At my previous university, I was part of a batch hire. It was an HBCU and we were an interracial group. We developed a fast and easy rapport: we met every week at a local diner; tried new restaurants and celebrated our birthdays together; acted as each other’s professional sounding boards. We all struggled to maintain reasonable academic expectations with the university’s uneven interest in retention and graduation numbers—and quickly found ourselves on a rumored black list for our reluctance to pass students who did not deserve to. We mostly conceded by adjusting our curricula and planning our exit strategies.

One of the white women in the cohort and I became especially friendly. Since middle school when I was barred from my white best friend’s birthday party for being black—and she let the slight go unvalidated—I have not entertained any more close relationships with white women (or white people for that matter).

After high school I spent five years happily and necessarily bathing in Blackness at an HBCU and post-grad jobs after my very white very racist k-12 matriculation—and grew more insulated by the day. So when I showed up to graduate school as one of two Black students enrolled in my program there was some culture shock despite being forewarned by the other Black woman.

White women continued to underperform in any sustained way to change my mind about their integrity. Two of my classmates were ever so chatty with me when we were in the confines of our academic building. One really liked to remind me about her Peace Corps tenure in Africa. Imagine my bemusement when we found ourselves in the lobby of the university library waiting for our workshop and suddenly they didn’t recognize me. I called them each by name, looked them directly in the eye and still they feigned unrecognition. It was one of my first semester experiences that let me know the program was going to be three years of bullshit.  Bullshit it was—some of the bullshit I’m still processing to this day. A story for another time. My first-generation ambition was kryptonite and I finished my degree.

Despite the white woman trauma feathers in my cap—and too much history—this white woman and I managed to became closer than I ever expected. Reticent as I was, the friendship developed and I believed I was better—less bitter—for it.

When her dog was dying—and we all knew that I’m jumpy around dogs—our chairperson told her coldly, “It’s just a dog.” Seemed like unnecessary roughness when my colleague confided the conversation with wet eyes. She invited me to the emergency pet hospital to sit with her as she said her goodbyes. I went.

We were office neighbors and often spent hours at the end of the day chatting—decompressing we called it. When I convened a panel on campus, an out-of-town friend was one of my guests. My colleagues enjoyed her so much they wanted her to join our energetic cohort. So the day after the event several of us met for a weekend brunch. After brunch we returned to my apartment, where my friend was staying, and this white woman ended up in my home too.

I don’t say this as if she invited herself; I can’t recall it being awkward either, but I have never had a white person casually visit my home. My home is very personal and very Black.

Meanwhile on campus allegations brewed of discrimination against white colleagues. I was unsurprised not because I noticed any discrimination but because I know how white people behave when they are minoritized. For reasons that placed us all on the black list, one of our colleagues, a different White woman who had been put on notice that her many documented conflicts with students jeopardized her contract, complained and gathered many of us to warn us that we were next.

I wasn’t unafraid; in fact I recognized that my lack of a PhD placed me in the most danger—not of dismissal but of securing another position should it come to that. My adjusted curriculum was already yielding a more even spread of passing and failing students and I was actively trying to find another position elsewhere.

In the Spring, as the semester was in its death throes, I peeked into my colleague’s office like always. She told me her contract was not being renewed; that she wasn’t in the mood to talk about it. It would be the last time I ever spoke to her.

For the next few weeks she walked past me and my door as if neither were in her line of vision. A colleague from our cohort thought I had the same inside knowledge of the contract decision he’d had. I hadn’t.  “Oh, I thought she wasn’t speaking to you because of that. Weird.” Not really, it was coded.

Three years ago, I dropped off some items at a local thrift store. I received an email shortly after I returned home. “Oh my gosh, was that you? I thought it was you. Then I changed my mind. Then I thought it was, and by then you were gone. How have you been?” she gushed.

I hesitated to reply but confirmed that it had been me; that I had been well and hoped she had been too. I was exaggerating. I had only started my new job a few weeks before that after being unemployed for three years. I’d had a medical crisis and the same institution that had terminated her contract had done the same to mine after my medical leave. I had been there at least three years after her—three years longer than I’d wanted but my attempts to escape were thwarted by the very obstacle I expected: lack of a PhD.

She had gone on to enjoy the scholarly success I expected she would—job at a prestigious PWI and publication of a monograph she had been working on plus others. I didn’t learn any of this from her because she did not respond. That was three years ago.

I have met white women who pretend sincerity like her. Like her they work in race theory or the equity industrial complex, love animals, show up on paper and sometimes on foot for every liberal cause under the sun. But their interpersonal integrity often reflects their code. They make props of the people and causes on which their identities and livelihoods are formed.  

I have a valid and deep distrust of people who do not and cannot share marginalized experiences; can walk away at any time from whatever margins you find yourself and they seem especially ubiquitous at HBCUs where I’ve spent 90% of my career. In fact, they often profoundly dislike Black people even when they enjoy the spectacle and industry of Blackness™. They often prop themselves as saviors and will use and cite the effort as evidence that qualifies their sainthood—or at least, tenure.

It is not as far a stretch to see how this failure of integrity found Emmett Till in a river and Black men hanging from trees because the integrity required might’ve cost them some comfort; Catholic school children beaten and abused to feed their impaired sense of altruism; Black women raped and exploited by White men to preserve chastity that didn’t exist in the first place.

So she stopped speaking to me. Whoopty do. But the code that her choice represents, that’s what so insidious and dangerous.