let's surface our country's abiding bigotry

My undergrad college, a 'little ivy' liberal arts college, had a freshman studies week where all freshman, before regular classes started, read a book or two. We had to read "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee". In the Upper Midwest, Wounded Knee was local history, local nightmare.

Of course for the rest of my undergrad experience, I chose the courses, with some distribution requirements. I took mostly Spanish and Anthropology classes. But in my senior year, my college introduced a new-to-them program, a three trimester series (one could take one, two or three trimesteres) called "Irrationality". I took all three. My college prided itself on very small classes, except for science lecture halls with small lab groups, but for Irrationality they used that model and the Irrationality courses were taught by a variety of liberal arts profs: history, anthropology, political science. We'd have one large lecture, held in the science hall because that was the only large lecture hall on our campus and then two small group discussions.

We kicked off our year in Irrationality with the Holocaust. Those all male profs covered the Vietnam War, which had ended while I was in college. Most college kids I knew watch the fall of Saigon in the student union. In those days, nobody had tv's in dorm rooms. No one had computers. In those dark ages, there were no computers either. Most of us knew newly returned veterans and we all knew guys with low draft numbers who had enlisted so they coud serve. If the low draft lottery numbers enlisted, they could choose to serve in W. Europe.

During the Vietnam trimester, the third one in the 'Irrationality" trilogy, just weeks before I graduated -- and I was very timid in class in college, never volunteering to speak. I got over that timidity, eh? But week after week, was had studied war, genocide. And we had all read "Bury My Heart" our freshman year. Never a mention of Native American genocide. Never a mention of any blacks, not even MLK, Jr, who was still fresh in the memories of all college kids I knew -- we had all been freshman in h.s. when he was assassinated. But nary a mention of him in my undergrad years.

I don't remember racism or slavery ever coming up in college.

After seeing the  new film, The Long Shadow, I am angry that the overt racism upon which much of this nation's history has been built did not rate somewhere in my education.

So as the final weeks of my college life wound down and we kept talking about war -- men's wars -- and never really about anything else, I piped up and suggested maybe we could study sexism. "And why would we do that?" intoned my brilliant U. of Chicago History Professor (he had PhD from Chicago, I did not go there . .. ). I could have picked a different small group discussion prof each trimester of irrationality but I had taken "Intro to History" with him and I liked how very smart he was. He went on. "What is irrational about sexism?" Not yet defeated, I said "If women had some say in all the wars we have studied, I think there would have been less wars. I think women might change the course of human history." And that History prof, who knew me pretty well for I had taken, by then, five courses with him said "Like a typical female, you are speaking irrationally". Then, a second too late, he realized he had crushed me. I am sure I turned beet red. I remember feeling that it had become hard to breath. I never said another word to that prof and he tried to draw me out, even introducing feminism in some context as we discussed the Vietnam War.

My larger point: we never talked about this country's history of racism. We didn't even discuss MLK, Jr. and, geez, even in my all-girl and all-white-but-for-two-black-girls high school, we talked about MLK, Civil Rights (and the Vietnam War which was going on when I was in h.s.).

Truth told, I thought I had a very smart insight, that the war between the sexes was both irrational and pivotal to human culture, and certainly to human irrationality. Fuck that guy for shutting me down with his white male privilege.