It is far too common, for one thing, for education to fail the students who go looking for it. Not only, White laments, do many educators simply refuse to address the racism that so fundamentally defines this country; often, when they do, they go about it all wrong. White shares the story of a white professor who, while discussing hip-hop, liberally uses the n-word in class. She is well-intentioned; she thinks she is tossing that slur around constructively; but White hears about the episode from a student of color who was in the classroom for this egregious mistake, stunned into silence and withdrawal by the display.
When White makes note of her own successes in the classroom, it is with a sense of triumph that is tinged with the painful awareness of how hard-won such demonstrable successes are—which anyone who has been a teacher is likely to recognize. White writes about an American literature survey course in which a first-generation African American student was “suffering from intellectual malaise.” “Then,” she writes, “I introduced him to W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk and watched his whole classroom demeanor undergo a sea change; it was like Du Bois himself had entered the room and shaken this student to his core.” While describing how Du Bois’s writing spoke to this student, and how he seemed to stir awake in response to it, White writes about her own first exposure to Du Bois, and the great influence his writing had on her. “Telling a story,” she explains, “and telling the right story are two distinct actions, the greater value definitely lying in the latter.”
What is implied there, given White’s faith in education as a viable tool with which to pry bigotry from the bigoted, is that this is, in part, what those celebrators of the lynching of Emmett Till are missing. They have been told the wrong story. The right one is out there. We need only ensure that it is told to them, and that they hear it.
And, again, as White is careful to remind us, that is not an easy task. But throughout Survivor’s Guilt she offers strategies with which she has found success in her teaching career, ways to make the most of the time she has with her students:
The way I work to improve generational retention of diverse narratives is to advise my students, regardless of their major, to purchase the books for my classes instead of renting them to save a few dollars, something that is not easy to convince underfunded college students to do. I encourage them to build personal libraries that they can share with their family members and, one day, maybe even their children. As first-generation college students, I tell them not to hesitate to share the books with their mothers and fathers. More than once, students have come back to tell me how much a parent has enjoyed a novel. The simple truth is that good stories change lives.
When you educate a student, White thus implies, the benefits are not limited to just one person. And there are concrete ways, such as the above, to make it more likely that those benefits will be extended, and more lives will be changed for the better.
At no point does White let the reader forget the dire stakes that underpin all of this. There is nothing abstract about the hatred White refers to, as the classroom where she teaches, like every classroom, is precisely where the bigotry she wants to remedy is sometimes expressed. In “A Lynching in North Carolina,” which concerns in part the lynching of one of White’s ancestors by a crowd of 150 white men in 1881, White describes a classroom scene in which one of her students refused to put away his Confederate flag, to the point where he had to be escorted out by campus security.
To look upon such a student and see a failure of education, someone who has, among other things, been told the wrong stories, is perhaps the height of empathy. That attitude insists that he is redeemable, that with the right teacher telling him the right story he can be set right. And in this way it seems Survivor’s Guilt is the book we need in these darkest of times, when, as White reminds us in the Introduction, “over the past several years, racial profiling has resulted in devastating loss of life,” and mass shootings are all but routine. What she writes about her students could just as easily be written about us, her readers:
I am not perfect; I mourn and celebrate with my students. I know that I can no more give up on them than I could on myself. Survival is not luck, it is a deliberate choice. In the words of my mother, who is over eighty now and still going strong, “You have to make up your mind early in life that you are going to be a survivor.” I want nothing more than for every one of them to survive.