Confessions of a Token Black Professor - The Atlantic

The insufferable hypocrisy of elite academia

Updated at 10:12 a.m. ET on August 15, 2026 This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here. As you cross the Androscoggin River into Lewiston, you pass on your left the waterfalls that once set the mills to humming. On your right, affixed to a pockmarked brick mill—now defunct, it had spun tens of thousands of bedspreads a week—a 30-foot-wide marquee sign reads HOPEFUL. And so I was. My wife and I drove by that unlit sign on the hot May afternoon when we moved from New York to the interior of Maine. It was 2020. The 100,000th American was about to…

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