
I also added that a Black actor in a French film does not change the theme of a film, but instead it would enrich the themes already within a film. At the end of the class I was again told to, “Watch my tone.” I didn’t know it then, but I surely know it now, the tone he wanted me to watch was not a tone of anger or impudence; it was the tone of my intelligence, of my competence, of my confidence. It was a variation of my earlier Fanonian moment as if the hysterical White male professor were saying,” “Hey look Mom, doesn’t this Negro know that he is a Negro?” “Watch my tone,” was a not-so-subtle euphemism for Negro get back in your place within the hierarchical structure of the classroom.
The fine point of the Dred Scottification here is how the White professor seized upon my brief racial observation but ignored all of my theoretical assertions on formal structure of Robert Bresson’s films that were beyond the boundaries of racial interpretation.
Yet, I would not pretend to be anybody’s tabula rasa for the sake of protecting the fragile ego of a hysterical White male progressive professor who was threatened not by my presence in the classroom (he was not a bigot) but by the inquiries, the observations, the comparisons, the theories, and the challenges I expressed with my own voice and intellect within that space. Again, in the hierarchal space of the classroom it is the Promethean White male professor that is the smartest person in the room and any scholar of color, particularly a Black scholar, who threatens the hierarchal structure of this space by expressing concepts and interpretations that may have eluded or not even been considered by the professor must be dealt with. The choice is a false binary: you either pretend to be a tabula rasa or get labeled a disobedient rebel. The threatened and hysterical White male professor must reassert his dominance particularly if the scholar of color’s work is praised by a White woman in his presence. It sounds primal, because it is primal. Perhaps in the realm of the academy we are not as far from 1857 as we are wont to believe.
Sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (2024) describes it best: “The academy, as any other institution or organization in a racialized society, expresses and reproduces systemic racism. Its claim to universalism is ultimately false, as the academy does not address how racism shapes its very core. The academy is organizationally and culturally white. This means that Black and Brown people are made to feel at best like guests in institutions of higher learning.”
In my scathing course evaluation at the end of the semester I stated, “Being told to ‘watch my tone’, was an unnecessary micro-aggression, used as a defensive posture to maintain the alleged intellectual power imbalance between a student and a professor.”
Conclusion: Lessons from the Fly in the Buttermilk
So how does a scholar of color withstand the strategies of marginalization in predominately White academic institutions to attain their academic goals? Speaking from these and other demoralizing, humiliating, and ironic experiences (too many to recount here) I’d say the only true antidote to the poisonous micro-aggressions of these strategies of marginalization is hidden within the sanctuary of self-validation. In other words, to stop thinking of the university or college as a place where knowledge is given and instead to perceive it as but one of the sites in modern civilization where knowledge is exchanged.
To build this sanctuary of self-validation you must as French filmmaker Robert Bresson once declared, “Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen.” In short, you have to make visible the validity of your own cultural experiences and your “other-than-white” – “other-than-male” – “other-than-straight” – “other-than-American” – “other-than-Christian” – “other-than-middle class” and/or “differently abled” perspectives. It is a constant battle that can too easily make complacency the victor, so it must always be fought with little respite for the weary.
To speak with confidence because if something strikes your mind differently through the filters of your own socio-cultural experiences as a scholar of color you have every right to speak on these things and to question, challenge, or re-interpret the assertions and conclusions of others within the classroom space. In so doing, you make the classroom space a place where knowledge is shared and not just doled out like stale communion wafers.
No one is a tabula rasa; especially not students or scholars of color. So, you cannot let anyone teach something to you as if you are. It would be my contention that it is the Tabula Rasa Expectation and the lack of interest in perspectives other than White male middle class that makes the postsecondary intellectual experience so painful and mentally debilitating to nonwhite students. If one’s voice and intellect are constantly going to be perceived as a threat; if one’s perspective is constantly going to be devalued; and if you cannot challenge or question the universalist and/or problematic claims made by those old White scholars, then it is very difficult to find a reason to stay in these institutions of so-called higher learning, let alone work within them. In my opinion and experience the aforementioned problems are what directly contributes to Black college student dropout rates – notwithstanding the other well-known factors such as income disparities, high tuition and boarding costs, expensive books, computer hardware and software expenses, and institutional fees.
There is a long history, indeed there is a deep tradition of breaking a Negro’s ambition. Whether it was Mr. Ostrowski, the eighth-grade English teacher who told Malcolm X to become a carpenter rather than pursue his ambition to be a lawyer or Dr. Bledsoe’s negative letters of recommendation in Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man – breaking a Negro’s ambition has always been a form of control for Whites and Blacks. But what building a sanctuary of self-validation instills is a constant sense of evaluation, reflection, and pursuit based on the positive and the negative reactions to one’s work. I’m reminded here of one of my favorite quotes from Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg: “In other words, in order to communicate intensely with a hundred people, you might lose a thousand on the way.”
Through all the slings and arrows of hypocrisy, pettiness, Dred Scottification, hyperbolic criticism, and the Tabula Rasa Expectation, I achieved my doctorate. And while I am grateful for the generous fellowship grant I received that aided in the completion of my dissertation, that grant from a PWI in no way invalidates or erases these pernicious experiences I’ve had within these institutions.
I attained my doctorate not for the validation of the predominately White academic institution that granted it, but instead to continue to validate my voice, my perspective, the inquiries, the observations, the comparisons, the theories, and the challenges I may express with my own voice and intellect. All in the hopes of inspiring others to do the same – because the only way to rid ourselves of Dred Scottification and all of the other strategies of marginalization against scholars of color in predominately White academic institutions is to recognize that it exists in the first place. Perhaps this analysis of experience is but the first step to answering that vexing question, “How do you know all of this?”
André Seewood is a writer, filmmaker, and musician. He is the author of two books, Slave Cinema: The Crisis of the African American in Film and Screenwriting Into Film: Forgotten Methods and New Possibilities. His award-winning film, TimeSphere: Le chrononaut et la sphère du temps, can be viewed on Vimeo, and his work in music, Adventures in the Black Imaginary, is available on all streaming platforms under his stage name: Drayali. Dr. Seewood holds a bachelor’s degree in film/cinema/video studies and a master’s degree in French language and literature from Wayne State University in Detroit. He earned a Ph.D. in media arts and sciences from Indiana University.
