Professor McMath

Professor McMath is the narrator’s first Black teacher, a marketing professor whose presence and teaching reshape what belonging in a predominantly white college classroom can mean. Her importance lies not only in being a Black woman whom the narrator can recognize herself in, but in creating a room where the narrator does not have to make her own experience intelligible before learning can begin.

Identity and Presence

When the narrator arrives at college in Chicago, Professor McMath is her first surprise on campus. Tall, with shoulder-length black hair, she wears suits that seem to lengthen her frame and takes command of every classroom she enters. The narrator remembers her as brilliant, not merely because of her authority or appearance, but because she brings stories from her professional experience into her teaching. Seeing a Black woman in that position fills the narrator with pride; the encounter makes representation immediate and personal rather than an abstract institutional aspiration.

Professor McMath’s identity also matters in contrast to the narrator’s earlier classrooms. There, white teachers could treat white middle-class habits as common experience without noticing that they were doing so. The narrator recalls teachers using activities such as skiing or sailing as effortless points of reference, and presenting daily hair-washing as an everyday routine even though none of the Black girls in the class did it. The students would nod and move on. They had learned that correcting the teacher would require extra work, and that the curriculum’s assumptions could pass as universal simply because the people who set them did not have to see their limits.

Teaching and the Beauty-Shop Lesson

Professor McMath changes that classroom pattern through her examples. While explaining business planning, she asks students to imagine opening a beauty shop. The discussion proceeds normally until she introduces getting a relaxer. The narrator immediately recognizes the reference; the white students look toward the lectern, baffled. In that pause, the difference between shared knowledge and presumed knowledge becomes visible to the entire class.

Professor McMath responds by asking the students whether they know what a relaxer is. When they continue to stare blankly, she explains that some Black women use relaxers to straighten curly hair, contrasting the process with what happens when white people get a perm. She winks at the narrator, who grins broadly. The exchange does not ask the narrator to supply the explanation or represent Black experience to her classmates. Professor McMath brings the reference into the lesson herself, recognizes the narrator’s understanding, and makes the gap in the other students’ knowledge part of the teaching moment. The classroom’s usual direction of explanation is briefly reversed: the Black student is not the one left decoding an assumed white reference.

Belonging and the Narrator’s Education

The narrator describes the gift of Professor McMath’s presence as more than visual identification. In her class, she does not have to manufacture a sense of belonging or continually translate the cultural references that earlier teachers treated as shared by everyone. That relief matters because the narrator had paid tuition like every white student but often felt she was attending a college made for someone else. Professor McMath’s classroom makes that contradiction harder to accept as ordinary.

The narrator’s response is a change in self-understanding. She says that, after relishing the belonging she felt in the classroom, she was no longer content simply to feel that the college had been made for someone else. Something was stirring, she recalls, and a particular experience soon brought it to the surface. That next experience was the Sankofa trip, a three-day journey into Black history with another student. The account places Professor McMath’s influence before that journey as a condition of the narrator’s growing willingness to claim space and confront what she encounters, without suggesting that the professor directs or accompanies the trip.

Lasting Influence and Significance

Professor McMath is part of a small group of faculty and staff who help the narrator understand what it means to be a Black student in white spaces. Alongside Dr. Simms and others, she helps the narrator demand what she wants, explore her own voice, and find comfort in Black history and the healing of Black community. Their support also prompts the narrator to reconsider what whiteness has taught her about her personhood, vocation, and place in the world. The book presents this education as both intellectual and practical: it equips her to respond to racism and to speak up until people farther back in the room can hear her.

Her significance therefore exceeds the memorable relaxer lesson. That scene gives a concrete form to a larger distinction in the narrator’s education: a classroom can include a Black student numerically while still requiring her to adapt to a white cultural default, or it can take her knowledge and belonging seriously. Professor McMath models the latter. She does not make the narrator’s experience a burden to explain; she teaches from a world in which that experience already belongs. The narrator carries that example beyond college, where the questions of whose knowledge counts, who is trusted to define an organization’s culture, and whether inclusion changes power remain urgent.