Confessions of a Token Black Professor
A professor reflects on his experiences navigating elite academia as a Black academic, contrasting his professional success with the underlying social and institutional tensions. The piece serves as a personal critique of the academic environment.
Why it matters
It provides a critical perspective on diversity and inclusion within higher education institutions.
The insufferable hypocrisy of elite academia
Illustration by Erin Jia August 10, 2026, 7 AM ET Share Save A s you cross the Androscoggin River into Lewiston, you pass on your left the waterfalls that once set the mills to humming. On your right, affixed to a pockmarked brick mill—now defunct, it had spun tens of thousands of bedspreads a week—a 30-foot-wide neon sign reads HOPEFUL.
And so I was. My wife and I drove by that unlit sign on the hot May afternoon when we moved from New York to the interior of Maine. It was 2020. The 100,000th American was about to die of COVID. And I was starting my dream job.
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