"Well, I would never date a white person," Regan responded in dead earnest. It was before our graduate seminar on English Renaissance literature that Joy and Regan, both Korean-American classmates of mine, began chatting about race and relationships.

"Just to make sure no accidents happen," I put in sarcastically. "You could each administer blood tests to your prospective partners to ensure racial purity."

There's no reason I should have known better, but now of course I wish I had. It was the beginning of my first year of graduate school at UC-Berkeley's English Department, a program known for pumping out scholars who are as well-versed in the litany of anti-colonial political correctness as the rhyme schemes of Chaucer. As green and eager graduate students, we all took (and, yes, still take) the finer points of racially tinged rhetoric very seriously. So I was surprised to hear such racial essentialism uttered by two of the department's young disciples, and I took it upon myself to point out their mistake. Now, with more irrational discussions about race under my belt than I care to admit, it's obvious that I was stepping into the trap that I've since tried mightily to avoid. Because even though people in graduate humanities programs seem to be thinking very subtly about gender and race, too often identities are dressed up as ideas. Even when people assiduously think through their positions, their skin color or sexual proclivity sometimes trumps their intellect.

"You should think about what you said about blood tests," Regan chided me after class. "Race isn't about genes, it's socially constructed, it's about power relations."

"Of course it is!" I exclaimed. "But you made the categorical statement about whites!"

"And it's the white power relation that I don't want to be a part of," she said.

I didn't ask her how she, who had gone to Harvard, was engaged to a medical student and seemed to carry a different handbag every day, imagined herself to be on the innocent end of the "hegemony." In some ways, she seemed to be a smart, fiercely intellectual young scholar, who, like all of us there toiling with nary a job prospect, had decided to devote her life to thinking about meaning, virtue and the grave implications that language can take on. I wanted to give her the benefit of my doubt and simply pursue the argument without dismissing her. "But if this power relation co-varies so exactly with white genes that you can call it the 'white power relation,'" I protested, "then it sounds like you're assuming that genes are almost the blueprint for social construction, which is the opposite of what you're asserting."

She berated me and all white people for regarding race merely academically, for thinking that it can be accessed and debated just like any other subject. I confessed I had never taken a course on race and that I found academic writings on race as repugnant as academic writings on literature.

"So you presume to talk about race when you haven't even deigned to study it -- you probably haven't even read one book by Cornell West!"

Her argument that it was typical of white people either to study or not to study race seemed to have all the bases covered. I got a little defensive. "If being racist has anything to do with how one feels about, thinks about and treats others," I replied hotly, "then I am not racist and nothing I have said suggests that I am."

"Clearly," she said, her eyes flashing with impatience, "your conceptions of race are very outdated, and this conversation is pointless because it would take too long even to get to the point at which you could understand the necessary terms. And I didn't even have to say as much as I have to you -- I could just have written you off like the other students in the department."

Next page | How I became the department bigot