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[Order Jason D. Hill’s forthcoming book, Letters to God From a Former Atheist, HERE.]

My first teaching job after earning my doctorate in philosophy in the fall of 1998 was as assistant professor of philosophy at Southern Illinois in Edwardsville (SIUE). I had been awarded my Ph.D. from Purdue University the previous spring.

My classes for the academic year were two courses in moral philosophy and critical thinking/logic allocated between the fall and the following spring semester. I faced my logic class as a recovering atheist, someone for whom atheism was no longer an option; however, I could not quite bring my will to yield to my desires. I was a praying agnostic.

I had declined a more lucrative offer from Bentley College in Waltham, Massachusetts because the teaching load was lighter at SIUE (pictured above), and I had big plans to overhaul my dissertation, rewrite it and add new chapters. I planned to turn it into a compelling book. I subsequently did. Of the five books that I have authored, that first book, Becoming a Cosmopolitan: What It Means to Be a Human Being in the New Millennium, retains a special place in my heart. It remains in print twenty-three years after publication.

I should have been elated. I was in a great relationship. I was a newly minted Ph.D., and I was teaching in a school of my choice. Yet my heart was heavy. There was a void, an emptiness that I could not explain lingering in the pit of my stomach. I felt impatient, a bit irritable at times, and hungry for greater meaning and purpose in life than the ones I had created for myself.

Most of my students were white, poor, and undereducated. Many of them lived in trailer parks, some without running water. There were a handful of black students from East St. Louis who sequestered themselves on one side of the room away from the white students.

Commanding the attention of the students at the beginning of each class was challenging. They were a noisy bunch who would often talked amongst themselves during class—much to my consternation. Often, I would simply stop talking and let their verbal drivel run a long course. When the background noise which was my voice had faded, they would stop talking. I would look at them for a long time and then quietly return to the material at hand. Invariably, to take advantage of their loquaciousness, I’d ask them some questions about the material they were required to have read. Invariably, they had no responses.

When one of my students, (we’ll call him Daniel), re-handed me his exam one afternoon with a handwritten note that read, “I could choose to bring a gun to school but I suppose I will accept the D you gave on my exam,” I literally pinched my arm in my office. I did so to remind myself of the gratitude I felt after living in the United States for (at the time) thirteen years. I felt gratitude and pride for having earned four college degrees, for becoming a university professor who had a big-name publisher interested in publishing my first book. I felt gratitude that all my dreams were coming true—and that now I would have to decide how to deal with an obstreperous kid in my class. I dug my hands into my pocket and clenched the large gold-plated crucifix I had carried as a ritual for the past year. It was a ritual meant to initiate godhead inside me. I did not know exactly how it would work; but holding the crucifix and feeling it pressed against my leg brought me a feeling of peace and utter assuredness that, for a brief while, everything would be well.

The next evening after classes were over found me in the small town of Vandalia purchasing gas for my truck before heading for the commute to St. Louis where I lived. After our next class meeting, two white female students came to my office. They were nervous. They had something urgent to speak to me about. Once I assured them of confidentiality, they told me the following. They advised against going to Vandalia to purchase gas because a lot of Klan members lived there and that it was informally known to a lot of folks as Klandalia. As a black person, they did not think that it was safe for me to be there after dark. I encouraged them to continue. Most of the white students in the class—about eighty percent of them, they surmised—were in the Klan, or they came from households where parents were Klan members. They looked a bit embarrassed. They assured me they were not in the Klan. They cautioned me against a student named Daniel. He was the student who wore a skull ring. It was a Klan ring and there was a “mark” on it, they confessed, that indicated that he “had put the hurt on somebody—probably a black person.”

I’m not sure what emotions I felt that night as I lay in bed and thought of what the students had told me. I remembered the ring on Daniel’s paper as he had handed me the exam with his threatening message. I remembered a kindly warning another black professor had issued to me the week before classes began. I was to be extra conciliatory towards the students; to treat them more as clients, and not to be punitive towards any of them no matter how they might comport themselves in classes or towards me.

I slept with the crucifix on the pillow next to me that night. I did not say much of a prayer. I did not speak with God. That which I would have asked for had already been granted. Tomorrow’s unfolding would change my life in a way I could not have conceived of as yet. But I somehow felt prayers would have been superfluous. Tomorrow had already arrived.

I fell asleep quickly knowing that resilience, perseverance, and tenacity were the traits I would need to get through the year. I slept deeply that night.

The next morning, I stood by the lectern and laid down the law. In a forceful but quiet voice I told them that I would never tolerate disrespect from any of them, that I did not care who among them or their families were members of the Klan, that I had grown up in Jamaica, a very violent country, and that I had witnessed violent atrocities that would break the toughest among them in half. This was my ship. I’d have anyone who showed even a patina of disrespect towards me permanently removed from the class.

