Content area
Full Text
LAST SPRING, I received an anonymous death threat on my campus voice mail. "F-----g mother f --," the call began, in a young man's screaming voice, "you're dead meat." The caller told me that he was going to "trigger your mother-f-----g ass." I knew that the threat was for me, because I say my name in the recording that comes on when I can't answer the phone.
By way of background, I am in the department of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. I'd been working very hard, teaching an extra class, and so I was especially upset by the call.
The threat was phoned in at around 3 a.m., about 12 hours after I had finished giving the midterm exam in my "Introduction to Asian-American Studies" course. More than 100 students were taking the course, and I hadn't had much of an opportunity to get to know them individually. But I did know that they were mostly freshmen and sophomores, and I guessed that quite a few had assumed that the course was going to be a breeze. In fact, many of them did badly on the midterm-I ended up giving about a sixth of them D's and F's.
The menacing call was filled with curses and threats. The speaker expressed great hatred for me. The call also involved racism: The speaker told me, among other things, that "white people rule."
Now that I think about it, given the emphasis on human rights and racial equality in my courses, I am surprised that in my almost 20 years in the classroom I had never before received a threat along those lines. Initially, after I got over the shock, I felt a combination of sadness and outrage-increased by the fact that I could hear other people laughing in the background as the caller threatened me.
I felt sad, because the call made me feel like a failure. I am not a natural teacher, if such a thing exists. I have to work very hard to prepare myself intellectually, psychologically, and emotionally to teach, especially when I am trying to hold the attention of a large audience of undergraduates in a lecture hall. I also felt sad because someone apparently hated me, my...