White's the difference.

WHITE BOY: A MEMOIR by Mark D. Naison. Temple, 2002.

I knew that I would be the only, white person in the classroom the day I began teaching at an urban community college, but, despite all the reading I had done on the topic, I wasn't prepared--especially for the sudden visibility of my whiteness. My students assured me that my race was nothing, that, in fact, they did not believe in racism, that race itself was a construct and that, like Martin Luther King, Jr., they wanted to judge me not by the color of my skin but by the content of my character--and, in the case of this classroom, which focused on college preparation and study skills, by how much I could help them.

Yet my race was an issue, much more so than it was at the overwhelmingly white classroom I taught in at the local state university, where I could talk about race in theoretical ways that challenged my white students' thinking but did not threaten their power in any material way. And while my students assured me that my whiteness didn't matter, I knew that it did--because I was often on the outside of their jokes, outside of their discourse, outside of their concerns. Empathy was not enough; I needed to share at least some of the experiences of my students.

Autobiography became a way for us to communicate. While my African American students often deflected my efforts to establish camaraderie, preferring, in general, a more formal student-teacher relationship, a demand that I, in response, often resisted, they loved to tell stories. In the sharing of our stories, we found not only common experiences but common concerns. Stories about car repairs or lousy landlords became opportunities nor only to practice basic budgeting skills and time management strategies but also chances to discuss institutional racism, the economics of the inner city, and empowerment. Autobiography permitted me to do the job that I was hired to do--teach college survival skills to the most under-prepared of students--while also building an atmosphere of encouragement, empathy, and energy.

Unfortunately, I had to learn this lesson before reading Mark D. Naison's White Boy: A Memoir, the 2002 autobiography of a Jewish kid who grows up loving African American culture, despite the fears of his parents, and pursues an academic career in African American studies at the time when the discipline was only beginning to emerge. Had I read the book sooner, I would have found someone who modeled the confidence and humility that I needed as a white teacher in a traditionally African American space. While Naison is not full of practical advice for teachers in this position (or for African American colleagues wrestling with their own feelings about the issue of a "white" man in a "black" field) or especially self-reflexive about his shortcomings (particularly his reliance upon his masculinity, heterosexuality, and physicality for feelings of self-worth and, at times, dominance over others), White Boy effectively blends social history and autobiography together in an engaging tale that begins in post-War New York City, with its changing neighborhood demographics, through the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements, into the development and eventual codification of the African American studies program at Columbia, where Naison has always taught, and the broader university world.

A record of the historical events is useful enough, but what marks Naison's book as of particular interest is not necessarily what Naison himself witnessed as a Jewish kid growing up in an increasingly black New York or as a partner in a biracial relationship or as an activist or as an academic worker foraying into a hostile field, nor is it his own ideas about teaching, which are not related in detail or considered in depth. Instead, the many potential ways that his book can be used in a radical classroom are what make it valuable.

White Boy should be read by those, like Naison, who at times question their own position as white and male in the academic world, and it should be read by those academic workers who are not white and male but ask the same question about their white male colleagues. Questions of authority and authenticity, central to White Boy but never fully articulated, are especially difficult for those teachers who believe neither in authority nor authenticity yet feel ourselves--as I did at the start of my experience as the white teacher of students of color--incompetent and false when interacting with students different from us, especially when we are discussing issues of difference.

Similarly, Naison's book can be used by teachers working in classrooms where racial difference--or, indeed, lack of racial variety--is a central characteristic of the composition of the class. Had I asked my students of color to read White Boy, I might have helped them understand my own discomfort and their own role in easing my discomfort. I might have been able to help them articulate their own concerns about white authority in the classroom. Had I asked my the students in my mostly white classroom to read the book, they might have learned to interrogate themselves, their motives and priorities and assumptions as they learned about black culture and history within the confines of a white classroom from a white teacher.

Most of all, students can learn the power of autobiography. As I enter the first year composition classroom year after year, my distaste for the personal narrative has grown intensely. Too often, students report personal events whose meaning is lost to anyone beyond themselves. Much of the time, students struggle to balance narration and self-reflection, and my use of texts by Richard Rodriguez, Malcolm X, and Richard Wright only seems to alienate my white students, who remain convinced that autoethnographies are for people of color or some other minority group. By demonstrating how whiteness matters--that is, how his whiteness affected his love life, his relationship with his parents, his academic career, his social life, his hobbies--Mark D. Naison's accessible White Boy can help white students find confidence to speak about issues of race, leading to a more honest treatment of this important topic in classrooms composed of all kinds of students.