Any time someone was pregnant or having a baby, professor Linda Piccirillo-Smith said her mother would tell two stories.

When Piccirillo-Smith was a baby, she had blonde hair and blue eyes. People would stop her mother with the stroller and tell her, “What a pretty baby.”

When her younger sister Julie was born and brought to her mother, she said, “That’s not my baby. … That can’t be my baby. You have to go back and check.”

Their mother said Julie was too dark and her nose was squished.

“My sister grew up with only that story,” Piccirillo-Smith said. “My mother had two daughters. She had the pretty baby and the ugly baby.”

Piccirillo-Smith didn’t realize that she was the “unwitting beneficiary” of colorism until she had to teach about it for a course in the Africana Studies department.

“Hearing stories where people were kind of pitted against each other,” she said, gave her an “aha” moment for her personal life, even though she wasn’t a part of the Black community.

Piccirillo-Smith is white. More specifically, she is Italian. Even in the Italian community, the closer you appeared to white, the easier your path was, she said.

Her career path led her to Kent State’s English department, where she began working full-time in 2000, but she became unhappy in her position.

The atmosphere in the English department 25 years ago was impersonal, rude and demeaning, especially if you were not on the tenure-track level, she said.

Piccirillo-Smith felt horrible and depressed going to work every day.

“The way you would be greeted or not greeted — just completely ignored,” Piccirillo-Smith said. “Like you didn’t even exist. Like you were not in that space.”

She was going to leave. She even thought, “Maybe teaching isn’t for me.”

Then a co-worker told her about an opportunity to teach English writing courses in Oscar Ritchie Hall.

Around the time, Black United Students asked for courses that would reflect its community’s history, culture and experience. A part of that was writing courses “where they could feel that what they had to say in their composition was also kind of a validation of their life experience,” Piccirillo-Smith said.

Even though she was not entirely sure why, she said she was interested. When Piccirillo-Smith first walked into Oscar Ritchie, she was shocked by the liveliness that existed just across campus from the English department. Students hung out on both sides of the hallway. People were friendly and welcoming.

Eventually, Piccirillo-Smith was introduced to professor Mwatabu Okantah, now the department chair of Africana studies. He had a certain presence and was very gracious, she said.

“I just remember him saying, ‘People call me Okantah,’” she said. He was involved in many activities and was sort of everywhere in the building.

Okantah guided Piccirillo-Smith early in her journey in learning about African American history and culture. Piccirillo-Smith knew how to teach writing and composition, but didn’t know the context of what her students in Oscar Ritchie were writing about.

When the topic of colorism came up, she didn’t know what she was doing and told Okantah she didn’t feel comfortable with the conversation.

He suggested she watch “A Question of Color” by Kathe Sandler, a documentary where Sandler interviews people in the Black community about their experiences with skin color.

“You can show the movie to your students and then let the students have the conversation,” he told her.

Not only did the movie help her teach, but it also helped her understand her own experience with her sister Julie. Piccirillo-Smith’s learning journey started with a lot of Okantah’s suggestions and advice, but she knew it was not his job to teach her everything. The more questions she asked, the more she realized she needed to learn. It grew into a personal mission.

Some learning came from the expertise other people shared, but a lot came from studying and reading. Whenever somebody mentioned a book, she would write it down, go and get the book and then read it, she said.

Piccirillo-Smith began teaching writing to students who would take Okantah’s Black Experience courses. He would give her the course materials so she could better help students develop their writing for essays.

“This didn’t happen like Tuesday,” Piccirillo-Smith said. “This took years of time for me to develop my sense of self, my understanding of the community, understanding of the history.”

As her knowledge grew, so did the kinds of courses she taught. She transitioned from teaching English courses to Africana and English cross-listed courses, then to teaching half English classes and half Africana studies classes.

Eventually, in 2021, Piccirillo-Smith became a full-time senior lecturer in the Department of Africana Studies. Over time, people began to know her as “the white lady that teaches [some course name],” she said.

At the beginning of her courses, Piccirillo-Smith addresses the elephant in the room: She is white.

One would assume that if the course is called “Black Experience,” the person experiencing it, who’s teaching you, should probably not be white, Piccirillo-Smith said.

Last year, in the first week of class, one student started with that assumption.

