Eli Steele: Jodi Shaw and the Racial Mask of Whiteness

A former librarian at Smith College, Jodi Shaw, chronicles her experience being reduced to "a white mask" as the school descended into a racially charged culture.

After I secured my rental car at the Hartford airport, I drove through Farmington Valley and its fields that no longer produced tobacco. I saw several barns that stood in the 1940s and I imagined, to the best of my abilities, what it would be like to be that teen who found unexpected freedoms in these lands. Down South, he had to hide his rich humanity behind the racial mask of inferiority to conform to the violent racial order of white supremacy that haunted his upbringing. But here, in this valley, when that teen realized that the local whites did not wear the racial mask of superiority and that he was no longer bound to his own racial mask, he felt the exhilarating freedom of allowing his true self to emerge wholly, even if for only the summer.