I told them they needed to refrain from referring to themselves as dumb farm kids as that was a sort of disrespect towards themselves I would not tolerate. Self-deprecation of that nature had no place in my class. Unlearn your addiction to self-evisceration, I advised them. I told them they had a humanity that they had to achieve, that it was not an endowment, that life existed as a series of continued disclosures and possibilities. You all have a not-yet-self, a self in becoming, a self on which you can pin an aspirational identity. That aspirational identity ought to be one suffused with a commitment to excellence, discipline, ambition, resilience, and perseverance.

One student asked me why she should embody those virtues when bad things would eventually happen to good persons like herself.

“Bad things will happen to good people and bad people alike,” I responded. “Suffering is built into the nature of existence. You must cultivate your goodness because it is the source from which you will heal from the bad things that will inevitably happen to you. No one ever healed from a source of evil or character rot.”

I told them they could make a choice about how to interpret their lives. They could accept the narratives they had inherited from their families and culture, or they could revise and modify those narratives that informed their thinking and their identities. They could decide what they wanted to become and work towards that vision.

As I uttered those words, I peered at their faces. Some looked as if they were on the verge of tears; some looked contemptuous, as if I were uttering idealistic sophomoric verbiage that had no basis in their reality. Others appeared thoughtful, and some seemed worried. I realized, too, that a significant portion of them was failing the class. Suddenly, it seemed as if some other voice took possession of me. I said: “I’ll be holding free tutorials in my office on Saturday from 10a.m to 1 p.m. I know some of you work during the week and it’s often difficult to meet during my official office hours.”

Some of them nodded. They all looked somber. I knew these extra tutorial sessions would bleed into the time I usually spent working on my book. Since I was also in a long-distance relationship with a professor at Cornell University, there would be weekends when I would not be available.

****

Three months into the tutorials we did more than review logic. My first goal was to improve their skill set in the subject and have them leverage it in other disciplines. I learned about their lives and the hardships they faced. I acknowledged their resilience, tenacity and perseverance and assured them that these were unassailable virtues.

I asked them if they had issues with receiving conceptual instructorship from a black man who was their professor given that none of them had had a black instructor before. Some admitted that they did have such issues. Their parents had taught them that black people were stupid by nature, and that white people were superior because they were white. I didn’t sound stupid, one student volunteered, so he wondered if I were an exception to the rule. I told him that I could adduce myself as evidence that what they were taught was simply wrong, but I asked them to imagine that because they practically lived in a closed system they were unable to meet the thousands of people such as myself who did exist in the world.

Daniel, the student with the skull ring who had written the threatening letter, asked me if I disliked them as a group. He was standing by the door of the office. He had never once entered it. The ten other students who attended the tutorials had found ways to squeeze themselves inside my small office—some sat on the floor, others in the concave of the window. I looked at him for a while. Then I told him dislike for students whose education I was responsible for was not an emotion conducive to learning. His dismissive smirk prompted me to say: “I dislike the idea of what you, you Daniel will permanently grow into if you choose to remain rooted to a belief system that posits the existence of other people as problems simply because they have immutable characteristics different than yours.”

He looked incredulous. “You asked for it by asking me what I thought,” I said.

At nights I often descended into loneliness. A void anchored itself in my chest. I prayed fervently at times. The tutorials were definitely having a marked improvement on the performance of those who chose to attend. Sadly, not one of my black students from St Louis attended the tutorials. When I gently reminded them after class about the tutorials on Saturday mornings, most smiled politely. Others said: “We’re good, professor.”

I wondered what I was hoping to truly achieve in these tutorials with a pack of racists. What was my ultimate goal? I sat on my couch one evening after classes and realized I had asked God for a sign and that he had given it to me. In serving those students I was not developing a calcified heart, or becoming regretful that I had accepted a job with such stark challenges.

In those tutorials, I had stripped away every protective artifice and mask—somehow. I faced the students with my naked singularity and a degree of vulnerability. Retrospectively, I realized that God was stripping me to a thin core; that such was the only way to encounter the students with moral integrity.

Behind the carapace of indifference and toughness they exhibited lay ugly wounds and a great deal of hurt and suffering. I was not there to be a therapist. But in being unafraid of them, and in revealing the core of who I was, they would see there was nothing to fight or resent in me in order to protect and preserve their lives. The only thing that was left shining in that core was love; it was a universal love for the species that was the subject of my book in a very abstract form. It was a love that was able to get behind and beyond the masks and ideologies they were formed by. They were second-hand consumers of values and belief systems that they had not ratified through appraisal and with an answer to the question: do these beliefs, values and mores fit the core of who I am?

