Why I teach at Howard

As a law professor at Howard University in Washington, D.C., I am reminded of the importance of race every morning when I walk to work. In the leisurely stroll down five blocks between my home and office in the nation's capital, I move from a mostly white residential neighborhood that is quite affluent to a predominantly Black institution that is economically mixed. The switch is more than physical, but it cannot be reduced to easy terms.

Howard University has been for more than a century the leading school in the nation for the training of black lawyers. Its legendary dean of the World War 11 period, Charles Hamilton Houston once said that every lawyer was either a social engineer or a parasite on society. A perfectionist who concurred with Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., that the law was "a jealous mistress," Houston devoted himself to preparing the social engineers. Graduates during his watch included such giants as Thurgood Marshall, who would use the law to produce racial desegregation by achieving the moral victory of Brown v. Board of Education before the Supreme Court in 1954. The tradition they started continues to this day, giving the school a mission that most others cannot claim.

I am privileged to be the first Asian American on the Howard law faculty, and yet there seems to be something remarkable about a person of Asian heritage being associated with a historically black college. Strangers may not be sure what it is that is so surprising to them, but their uncertainty induces them to wonder aloud. Since becoming a member of the academy, I have lost count of the number of times people have asked, "Why are you at Howard?" or been impressed because they thought I taught at Harvard. They ask, "What is it like to be a minority among minorities? How does it feel?" Sometimes, "Do black people accept you? Or do they discriminate against you?" They ask, "What are they like? Are they good students?" Or, "Are you trying to make an ideological statement? Are you rebelling?" They add, "Couldn't you find a job anywhere else? Do you want to stay?" Even, "Did you grow up in a black neighborhood?" On more than one occasion, a person has looked me over carefully, paused, and then stammered, "Are you - are you actually black?"

The people who ask these questions casually but constantly in various combinations are almost all good-hearted. Most are white, some are black, and a few are Asian American themselves. Despite their diverse backgrounds, they share the same curiosity. Within a moment of meeting me and finding out what I do or more precisely, where I do what I do - whether it is during a professional conference, while I am at a television station appearing as a guest, visiting a campus to speak, at a social gathering such as a dinner party, or in striking up a new acquaintance through an introduction by friends, they pull me aside to confide their surprise. It doesn't matter what I may have been doing or talking about - trying to learn to play tennis or chatting about politics - and I need not make any effort to provoke any racial issue. People raise their eyebrows when I mention my employer.

After awhile, the questions started me mulling over race itself. Speculating about an Asian American teacher with mainly African American students is not offensive, although I admit I am exhausted by the tedious interrogations. I toyed with having a sarcastic retort printed on the back of my business cards, but they are looking for more than cursory answers. They are looking for something, they know not what, but it is directly in front of them. More than might be intended by the people who are inquiring, their inquisitiveness reveals the invisible influence of racial judgments on our everyday perceptions. All of us see race inevitably, without even being awake to what is on our minds. Race is the elephant in the room; the harder we try to pay no attention to race, like the elephant, the larger it looms.

When I was pondering where to embark on my life as a scholar, nobody thought to ask, "Well, what will it be like to be the only Asian American at a white school? How does it feel?" or "What are whites like? Are they good students?" I am bemused that Asian Americans now and then suggest that I have taken a position to curry favor with blacks, because I work at a predominantly black institution. They don't seem to realize that if such an assumption can be made about me without any other basis, they must be ingratiating themselves to whites by the same reasoning. Nobody ever bothers my wife, an Asian American who happens to teach at another fine but predominantly white law school across town, about why she has chosen that place of employment or expects her to be an expert on whiteness.

Becoming the only Asian American at a white school was an option available to me. I was fortunate enough to have been invited to interview with many law schools. I would have ended up every bit as much the minority at any of them. None of the law schools with which I interviewed had ever had an Asian American professor. The majority of the 175 accredited law schools in this country did not then and had never had a person of Asian descent in a tenured position teaching any subject. After they hire one, who knows whether they will hire another. There is no place where my wife and I could be among a majority of Asian Americans; even in Asia, we would be out of place as Asian Americans.

Even so, I suspect that not many people who are white - or for that matter Asian American - consider as a "white" law school one that boasts an overwhelmingly white enrollment, a totally white alumni until recently, a mostly white faculty, or an all-white administration; or where the framed photographs of judges and lawyers displayed with pride on the walls include no black faces (or needless to say, Asian faces), where a lone person of color has recently become a professor while a corps of racial minorities have always been janitors. Those African Americans who call a school "white" are likely to be chided for having imagined a problem for themselves. I doubt that anybody would suppose that joining the faculty at such a white law school represents a political choice as much as a politic one.

