As I got to know Ava, I was surprised to discover that she viewed central Maine as a Stephen King–esque hell, a place where ancient prejudices and violence lay just beneath the friendly college-town facade. She regaled my wife and me with stories of alleged racial offenses, both major and minor, and generally made it clear that she thought Lewiston—an island of diversity in an otherwise famously homogenous, if not notably reactionary, state—was a hub of white supremacy. One evening, Ava confessed to me that when she drove through town and spied the local “crackers” sitting on their porches (not unlike the very porch we were sitting on), she sometimes thought to herself that these townies would probably like to kill her.
I didn’t know what to make of Ava’s views. I won’t pretend that my sensibilities were inflamed by the word cracker, but the epithet also didn’t seem like one that a college administrator should be using—especially at a school that admits a not-insignificant number of white, working-class Mainers. I also had a difficult time taking seriously the idea that I had moved to a place with would-be Klansmen around every corner. I grew up outside Harrisburg, Pennsylvania—another deindustrialized, permanently revitalizing urban center—and Lewiston felt familiar to me. The people I met were nice, hardworking; they minded their own business. I don’t think it ever occurred to Ava that I could have come from a similar place and similar people.
But although I sometimes found the things she said classist and even offensive, I also genuinely liked Ava. She had a fast wit and a quick laugh. She watered our tomato plants when we traveled to Boston to visit family. We traded texts about the baby fox that scampered through the neighborhood’s yards in the morning and the oversize groundhog that pestered the dogs. I left freshly baked sourdough baguettes on her porch; we commiserated during power outages. Ava struck me as perhaps a touch paranoid, but she was also obviously smart. More important, she was a well-credentialed authority on racism, and I took such people seriously. Why wouldn’t I?
I’d never had great enthusiasm for identity politics; I’d been a socialist since my early 20s, and it had generally been my experience that liberals were as eager to talk about race as they were uneager to talk about class. Yet I also assumed that conservative complaints about “wokeness,” a term just coming into vogue as a pejorative, were essentially Fox News hysteria. Until I got to Bates, I had little reason to suspect that they held any merit.
At Haverford, the campus politics were of the earthy, stoner, peacenik variety—more focused on “late capitalism” and President Obama’s drone warfare than flamboyant identitarianism. At NYU, the students and faculty seemed more interested in enjoying the hedonistic riches of the city than anything that might reasonably be called “woke.” The new political correctness that was spreading on many elite campuses felt mostly like background noise, and seemed harmless besides.
That’s why, when Ava gave me anti-racist reading recommendations that first summer in Maine, I read them with an open mind. And when I found them disquietingly flimsy, politically bizarre, and, in their naked essentializing, even sort of racist, I assumed that I must be the problem. As a light-skinned Black guy who doesn’t speak African American English, I had rarely been subjected to acute prejudice in my life. I thought that perhaps I simply wasn’t Black enough—“authentically” Black enough—to understand the kind of racial pessimism that had become so mainstream.
Ava was hardly the only pessimist among my new co-workers. Around the start of the semester, I attended an informal orientation event for early-career Black faculty, where I assumed we would talk about our research interests or simply get to know one another. Instead, the gathering felt more like a combined therapy session and HR seminar. At one point, someone casually rattled off a series of local establishments to steer clear of, vaguely implying that they were filled with bigots. Alarmed by the notion that race relations were so bad in Lewiston that there were places I should avoid eating, I asked why one restaurant in particular had earned a reputation for intolerance. My colleague said that a student of color had worked there and not liked it very much.
The source of the most intense racial monomania on campus, I came to realize, was senior leadership. In one of my first encounters with the man who was then dean of the faculty, I mentioned how excited I was to be joining one of the few American colleges founded by abolitionists. At this, the dean—a white biologist who was an expert on sponges—frowned, as though my rosy view of the school’s antislavery history physically pained him. He conceded that, sure, it had been founded by the abolitionist minister Oren Burbank Cheney, but he pointed out that Benjamin Bates, the textile tycoon who had funded the college, had processed slave-picked cotton in his mills. I had come into Bates rather smitten with the idea that I was a Black academic joining the ranks of a faculty whose predecessors had agitated for Black freedom, but the dean seemed to feel that this was actually something to be faintly embarrassed of, a history that was best mentioned, if at all, only after layering on an array of caveats.
I found this kind of endemic self-flagellation to be eye-roll-worthy. But the charged atmosphere at Bates didn’t feel out of step with that of the country as a whole, at least initially. Yes, the college sponsored overearnest discussions of books such as White Fragility and How to Be an Antiracist. Yes, the president of the college bragged that 67 percent of new faculty hires that fall were “BIPOC-identified,” and, sure, it seemed likely that some racial-discrimination laws had been ignored to get that number so high. Yes, college leadership was constantly adding new letters to the sexuality acronym—LGBTQ became LGBTQAIP2+. And, yes, many of us in academia tacked pronouns onto our email signature with the righteous zeal of Martin Luther hammering his 95 theses to the church door. I certainly did. But none of this seemed all that unusual. Bates was weird in 2020. But America was weird in 2020.
That first year, I kept my head down and let the small oddities I noticed pass by without much reflection. Between teaching, grading, student advising, Zoom faculty meetings, twice-weekly COVID testing, wrangling a hyperactive rescue puppy, and trying to survive the Maine winter, I didn’t have much time to think about the college’s (or the country’s) cultural eccentricities. Ironically, that pandemic year turned out to be the sanest one I would experience at Bates.
The request came a couple of weeks into June 2021: Would I co-chair the task force that organized the college’s annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration?
