Download PDFHow We Are Perceived
Sujash’s story: I walk into the classroom on the first day of a new semester. Ten minutes early. Not as an international student this time. But as an instructor. A student from the same part of the world I am from (the Indian subcontinent) greets me as I take a chair next to him. It’s ten minutes before class starts… He is relieved to see there is somebody like him in this class! We chat about what we are excited about this semester. I tell him I am excited about my coursework. He tells me he is nervous about keeping grades up. It’s a first-year-writing class. Ten minutes go by. I walk up to the podium and open my backpack to get my laptop out and plug it into the overhead projector system. I hear a few students gasp and ask out loud, oh wait, you’re the teacher?
Teaching writing as a Bangladeshi immigrant to the US has come with a mix bag of surprises, sometimes for me and sometimes for my students. The stereotype is that we only dig the sciences. Material, chemical, computer. If not that, at least, business or econ. Despite my childhood education (Bangladeshi equivalent of K-12) centering around the idea that someday we all become either doctor, engineer, or businessman, I turned out to be a teacher of writing. Even in America this idea has its echo.
At a PWI, there is this racialized immigrant identity that has been a Rorschach-like shadow that follows me around. To some this shadow causes a sigh of relief (oh, there are others like me), but for most it creates confusion (the administration asking for more paperwork to be able to employ).
Matt’s story: Growing up, I always got questions of “so what are you?” to which my answers never sufficed. I would get things like “you aren’t Chinese [because you don’t look it]” or “I didn’t even know Guam was a place.” Being mixed-race, no one really ever could pinpoint who I was as I never fit their conceptions of what an Asian American or Pacific Islander looked like. While this slowly went away as I went through my education, these memories still haunt me as I got to teach. What are my students going to think of me? I don’t have a Canvas picture and my name is Matthew Louie; they might think, that's a white name so it must be a white professor. When I get into the classroom, are they going to have the same questions of “so what are you?” Though students never asked, how I was racialized (or in this case not fitting into generalizations about either Asians or Pacific Islanders fully) made me feel always like I needed to be on the defensive. I need to prove that I am Asian American and Pacific Islander despite “not looking the part” to others.
While I feel like I have got the “proving myself” as an Asian American and Pacific Islander down now, I then had the other hurdle of now proving that I was a knowledgeable and legitimate instructor of writing and the questions again come back. I literally just convinced my students that I am Asian American and Pacific Islander, do I undermine all that by saying “oh, don’t worry, I am knowledgeable about writing as I come from histories of colonization and immigration which were wrought with English-only/assimilative Policies?” I don’t even know if students feel like they need this information but it feels important to me to think about it as I know I don’t look like what they might perceive a writing instructor to look like.
Between our stories, the throughline is how the idea of what a writing instructor looks like is connected with whiteness. This normalization of whiteness takes a toll both through our external interactions with students (amongst other people) alongside the internal thoughts we engage with as we understand that people who look like us have historically not been in this role. These external and internal pressures are not isolated to us and are ideas that have been articulated before by other graduate students in similar contexts. For example, Lee (2023) and Sales (2020) both also engage with the responsibilities and perceptions that weigh on graduate student-instructors of color. In Lee’s (2023) case, it is a matter of how race and identity come up against the normalization of whiteness and language experience as she details how being Asian, in addition to jumping between the student-instructor role, has impacted her perception of how equipped she is to teach native English speakers in her English composition course. Sales’s (2020) work brings in the student side of things as he recounts the tensions of how “becoming successful as a person of color, as an immigrant, as an indigenous [sic], has historically looked a certain way” (para. 13). Being a graduate student in the humanities was not seen as part of the history around what becoming a successful person of color looks like.
Our stories combined with Lee’s (2023), then, affirm how there is a normalization of the white body for instructors. Sales (2020) contributes further by highlighting how approximation of whiteness haunts perceptions of what graduate studies people of color have historically taken up to be deemed successful in the United States. These dissonances bring up how race factors into the graduate student-instructor dual role as, alongside the responsibilities that come with being a student and being an instructor, we are navigating the challenges of how racialization shapes the way we are perceived in these roles. This includes the combination of the “persuasion-work” we have to do to justify why we have the authority to stand in front of a classroom, as people of color at a PWI, alongside the negotiation we need to engage in as we represent our identities as students and future scholars in rhetoric and composition.