My hypothesis is that many of us are afflicted with a partial color blindness. We cannot see clearly, and our would-be color blindness conceals the subjectivity of our own vantage point from ourselves. Through this filter, Asian Americans see that being in the company of white Americans is accepted as assimilating into the mainstream, a sign of upward mobility. Someone who is neither black nor white observes that given a choice, it would be smart to try to become white because that status brings tangible benefits. Asian Americans follow whites, not blacks, in trying to become American, and we disregard the dictum that it is blacks who are the most authentic Americans. The alternative, intentionally associating with African Americans, is weird, some sort of naive error or purposeful subversion. As soon as Asian Americans deviate from the rule that we should prefer to be white rather than black, we will be gently corrected.

Perhaps all of us regardless of race have an unconscious tendency to accept white culture as the majority culture as well as the favored culture. White is normal. Whiteness is desirable. Our world has more than racial categories, so transparent as to be invisible. It has racial hierarchies, both blatant and subtle.

Many whites and Asian Americans do not have enough contact with African Americans to have formed a sense of any individual African American as a human being. For them, I am an interpreter. I can expound on my experience as pompously as John Howard Griffin did poignantly in his 1961 book, Black Like Me, in which he recounted his travels throughout the Deep South as a white man disguised through chemicals to look like a black man. As much as I try to resist it, by talking to whites about African Americans I sometimes suspect that I become more white to them. It is as if I am a nineteenth-century adventurer who has explored the Dark Continent and returned as an authority to regale my audience. Or I am an outsider between worlds and thus momentarily an insider in each world. For the same reason, I am a more credible source for a letter of recommendation than an African American colleague, with the authority of independence. I seem to be vouching for students as if I can say that they can fit into a white environment, without racial allegiance toward them.

So I am not sure whether to be flattered or insulted that people consider my current position a form of personal charity or an experimental phase of life. They do not see that, even acting solely out of calculating self-interest, being at Howard has been good for my career. Thanks to them, there probably is a certain cachet to being the Asian guy at the black school. An Asian American law professor is rare enough, to be sure; an Asian American law professor in a black school is sui generis.

Until I started at Howard, I would not have been accustomed to finding myself the only Asian American in a room of African Americans. Growing up in what I did not know was the most segregated major metropolitan area in the country [Detroit], I knew only whites and no blacks. I attended a suburban high school that shared a campus with another high school. The two schools together had an enrollment of more than 4,000, among which was one African American. Scarcely less rare were Asian Americans. There were no faculty, no administrators, and no staff who were African American, and not more than one or two who were Asian American. There may have been a few Latino/as. There were only a few Jews.

Since coming to Howard, I have become so used to being there that I am startled to be the only Asian American in a roomful of whites - or, for that matter, an Asian American among other Asian Americans.

Here is a thought experiment about the minor symbols of racial double standards. When I began teaching, a street vendor who had set up operations near the Howard University Law School was selling fake leather goods. Likely manufactured in Asia, his bargain wares were emblazoned with the logo Eurosport. Many incoming students bought his backpacks to carry heavy loads of casebooks back and forth. If a sizable number of firstyear-students at Harvard Law School passed by advertising Afrosport with their bookbags, it would prompt a double-take. Eurosport on blacks is fashionable; Afrosport on whites would be puzzling.

In many ways, Howard's law school resembles Harvard's. Students are similarly apprehensive about whether they have made a terrible choice in volunteering themselves for the Socratic method. They have the same delusions about legal practice, gleaned from television shows such as Ally McBeal and Judge Judy. They undergo the same pre-exam panic over distinguishing hypothetical goals of lucre and rank. The field of law has its own culture, with specialized jargon; elaborate ceremovies; and methods of delineating insiders, outsiders, and the ranks of the bar and bench. For this reason, it would be a mistake to treat the law schools at Howard and Harvard as representative of black culture or white culture, respectively. Non-lawyers of any sort would object with good reason if they were measured against lawyers. Some Howard students, even if they come from backgrounds that are not especially privileged, are socialized just as other students from backgrounds of privilege are socialized into having contempt for their clients as unworthy if they are indigent.

In other ways, however, Howard is quite unlike Harvard. Howard students agree that racism still affects their lives, but they disagree on what to do about it. They have first-hand experience with gun violence and economic despair, even if they come from a middle-class upbringing. A relatively high proportion of students have to testify at criminal trials or cope with the day-to-day exertions of being a single mother. The cafeteria has grits for breakfast and greens at lunch. There is an active choir that gives concerts in our chapel. Many students say "sir" and "ma'am," and some staff call me Mr. Frank.

