(Note: This is a long post for this assignment, but I think it’s important for you to know whence your professor speaks and acts.)

That post title is in jest, of course. Well, mostly.

But I get ahead of myself. . .

When I was a child, four generations of my family lived on the same residential block in Long Beach, California. My grandfather was a retired lifeguard and police officer who in his retirement made some extra money by refinishing the woodwork on the yachts floating on the canals and marinas of an adjacent neighborhood. My grandmother took care of grandkids and cats. My parents were both high school teachers and most of my aunts and uncles worked in public education as well.

If you grew up in a city or town, maybe this, minus the yachts, sounds a bit like your own upbringing—two working parents, lots of family nearby.

If you grew up in Idaho, however, chances are that’s where the similarity ends.

As educators, my parents, aunts, and uncles were all union members. And we lived in what was increasingly acknowledged to be a gay neighborhood, with many gay couples and families on our block and the next.

My schools were diverse. Among them, kids at my high school spoke 50 languages, and in the district they spoke 150. Twenty percent of the kids at my high school were white; the remainder was evenly divided among Asian Americans, African Americans, Pacific Islanders, and Latina/os. It was Snoop Dogg’s high school, and I wrote the obituary page in the yearbook.

When I started college, I thought I wanted to study 18th- and 19th-century U.S. history, and I wanted to attend a college smaller than my high school (which had 4,000 students). What better place to be, 18-year-old me thought, than a small public college in Fredericksburg, Virginia?

Ends up I wasn’t prepared for that kind of culture shock; I wasn’t ready to be in a place where there people still flew Confederate flags and where the college was 95 percent white. I left that college after only a semester and went to community college back home in Long Beach before transferring to a small liberal arts college in Grinnell, Iowa, a town whose population was at that time 8,000. Surprisingly, despite the differences between Southern California and central Iowa, I felt very much at home.

That’s where my education really took off and the shape of my lens began to change. At Grinnell College, we didn’t have any general education requirements. We had small classes, and the college offered us all kinds of resources. The vast majority of students lived on campus, forming a strong and vibrant community. We were encouraged to prepare ourselves not for a vocation, but rather for a life of service and civic engagement. Many of my fellow alumni work in the public sector, and they take pride in their work for government and in nonprofits.

I went to grad school at UC Davis, earning three degrees—two Master’s degrees (in creative writing and cultural studies) and a Ph.D. (cultural studies). All through grad school, I taught undergraduates. Upon graduation, I worked at the university in academic technology and in the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning, where I helped faculty be more thoughtful about teaching undergraduates. I also taught graduate courses.

All this time, I read widely and deeply. Books, articles, blogs—whatever I could lay my eyes in my spare time.

Taken collectively, these experiences made me value diversity—and not just in a knee-jerk way that applauds multiculturalism. Rather, I like to hear and engage with all kinds of voices. My experiences as a woman who had met countless other women, as well as LGBT people, who were struggling to make their way in the world made me a feminist. (For me, being a feminist means acknowledging the humanity of all people, regardless of gender, sex, or sexuality and speaking up when I see bias, harassment, or unfairness related to gender and sex—especially if it’s a pattern.) Furthermore, the kinds of violence I saw, heard, and read about made me deeply pacifist; while I do not consider myself a religious person, these days my philosophical outlook leans Quakerly.

 

I share all of this as a way of saying that in this class some of you are going to feel as if we’re talking across a huge cultural and political—and perhaps sometimes even a factual—gap. Learning to talk across that gap, learning to talk with and listen to people with very different perspectives and experiences, is, I have discovered, a skill that can enrich one’s life immeasurably.

Since coming to Idaho in 2010, I have enjoyed immensely the conversations I’ve had with students from all over the West and from across the political spectrum. I don’t need to agree with someone to respect and like that person. And I’m certainly not here to indoctrinate anyone, though I know I have changed a few minds. . .and I’ve had my own mind changed.

At the same time, occasionally my beliefs and I have been caricatured by students and others. (Hence the post title.) In one case late last summer, someone I had never met or even heard of found one quote by me in a months-old press release by an organization with which I sometimes volunteer, extrapolated wildly from that quote about my beliefs, and posted about me in a far-right Facebook group; he even included a photo of me to make me easier to identify.

Death threats and threats of sexual assault followed, and that post was shared more than 120 times, amplifying its hatred. I had to get campus security and city police involved to protect me and my family. The police encouraged me to get the FBI and a counterterrorism task force involved. I didn’t want to escalate the situation, so I let it drop and eventually the haters grew quiet, though I am anxious about another flare-up during the legislative session. I wish the person who made the initial post on Facebook had simply reached out to me rather than committing libel, attacking me, and inciting others to violence.

 

All of these experiences and others have increased my interest in empathy. Why do some people have so much of it? How can I develop empathy for people who attack me or my beliefs? What am I not hearing? What am I not seeing? How did these people come to have such different habits, beliefs, and values than I do? And at what moments is it appropriate for me to engage with them respectfully around these beliefs and values, and at what points should I push them to consider new perspectives and change their habits?

That’s the lens through which I view the world: that of an intellectually curious progressive who genuinely likes all kinds of people and tries to be optimistic about the present and the future, even when it’s hard.