Why I teach at Howard

New Crisis, The, May/Jun 2002 by Wu, Frank H

As a law professor at Howard University in Washington, D.C., I am reminded of the importance of race every morning when I walk to work. In the leisurely stroll down five blocks between my home and office in the nation's capital, I move from a mostly white residential neighborhood that is quite affluent to a predominantly Black institution that is economically mixed. The switch is more than physical, but it cannot be reduced to easy terms.

Howard University has been for more than a century the leading school in the nation for the training of black lawyers. Its legendary dean of the World War 11 period, Charles Hamilton Houston once said that every lawyer was either a social engineer or a parasite on society. A perfectionist who concurred with Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., that the law was "a jealous mistress," Houston devoted himself to preparing the social engineers. Graduates during his watch included such giants as Thurgood Marshall, who would use the law to produce racial desegregation by achieving the moral victory of Brown v. Board of Education before the Supreme Court in 1954. The tradition they started continues to this day, giving the school a mission that most others cannot claim.

I am privileged to be the first Asian American on the Howard law faculty, and yet there seems to be something remarkable about a person of Asian heritage being associated with a historically black college. Strangers may not be sure what it is that is so surprising to them, but their uncertainty induces them to wonder aloud. Since becoming a member of the academy, I have lost count of the number of times people have asked, "Why are you at Howard?" or been impressed because they thought I taught at Harvard. They ask, "What is it like to be a minority among minorities? How does it feel?" Sometimes, "Do black people accept you? Or do they discriminate against you?" They ask, "What are they like? Are they good students?" Or, "Are you trying to make an ideological statement? Are you rebelling?" They add, "Couldn't you find a job anywhere else? Do you want to stay?" Even, "Did you grow up in a black neighborhood?" On more than one occasion, a person has looked me over carefully, paused, and then stammered, "Are you - are you actually black?"

The people who ask these questions casually but constantly in various combinations are almost all good-hearted. Most are white, some are black, and a few are Asian American themselves. Despite their diverse backgrounds, they share the same curiosity. Within a moment of meeting me and finding out what I do or more precisely, where I do what I do - whether it is during a professional conference, while I am at a television station appearing as a guest, visiting a campus to speak, at a social gathering such as a dinner party, or in striking up a new acquaintance through an introduction by friends, they pull me aside to confide their surprise. It doesn't matter what I may have been doing or talking about - trying to learn to play tennis or chatting about politics - and I need not make any effort to provoke any racial issue. People raise their eyebrows when I mention my employer.

After awhile, the questions started me mulling over race itself. Speculating about an Asian American teacher with mainly African American students is not offensive, although I admit I am exhausted by the tedious interrogations. I toyed with having a sarcastic retort printed on the back of my business cards, but they are looking for more than cursory answers. They are looking for something, they know not what, but it is directly in front of them. More than might be intended by the people who are inquiring, their inquisitiveness reveals the invisible influence of racial judgments on our everyday perceptions. All of us see race inevitably, without even being awake to what is on our minds. Race is the elephant in the room; the harder we try to pay no attention to race, like the elephant, the larger it looms.

When I was pondering where to embark on my life as a scholar, nobody thought to ask, "Well, what will it be like to be the only Asian American at a white school? How does it feel?" or "What are whites like? Are they good students?" I am bemused that Asian Americans now and then suggest that I have taken a position to curry favor with blacks, because I work at a predominantly black institution. They don't seem to realize that if such an assumption can be made about me without any other basis, they must be ingratiating themselves to whites by the same reasoning. Nobody ever bothers my wife, an Asian American who happens to teach at another fine but predominantly white law school across town, about why she has chosen that place of employment or expects her to be an expert on whiteness.

Becoming the only Asian American at a white school was an option available to me. I was fortunate enough to have been invited to interview with many law schools. I would have ended up every bit as much the minority at any of them. None of the law schools with which I interviewed had ever had an Asian American professor. The majority of the 175 accredited law schools in this country did not then and had never had a person of Asian descent in a tenured position teaching any subject. After they hire one, who knows whether they will hire another. There is no place where my wife and I could be among a majority of Asian Americans; even in Asia, we would be out of place as Asian Americans.