Howard is no more perfect than Harvard. There is some grumbling about the number of non-blacks and acceptance of discrimination by blacks as the "flip side" of white racism elsewhere. An excessive number of black students want to become sports or entertainment lawyers. An occasional poster announces a boycott of an Asian American-owned business in derogatory racial terms. I am saddened that, from time to time, when students are understandably frustrated at the seeming Catch-22 ineptitude of the institution that manifests itself here and there, they will remark, "What do you expect from black folks?"

Black schools and white schools are not mirror images. Their origins, their purposes, and their meaning to society are not alike. Black institutions of higher learning came about because blacks were denied the chance to study elsewhere. White institutions barred blacks by law and custom.

Black institutions are one of the complicated legacies of racial segregation, which ended only during the lifetimes of people alive today. They have a specific function of ingathering, which creates a special community without insinuating that others are inferior. Black students seek out black schools because they are welcoming. White students self-select themselves away from black schools with only a few exceptions. They are absent because they believe the schools are beneath them, not vice versa. Black schools seem immune from the backlash against affirmative action, even though black schools are undeniably not color blind but institutions that are wholly color conscious. The implications are that color consciousness is acceptable if it tends toward racial segregation but not if it is aimed at racial integration, and black institutions either are too important or too inconsequential to be subjected to a stem edict of color blindness. In contrast, many white schools tend to be faceless way stations leading toward a coveted credential. Students matriculate anonymously at the best school that has accepted them, without any connection to it.

Black schools enhance diversity. They do so at another level than is conventional. They ensure that even as institutions become integrated internally, so that African Americans fit in as equals at Stanford University or the University of Michigan - where I taught as a fellow and graduated from law school, respectively - institutions continue to differ from each other. African Americans ought to have a choice to be more than a token or an anomaly, even if white Americans are not eager to gain first-hand knowledge of minority status. If every place were identically integrated, African Americans (not to mention Asian Americans) would end up always alone among whites. Whites might feel differently about the allure of color blindness if they knew that each individual white person would be alone among African Americans in order to satisfy the goal. A white person might not feel quite as reassured by a solemn pledge of color blindness if she were the only white person in a roomful of African Americans.

An institution perceived as wholly black can be more integrated than institutions that are thought to be quite ordinary. Howard University, which has always opened its doors to everyone, has had its share of deans, professors and students who were white. Established after the Civil War, it is named for a white Union general who became the director of the Freedmen's Bureau. (This is not to suggest, as sometimes seems to be implied, that a predominantly black institution is only as good as the number of whites it can attract.) It has an annual enrollment of more than 10,000 students, serving as a Mecca for black intellect spanning cultures and transcending politics, drawing to it an African diaspora from well beyond American borders. Its openness has been the basis for a rooted cosmopolitanism rather than an immutable parochialism.

When I looked out at my classroom during my first year, looking back at me were a half-dozen white faces among the fifty students. When I showed up for faculty meetings, around the table sat the same number of whites among my two dozen or so colleagues. These numbers of whites are equal to if not greater than the representation of blacks at other schools. The professors display a range of opinions that matches that found at any other school.

Nor am I unique. Two generations ago, many Asian immigrants could be found teaching at historically black colleges. After they received their doctorates, they found it easier to obtain employment there than at segregated white campuses. They staffed the math, science, and engineering departments of the dozens of historically black colleges. Many of them have retired, but some are still there as the senior faculty staff.

I have become convinced that there is a value, and not for African Americans alone, to having a place where people of color can be in the overall majority and hold most of the leadership positions. The cumulative effect of being a permanent minority is a demoralizing stress. It is only from the outside - or if the state of affairs is reversed to the extent possible - that the identity of whites as a group is even discernible. Paul Igasaki, the first Asian American to serve as chair of the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, is fond of noting that a white male manager whose team consists of only other white men, who may be unmindful of the message he conveys just by introducing his colleagues at a meeting, cannot help but take notice if Igasaki were to do the same and surround himself with Asian American men. It wouldn't be right if Igasaki's office included only Asian Americans, even if each was eminently qualified.

On Issues of race, I have learned as much as I have taught. My personal opinions on race have been transformed through a series of events, which have in common that I defied my own as well as others' expectations. All of these events required the purposeful decision on my part to insert myself into places where I would never have found myself by chance. But they also required that I overcome my own confines of identity.

I am convinced that this approach is more generally applicable: By becoming more conscious of our own perceptions, as a society we will be able to neutralize racial prejudice. The necessary but not sufficient threshold is acknowledging that race operates our lives, relentlessly and pervasively. Working in multiracial coalitions of equal members, united by shared principles, we can create communities that are diverse and just. Together, we can reinvent the civil rights movement.

And that is possibly why I teach at Howard.

From the book, Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White. Copyright 2002 by Frank H. Wu. Reprinted by arrangement with Basic Books, New York. All rights reserved.

Copyright Crisis Publishing Company, Incorporated May/Jun 2002
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