Not White/Straight/Male/Healthy Enough

Book excerpt: Every fall, a new crop of college freshmen arrives on campuses eager to acquire skills that will prepare them for the workplace, to join organizations that support causes they care about, and to establish meaningful relationships with their peers. Less visible are the new professors who aspire to make a difference in students’ lives, make ground-breaking discoveries, publish scholarship that influences their fields and forge lifelong collaborations with colleagues. Most importantly, these students and faculty seek acceptance beyond admittance and employment. While this desire for acceptance is universal, there is no guarantee of achieving it. For some, simply settling in often is not possible. This anthology discloses the experiences of members of the academic community who know this fight all too well. By taking a deep dive into the minds and hearts of students and faculty members who identify as “other” and by disclosing their awkward, funny and painful experiences, this book aims to caution newcomers to the academy, to equip teachers to identify and discuss inequity in the classroom, to call out perpetrators and perpetuators of injustice, and to provoke change, if not in the academic community as a whole then in each individual reader. Recognizing that the case for doing and being better cannot be made with statistics alone, this book uses storytelling to bring to light the impact of discrimination on a very personal level. The writers in this collection put their stories out there to remind readers that others like them suffer in silence.