How Dwight McBride Unknowingly Lifted A Young Scholar

I attended the Modern Language Association (MLA) conference in my first or second year as a professor at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, so around 2003 or 2004. While browsing the book exhibit, I spotted a well-known scholar in African American literary studies. 

I rushed over and began telling her how much I admired her work and how much I had learned from it when she interrupted me: “Have you published a book?” “No,” I said. “Oh, I thought you were someone else,” she replied, and the conversation ended there.

I won’t lie; I was hurt and embarrassed. To tell a further truth, I remember thinking that the interaction confirmed some of the critiques I had been hearing about elitism in academic spaces. I began to leave the exhibit hall, feeling, you know, defeated. 

Before I could exit, another well-known scholar walked by. Not wanting a repeat of what had just happened, I kept my head down and tried to move along. But he saw me, smiled, greeted me, extended his hand, and introduced himself: “I’m Dwight McBride.” Of course, I already knew who he was. If you were paying even modest attention to African American Studies at that moment, you knew, we all knew who Dwight McBride was, and that he was a leading force in literary and cultural studies. For all of us up and coming folks in the discipline, he was one of the blueprints. 

And there he was, speaking to me as if we were colleagues. One of us was major--established and widely recognized, and the other was minor--just getting started, but that was not how McBride approached the interaction. In retrospect, what may have seemed like a small gesture was actually a powerful act of affirmation.

Fast forward to December 2024, almost exactly twenty years after that MLA encounter. I attended the first meeting of a new Race & Ethnicity Study Group here in St. Louis, sponsored by CRE. When I walked in, the host was speaking with a group of attendees, and as soon as he finished, he turned toward me, smiled, extended his hand, and (once again) introduced himself: “I’m Dwight McBride.”