Class Conflict

LATE one Friday night last May, I left my thesis work in the Classics Department of Princeton University and headed home for a couple of hours of study break sleep. Passing a dormitory near mine, I heard a shout from one of the upper floors: “F—ing nigger!” The shout was directed at me.

About racism, at Princeton and elsewhere, I was already no innocent. Speakers standing directly in front of me, in small rooms, had managed to deliver entire presentations without once looking at my face. I had often encountered the word “black” in a list of derogatory adjectives. Shopping in department stores, I had more than once been taken for a salesperson. But never before had I experienced, at least on the Princeton campus or elsewhere, such overt racism.

DA

About the Author

Danielle Allen

Danielle Allen is the James Bryant Conant university professor at Harvard University, and a former candidate for governor of Massachusetts.

LATE one Friday night last May, I left my thesis work in the Classics Department of Princeton University and headed home for a couple of hours of study break sleep. Passing a dormitory near mine, I heard a shout from one of the upper floors: “F—ing nigger!” The shout was directed at me.

About racism, at Princeton and elsewhere, I was already no innocent. Speakers standing directly in front of me, in small rooms, had managed to deliver entire presentations without once looking at my face. I had often encountered the word “black” in a list of derogatory adjectives. Shopping in department stores, I had more than once been taken for a salesperson. But never before had I experienced, at least on the Princeton campus or elsewhere, such overt racism.