Rigoberto González on Microaggressions in Artistic & Academic Circles: 'Respectability doesn’t protect us'

Rigoberto González writes for Jacket Copy about belonging to the "exclusive bittersweet club for professionals of color." "The hard lesson," writes González, "is that respectability doesn’t protect us, and neither does being a part of a liberal space; being an academic or an artist doesn’t spare us the indignity of being devalued." More:

Since becoming a college professor, I have had more stories to share: the time I went to the dean’s apartment for a dinner party with a bottle of wine in my hand and was mistaken at the door for a delivery man; the time I was stapling a lesson handout in the department copy room and was mistaken for the office assistant — how could I, in my brown body, exist beyond such roles?

I thought that as I matured I would develop a thick skin about these failures of the imagination, but I discovered quite recently that I have not. Maybe it’s the times, the belief that being a model citizen would shield a person from expulsion or deportation is under serious threat if not debunked altogether. The expectation that immigrants could actually earn a place at the table has become a precarious promise of the American dream.

Picture it: Chicago, 2017. I am on assignment for a literary magazine to interview an up-and-coming Latina talent from the area. I ask her to meet me at the building housing a renowned literary foundation and its library. The hook of her story, and mine (and why I had a sentimental reason for pitching the article), is we were both inhabiting cultural spaces from which our communities have felt excluded. About 10 minutes into our conversation we are asked to leave for talking in the library, which was empty of any patrons except for us. The optics were unnerving: a white woman, supervising from the second floor, sends her message via text to her assistant to ask the two Latinos to leave while the African American security guard has to look on. The point of this specificity is not to shame the literary organization, but to illustrate how such dynamics of race and power are not lost on those of us whose writing questions, unpacks and critiques authority, policy and boundary.

Read it all at Jacket Copy.