The first week of graduate school is usually pretty hectic, with lots of social gatherings with other departments, often lubricated with generous amounts of alcohol. During one of these gatherings, I was talking to an African-American woman in my six-person cohort, and when she said she was from Boston, I replied, “Oh, are you from Jamaica Plain?” She said, “No, Framingham,” to which I responded, “Sorry, I must have you confused with someone else I met.”
The following week we met for one of our first classes. I have no idea what we were discussing, but out of the blue this woman pipes up and accuses me of being racist for assuming she was from Jamaica Plain because she was black. I was gobsmacked, and sort of stuttered out that I must have met someone who was from there, not that I assumed anything about her. I’d lived in Boston for a year and had a number of friends from the area, so I was pretty aware of the geography and the impressions people had of Jamaica Plain (particularly in comparison to Framingham). This event snowballed into a series of really gruesome episodes where racism was thrown around at every opportunity by this woman, over the course of the entire academic year. She was pretty much a menace to the faculty and the students.
Eventually, I figured out that I’d confused this African-American woman with a tall, white dude who’d lived in Jamaica Plain for several years.