A Necessary Book I Can't Keep on My Classroom Library Shelves
On Jennine Capó Crucet's My Time Among the Whites
In one of my first years at the school where I currently teach, our principal brought to a staff meeting a psychologist studying resilience and college success in first-generation minority students. In particular, the researcher, David S. Yeager, was looking for ways to reduce the racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic achievement gaps that persist among different groups in college grades and completion, even among students with identical academic qualifications. It was an incredibly relevant presentation for us, since I teach in a college preparatory school with a population that’s almost 100% Hispanic, and in which almost all of our college-bound seniors will be first-generation students.
Students from schools like ours, Yeager said, tend to face what could be described as a “check-mark” model of well-being when they enter college. They start with a healthy sense of self-efficacy and determination, but that well-being often craters towards the middle of their first year. Their grades drop, they report higher levels of homesickness than their peers, they start to say that they feel like they don’t belong. If students can persist past that nadir, they usually recover and succeed, but unfortunately for many students the valley is too deep; they drop out or transfer to less-challenging institutions.
According to Yeager, that crash comes as a result of something like a culture shock. While struggles adjusting to university life are common among all students, they can lead first-generation students and students from racial or ethnic minority groups to “worry whether they and people like them can fully belong, will be seen as lacking intelligence, or will be a poor cultural fit in college.” Further, Yeager points out, these struggles are “pernicious precisely because they arise from awareness of real social disadvantage before and during college, including biased treatment, university policies and practices that inadvertently advantage some groups of students over others, and awareness of negative stereotypes and numeric underrepresentation.”
One way to think about it is that, for first-generation minority students, the normal stress of adjusting to college gets compounded by a sense of difference from everyone else, which is then added the real threats of stereotypes, structural obstacles, and sometimes even discrimination that come with being part of a marginalized group in America. And this can be especially jarring for students, like ours, who come from schools where de facto segregation remains a stubborn reality. All of these components combine to create a particularly nasty sense of alienation and estrangement. Another way to think of it is that students from schools like mine go off to university and crash into a wall of whiteness.
“It’s just so white,” said one of my former students that year of her small liberal arts college in Pennsylvania. She was home for winter break, telling me stories of cultural misunderstandings: the professor who made assumptions about her language skills, the roommates who made denigrating comments, the general lack of people like her on campus.
The novelist, essayist, and professor of creative writing Jennine Capó Crucet has an explanation for students like her: “This place never imagined you here, and your exclusion was a fundamental premise in its initial design.”
It’s a line from “Imagine Me Here,” the penultimate essay in her brilliant collection My Time Among the Whites. In previous years, I haven’t been able to keep her book on the shelves of my classroom library. Students have found it and taken it home, read it, re-read it, sometimes not returned it. I don’t mind. They need it—the girl going to Emory, the boy headed to Duke, the students mulling their acceptances to Bennington—and it’s easy enough for me to go back to Half Price Books for another copy.In the nine essays of My Time Among the Whites, Crucet describes navigating the wall of whiteness she encountered on leaving her parents’ Cuban-American enclave in South Florida, first for Cornell University, then for the adult worlds of writing and academia.
The collection’s first essay, “What We Pack,” starts with the shock Crucet faced on arrival for Cornell’s freshman orientation, when she learned that her parents were expected to leave immediately. No one had told her or her family that college drop-off is meant to be just that—a drop off. Her parents (and sister and grandmother) had planned to stay for the entire orientation; they had saved up for the trip, used up all their vacation days, booked a hotel room for an entire week. When the school’s dean ended his welcome speech to the mostly white families of the freshman class by exhorting them to “cut the cord” and “go home,” Crucet’s grandmother asked, incredulous, “What does he mean, go?”
That initial dismay set the tone for her first semester. In one passage Crucet relates calling home in a panic to get her mom’s help deciphering the prompt for her first English essay. Her mom, as flummoxed as Crucet by words like “intersectional” and “gendered,” tells her she’s screwed. Crucet writes:
“Parents who’ve gone to college themselves know that at this point they should encourage their kid to go to office hours, or to the writing center, or to ask the professor or a TA for clarification—that it’s not just a student’s right but their responsibility as budding scholars to do so. But my mom thought I was as on my own as I feared.”
What Crucet is describing is exactly the nadir Yeager says so often befuddles first-generation minority students.
So how do students overcome that nadir? Yeager’s research suggests a fascinating answer: with stories.
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