"I Cannot Help Being a White Man" (CIMS Chronicles)

It was only my second month at the university as a PhD candidate when I received an email from the head of my research group. It was an email to the entire group in which he extended his apologies for not making it to our team building weekend. He had just returned from "crazy Cairo" and had to stay home to fight against "some Egyptian slaves who tried to build another pyramid in [his] stomach."

It took me a while to realize he was full of shit. Literally. He was battling food poisoning. That was the joke.

My toxic trait is that I write sarcastic replies to dumb emails that enter my inbox (working on it). This time I hesitated. Maybe I could be funny too. So I hit send on a short reply: "I hope you are funnier in real life." Two minutes later, it backfired. He called my email brutal. He said brutality was neither interesting nor productive.

This is where I started to sweat. Was my line really so terrible? Or was it the fact that I dared to puncture the authority of a senior professor with "humor" of my own? (i.e. to match his energy). His message seemed laced with unspoken rules. Humor, apparently, is fine when it flows downwards, but becomes disruptive when it goes upwards.

The irony here is almost unbearable. This man supervises a doctoral project on the very intersection of humor and racism. He is supposed to guide critical thinking on how jokes can wound, exclude, and perpetuate stereotypes. Yet when faced with a - I'd say gentle - pushback to his own orientalist quip, he collapsed into fragility.

The story did not stay between us for long, because soon after, my supervisor felt inclined to send him an apology on my behalf (wtf?). Then the head of research group forwarded the whole e-mail exchange we had to the entire mailing list "for [all of them] to enjoy", claiming I had already done so (I had initially hit the reply all button - cheeky me). In less than two hours my short reply had turned into an affair that apparently shook the "safe space" of the entire group.

At lunch that day the discussion became weirdly gendered. Female colleagues congratulated me, one even hugged me. Two male colleagues laughed it off, confident he could handle it. But the rest... the men closest to him, those clearly eyeing a fixed position at the department, began to avoid me altogether. Their loyalty was obvious, or at least calculated.

When I met with him in person (his request), the conversation revealed what was really at stake. Before I had even sat down he began to lecture me. "Honestly, it was brutal. I felt it was brutal, really." He trembled, avoided eye contact, shifted in his chair. He insisted we were equals, that he valued critical voices, that he liked assertive replies. Yet every sentence circled back to how my words had wounded him. And not only him, I had threatened the openness of the group, and disrupted its culture.

He brought up the term "safe space," and how my reply had made colleagues afraid to present their papers, afraid to fail, afraid to speak freely. It felt twisted. I had to ask him directly which email, exactly, had threatened the safe space? He answered without hesitation: "Yours."

The appropriation of that language is staggering. Safe space was coined to protect those vulnerable to exclusion and harassment. Women, queer people, people of color, working-class students. It was never meant to shield the authority of a white man who cracks clumsy jokes about pyramids and slaves. Safe space has always already existed for people like him. If anything, we are all navigating his five-hundred-year safe space.

What he could not name directly was that he had felt challenged, and embarrassed, probably, by a young woman of color who was new to the institution. For him the offense was not simply the words I wrote, but that I had written them publicly. In his world critique from below has to remain private, careful, and contained.

When I brought up the twistedness of it all. How there are obvious power relations at play here, and that safe space might not be the right term here, he reached for the classic card: "I cannot help being a white man. I was born like this." At that moment I realized the conversation was no longer about me at all. It was about him, his identity, and his need to be reassured that his authority would remain intact.

He eventually shifted to another topic. He had googled my work (creepy? but ok) and wanted me to help organize a class around the film BLACK (if you know, you know). The request was part of my job description, yet it carried an undertone. He warned me not to cause conflicts, as if conflict was my default state. Again the framing was clear. I was no longer a researcher with ideas of my own. I was an "angry" presence to be managed, useful only if I could do the work quietly, behind the scenes.

I left his office with a pat on the shoulder that felt more like a dismissal than a gesture of collegiality. The following weeks I felt sick. I hated being at the office. I hated being cast as the Angry Black Woman. And I hated how easily he had managed to silence me.

For a while the power play continued in quieter but equally telling ways. He would ask me to drop off a library book at his office one floor below, as if I were his assistant. He dictated how I could or could not be involved in his class on cinema and race. He warned me explicitly that although he welcomed critical voices, he did not want any of this to appear on a public forum (lol, bet). Critique, in other words, was fine as long as it never left his control.

The truth is that white fragility often hides behind words like safety, collegiality, and productivity. People like me are expected to carry the burden of politeness, understanding, and grace. To translate our discomfort into academic theory before it counts as legitimate. Meanwhile the powerful can retreat into their rawest feelings, their white tears, and their fragile egos.

After weeks of trying to push through, I realized the only way to stop the cycle was to step back. I stayed home more. I disengaged. Eventually I left the research group altogether. I am not here to be anyone’s slave. Not in their jokes, not in their classrooms, not in their wildest dreams.