This past spring, to round out my first year as a Humanities Teaching Fellow, I taught Reading Cultures 3: Exchange in the Humanities Core for the first time. It was also my first time teaching an online course, not to mention teaching any kind of course during a pandemic. Many firsts, and I was daunted.

Sure, I had done this before, in a way. I had taught a literature course in the fall titled Apocalypse Then and Now, in which we read Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826), a dystopian novel about a mysterious virus that eradicates all of humanity save one man in the late twenty-first century. By the spring, our reading of that novel in the relative innocence of Autumn Quarter 2019 felt eerie.

I’m used to encouraging students to make connections between an eighteenth- or a nineteenth-century text and their own twenty-first-century experience. This quarter, the stress and intensities of our present made it virtually impossible not to connect our texts to our lives at every turn.

As COVID-19 started to wreak havoc on the economy, we began our teaching online with anthropologist Marcel Mauss’s work on gift exchange societies, followed by Marx’s famous critiques of capitalism. Our main artistic works were Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times, Honoré de Balzac’s Old Goriot, and Xiao Hong’s The Field of Life and Death. Each of these works explores how individuals interact with major social and economic shifts—the plight of the factory worker and the labor strikes of the 1930s; the clashes of wealth regimes, old and new, in the wake of the French Revolution; and Chinese peasant farmers before and during the time of the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931, respectively. Distant as these contexts might seem, they felt immediate, as we compared them to the ways the economic institutions of our own times are being tested.

We began our reading of Richard Wright’s Native Son the week George Floyd was killed. I’ll say right up front that I floundered. As it turns out, a couple of pedagogy workshops on race do not make up for the fact that I hadn’t, as a White person, even begun to “do the work.” Keeping Wright’s novel as our focus, I tried to examine how the issues raised by Floyd’s death—systemic racism, in particular—appeared in our discussions of this novel published 80 years ago. What had changed? What hadn’t?

We read part of a 2015 article by sociologist Elijah Anderson, AM’72, about white spaces—“settings in which black people are typically absent, not expected, or marginalized when present.” In discussing the difference between the overt segregation in Native Son and the subtler category of white space, one student’s comment illustrated how then and now could blur. Segregation, this student said, is “essentially a logical wall that you can’t pass,” whereas white space is “more subconscious.” But as the student continued to speak, his referents and tenses muddled, and it was harder to track which setting he was referring to, the setting of Native Son or Anderson’s twenty-first century.

There were moments when the novel seemed to us lifted right out of 2020: When Bigger arrives at the Daltons’ home in a wealthy White section of Hyde Park, he worries, “Suppose a policeman saw him wandering in a white neighborhood like this? It would be thought that he was trying to rob or rape somebody.” Remember, that last week of May was also the week that a White woman called 911 on a Black birdwatcher in New York City’s Central Park Ramble. And Ahmaud Arbery’s third murderer had only just been charged on May 21. One of my students suggested we’d shifted entirely from a segregationist mindset to a white space mindset, where, in his words, it was no longer “unforgiveable” to be Black. But the recent murders of Floyd, Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and many, many others said otherwise.

I found one of the most useful teaching tools of the novel to be the character of the older, White, blind Mrs. Dalton. Though she seems interested in helping Bigger go to school and advance in society, she is not interested in him as an individual with individual desires. When Bigger is inadvertently suffocating Mrs. Dalton’s daughter, Mrs. Dalton appears in the doorway as a “white blur.”

I asked the students whether they thought Mrs. Dalton could be read as a figure for White supremacy. Some said they didn’t think so, pointing to the fact that she was a member of the NAACP. This led to a conversation about how the novel’s descriptive style could seize Mrs. Dalton and transform her into something larger than, and even in apparent contradiction to, her stated beliefs. She’s a physically weak character, and yet to Bigger she is more active and dangerous than a mere blur. Perhaps, we concluded, it was about widespread complicity. As one student put it, “Even if she doesn’t have this belief, society does, and so for that she’ll always have this kind of authority position over Bigger.”

Teaching difficult and sensitive material—or teaching remotely, for that matter—is challenging under the best circumstances. In planning my syllabus, I tried to keep in mind the range of challenges that had been dumped on my students. I cut supplementary texts, decreased our synchronous meetings from twice to once a week, added more online discussions for continuity, and reduced the number of formal assignments. And I learned the art of the video platform Panopto, or at least some of the science of it, and recorded several presentations. The Reading Cultures lecturers all shared presentations, which let us give students something they had overwhelmingly said they wanted: the opportunity to hear perspectives from a variety of Core instructors and to be able to watch and rewatch lectures on their own schedules.

To help get us all through, I made more room for humor, pausing (irrepressibly delighted) when students’ pets or mine wandered onscreen, and generally tried to foster a relaxed environment in which it was OK to be curious, unsure, tired, or behind on the reading. If there has been a silver lining, it is that the stress of the pandemic coaxed all of us perfectionists to be more compassionate toward ourselves and each other.

The challenge of making the quarter manageable and even fun for my students—a spot of social contact and community—helped me keep it together as I planned for a career transition. Even before the pandemic, the academic job market was worse than it had ever been. Now, with widespread hiring freezes and one year left on my two-year fellowship, it’s unlikely I’ll be working with university students beyond the coming academic year. I’m grateful, though, that the thing I enjoy most about teaching is portable: building supportive relationships that allow everyone’s best work to emerge.