Effacing Blackness in the Classroom

Is it better to be mentioned in a scholarly work as an anonymous black student who said something smart in a seminar or not be mentioned at all?  To wit:

For nearly twenty years—since 1874, when he wrote his "True Story" about former slave Aunt Rachel—Mark Twain had been thinking and writing about the causes and consequences of caste and slavery.  In Pudd'nhead Wilson he saw the problem with such singular clarity that he chose to separate it from the question of race.  I had not been aware that he had done so until a few years ago, when a black student in one of my classes protested a trend in our discussion of the novel.  "This book," he said, "is not about black folks.  It's about the mean way some white people treat other white people."  (Mark Twain and Science 194)

Seems fair to me: 

• Black student effaces black folks from Twain's novel. 
• Teacher effaces black student from monograph about white folks in Twain's novel.

What?  Like the black student could've made a career writing about novels full of white folks?  Do you honestly think those people beam with pride when they see their names in scholarly books? 

The teacher takes pains to mention the boy's blackness.  Since when was being a credit to your race not enough?  Now they want us to acknowledge them by name?  Talk about gratitude.

Comments

[Belle Lettre]

This is awful. My discipline would never do this, particularly when discussing race-based classifications in law or race-based affirmative action. Except that this happens all the time in law reviews. Although when they write an entire aricle about how the year after Prop 209 was enacted there was only one black student enrolled at the law school at Berkeley--well, you can kind of figure out who that one black student was.

Awful.

[tomemos]

Am I missing something? Correct me if I'm wrong, but when quoting impromptu class comments, I don't imagine it's commonplace to give the real names of the student commenters, not least because getting permission (and verifying what exactly was said) would be potentially problematic. And it seems relevant to the author's point that the student is black; it would be kind of weird to omit that. So what's the problem?

[Rich Puchalsky]

Tomemos, the student's blackness functions in the anecdote as validation of his point. Without it, the anecdote is about some student making some random, unsupported point, and why should anyone care? This whole "speaking for your race" thing is highly annoying to most people, in my observation.

[SEK]

Tomemos,

Rich points to one of the problems: the student is reduced to a function of his race. Professionally speaking, I think the student ought to be credited in the acknowledgments section. I mean, a grad student's comment making it into a monograph deserves some sort of recognition, no? Think about the instrumentality: if you discuss your work with a colleague, they'll be noted in the acknowledgments. But that's an indirect influence, whereas this is a citation of an actual, particular student in a discrete classroom situation.

Then there's the journalism teacher in me who hates Hates HATES uncited sources.

[JPool]

Tomeemos and SEK, you're both right. This is standard practice, and it's obnoxious (the obnoxiousness being underlined by instrumental use of the students race to add validity to his argument).

[JPool]

Sorry, stick e.

[JPool]

Sorry, sticky e.