Austin and Crendalyn McMath's teacher-student relationship

Austin’s relationship with Crendalyn McMath, her first Black teacher and a marketing professor, made belonging at college feel possible without requiring Austin to translate herself for a white classroom. McMath’s teaching offered more than the reassurance of seeing another Black woman in a position of authority: it exposed how supposedly universal lessons and examples could assume white cultural knowledge, and how a teacher could make that assumption visible. In McMath’s classroom, Austin encountered a different model of who belonged, whose knowledge counted, and who had to do the work of understanding whom.

First Black Teacher at College

Austin first encountered McMath when she arrived at college in Chicago. McMath took command of her classrooms, bringing stories from her professional experience into her teaching. She was tall, wore suits that seemed to lengthen her frame, and stood out to Austin as a brilliant Black woman. Austin felt proud that McMath shared her identity; her presence mattered before any particular lesson had begun.

That recognition did not mean the relationship’s significance rested only on representation. In classrooms before McMath’s, Austin had routinely been asked, implicitly, to follow references drawn from white middle-class life. A teacher might use sailing or skiing as if every student already knew those experiences. Everyday examples could similarly assume that all girls washed their hair each morning, though Black girls in the class did not. Austin and other Black students learned to nod along rather than interrupt the lesson to explain the limits of the teacher’s assumptions. The cost was not simply missing a reference: it was carrying the recurring labor of interpreting a curriculum that treated white experience as common experience.

Teaching Across Cultural Assumptions

McMath disrupted that pattern through her teaching, including when she used a beauty shop as an example while explaining business planning. As the class followed the example, she referred to getting a relaxer. Austin immediately recognized the term; the white students looked toward the lectern in confusion. McMath explained that some Black women choose relaxers to straighten curly hair, contrasting the practice with what happens when white people get a perm. Then she winked at Austin, who grinned broadly.

The moment made cultural difference visible without making Austin responsible for explaining it. McMath did the explanatory work herself, and the class’s confusion exposed the narrowness of what it had treated as familiar. Austin could respond as a student who understood the example, rather than as a spokesperson summoned to account for Black life. The wink also made the recognition personal: McMath acknowledged that Austin had caught the reference and shared in the brief pleasure of the exchange.

Belonging and Agency

Austin described the larger gift of McMath’s presence as not having to create her own sense of belonging in the classroom. That ease contrasted with the effort she had made elsewhere to decode white teachers’ examples and move through a curriculum that presented white cultural experience as universal. McMath’s classroom did not require the same constant translation from Austin. Her example of a beauty shop and a relaxer was part of an ordinary lesson, yet it allowed Black cultural knowledge to enter the room on its own terms.

The change registered beyond the immediate comfort of class. Austin had paid tuition like every white student, but had begun to feel that college was made for somebody else. In McMath’s classroom, that settled sense of exclusion began to stir; Austin was no longer content simply to attend an institution in which she felt peripheral. The account links this awakening to a particular teaching relationship, not to a claim that one teacher could resolve the institution’s inequalities. McMath’s influence instead helped Austin identify what had been missing and assert a stronger claim to her education.

Lasting Significance

McMath was among the faculty members who helped Austin define what it meant to be a Black student in white spaces. Alongside Dr. Simms and other faculty and staff, she helped Austin demand what she wanted, explore her own voice, respond to racist white people, and seek comfort in Black history and community. The support mattered in an environment where Austin was often surrounded by whiteness, and where the assumptions she had absorbed could shape her view of her personhood, vocation, and place in the world.

The relationship’s significance therefore lies both in its intimacy and in its institutional context. McMath’s classroom supplied a concrete alternative to the white norm Austin had repeatedly been expected to navigate: a teacher who could draw on Black cultural knowledge, recognize a Black student’s understanding, and keep that student from bearing the burden of educating everyone else. Austin’s memories of that classroom became part of a broader education in voice and agency. McMath did not merely help Austin feel represented; she helped make visible why representation, cultural recognition, and the authority to shape one’s own education matter.