One afternoon as the tutorial was ending, I asked them to ponder a question I often asked myself and others who were willing to make themselves vulnerable to the vicissitudes of life’s challenges, and who wanted to find or even approximate their core. The question was: “Who were you before the world told you who you had to be and had to become?”

Resilience is a blessing that has to be cultivated. There were mornings when I hated attending classes, and there were Saturday mornings when I drove to the tutorials with horrific stomach cramps, a palpitating heart and sweating palms.

God had granted me grace. I knew that had I stepped into those tutorials in full professorial mode, or with a smug sense of superiority over what several regarded those students to be—village idiots and social ballast—that I would have failed miserably in my task. But I felt that God was saving two birds with one firm and gentle touch. In stripping me to a thin core so I could reach the humanity of my students, God was also stripping away all the defense mechanisms and highly intellectualized, mediating tropes that stood in the way of my fully approaching Him and knowing Him.

At the end of the academic year some of the students cried when I announced that I would be leaving to assume another teaching position. Some hugged me and wept bitterly. No one had ever spoken to them like that, one young woman said to me. To my surprise, Daniel shook my hand and thanked me for all I had done for him. With a smile on my face, I reminded him to never refer to himself as a dumb farm kid. I wished them well in their pursuits. I encouraged them to keep in touch. I handed each of the black students from East St. Louis my professional card and told them to reach out if they just needed to be in touch. I was unsentimental in my farewell.

I realized the worst in anyone can be an accident of circumstances that have not been mediated by others who have the power to alter the trajectory of a damaged life. There were redemptive moments in those tutorials. Genuflective moments. They came with the realization that when we parse through our beliefs and past actions, and we examine the suffering that we have inflicted on others, we constitute a confederacy of sinners. We are striving for redemption and reconciliation.

Why had the parents of the students (they all lived at home) permitted them to come to a black professor’s office for tutorials if they believed in the congenital inferiority of black people?

People are often drawn to the extremes in others that they lack in themselves. Perhaps the cosmopolitan in me, the lover of humanity, and the citizen of the world had found some attraction in the philosophical antipode of those sentiments: in the atavistic tribal cravings, in those who believed in some primordial form of chemical predestination and biological collectivism as insignias of moral and metaphysical superiority. I needed to be immersed in this racist paradigm to truly understand it.

When I showed a colleague Daniel’s threatening letter I was informed by the school administration that I could be assigned another class. I refused the offer. This was my cross to carry, I thought. But why should it be my cross to carry? What justification was there for any black person who had been placed in such a precarious position to participate in and transform a hostile classroom environment?

I believe that if you’re resilient in life you learn, among other things, to parentify yourself; you learn to nurture yourself and take care of your needs. Sometimes, with the help of an active moral imagination I looked upon those students and thought: There but for the grace of God go I! As I extended my moral imagination farther, I realized that if I did not tutor these students I would be writing them out of the historical process; relegating them to the dustbin of history in my own mind. Misanthropy was not an option.

I believe that on those Saturday mornings as I parked my truck and walked to my office, that I was walking to minister more to the souls of those students than I was in improving their skill set in logic. The tutorials took on a religious meaning. I had asked God to give me a sign. He gave me a task instead, one that led straight to individuals ensconced in a milieu of hatred. The ideology of hate commanded them to descend into total ignorance and hatred. It appealed to the lowest common denominator within them. I had no script, for the notes and diagrams on logic were not the scripts; they were preambles to a greater mode of being in their presence. If love, among other things, is a command to rise in the name of the best within oneself, then was I taking on too much of a burden by offering myself up as an incentive for them to rise to the noblest and most heroic vision in themselves that they could be taught to seek and find?

The Saturday tutorials became part of God’s gifted rituals for me to draw closer to Him while simultaneously exposing and sharing that element of the divine He imparted in me to my students.

I reasoned that if we were all made in God’s image, then somehow I had to affirm the students surrounding me. I needed to inoculate them against a poisonous world not through proselytizing and guilt-tripping but by means of my own agency. I did not have to become anything in particular.

As I mentioned, stripping myself to a thin core revealed a self that, in its nakedness would be able to fulsomely reflect the divinity that resided there. If they could see it then, perhaps, they would be moved to get outside themselves and their hermetically sealed history and move into a capacious future. Perhaps they would be motivated not just to seek an aspirational identity predicted on that which they aspired to be. I hoped they would be led to a redemptive identity, too. And hopefully the picture of the good, the true and the beautiful that I had painted as suffusing all spheres of life would be fuel for them in the days ahead as, hopefully they cultivated goodness within themselves. That cultivated goodness, I hoped, would save them from the inevitable suffering they would face in their lives, and from the charged infections of the soul that afflict anyone who judges another by any other criterion save the content of his or her character.

Jason D. Hill is a professor of Philosophy at DePaul University and a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. His forthcoming book is Letters to God From a Former Atheist. Follow him on Substack.