“I go through this whole thing about, you know, I’m white and blah, blah, blah, and he said, ‘You know, I was going to ask that because that just seems wrong to me,’” she said.

The two ended up having a really good relationship, she said. She knew he wasn’t being mean and thought it was funny.

One of Piccirillo-Smith’s current students, freshman biology major Taylor Brown, didn’t know who Piccirillo-Smith was when she signed up for Black Experience I. When she walked into class the first day, she was surprised, and some of her classmates were confused, she said.

Brown laughed as she remembered Piccirillo-Smith’s introduction to the class.

“I know you guys weren’t expecting me when you walked in, but try to be open,” Piccirillo-Smith told the class.

Nobody looks at Piccirillo-Smith weirdly because she is very open to all the students’ comments and opinions, Brown said.

“It’s not like she’s trying to push a specific rhetoric on us or make us feel a certain way about our past,” Brown said.

Piccirillo-Smith acknowledged that “this is not my experience. This is never going to be my experience.”

Jordan Wheeler, a senior applied media major, knows this, too.

“She never experienced the struggles of the everyday African American, black man, black woman, black child, whether it’s a boy or girl,” he said.

He said he didn’t have a mutual connection with her because she is white. But Wheeler has had a good experience in the Black Hollywood class so far and said it wouldn’t be better if Piccirillo-Smith were Black, just “different.”

Piccirillo-Smith knows she can’t take it personally when someone drops her class in the first week. She said she understands that it could compromise their experience to have it taught by her instead of someone of African descent.

Piccirillo-Smith asks her students to trust her and give her an opportunity because she believes it can be a really good experience.

But she isn’t perfect.

“There were times when I was way out of my element, and I made mistakes, and I apologized to the students for those mistakes,” Piccirillo-Smith said.

More recently, the first time she taught Black Experience II in person, she used the word “Negro” in class.

The course covers history from emancipation during the Civil War to the present. Published works from the past used the term frequently to identify a Black person since “African American” was not used, Piccirillo-Smith said.

In the post-course evaluations, students wrote that they resented the fact that she was using this language, that it was inappropriate and should not have been used in the classroom.

Piccirillo-Smith tried to address her use of the word before the texts were read, but she did not take enough time to reinforce her purpose in using it. She should have done a better job, she said.

“This was not meant to be derogatory. This was just a reflection of the language at the time,” Piccirillo-Smith said. “… If I’m reading a title, that’s the title. But if I’m talking about it, ‘Now, here is what the book is about,’ I’m going to use my own language. I’m going to use contemporary language.”

From that point on, Piccirillo-Smith made sure to address appropriate language at the beginning of the class and repeated it as the conversation approached the use of certain terms. Piccirillo-Smith encourages discussion in her classes through questions to the class and group activities. Like Okantah once suggested, she lets the students have the conversation.

In her Black Experience I class, Piccirillo-Smith passed out white cards to groups, each with a different type of artist on it. The topic of that day was the Harlem Renaissance.

She instructed the groups to find a couple of examples of each kind of artist that came from the era.

The first group’s card read “dancer/singer.” Their first artist was Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. After they read a short description of his talents, Piccirillo-Smith played a video of Bojangles and Shirley Temple tap dancing and expanded on what the group said.

Their second person was singer Cab Calloway. Piccirillo-Smith showed the class a clip of him performing “Minnie the Moocher.”

Similarly, in Piccirillo-Smith’s Black Hollywood class, she had students form their desks into a large circle to begin their discussion of the movie “Bamboozled,” directed by Spike Lee.

For the discussion, each student said what stuck out to them the most from the movie.

Piccirillo-Smith called on Wheeler, who said the clips of racist imagery stuck out to him.

After everyone said their piece, Piccirillo-Smith started asking the class questions about the themes of the movie and its connection to the world today. The themes and history discussed in her classes are always relevant, and many students have never been taught them before.

Piccirillo-Smith said courses in Africana studies teach students where their history and rights come from so people can’t take advantage of them.

“Students, including — and sometimes especially — white students,” Piccirillo-Smith said, “are like, ‘Oh, I didn’t know this. This is really important. Everybody should learn this.’”

Bianca Amoako is a reporter. Contact her at [email protected].