ABSTRACT
There is always the risk of a student breaking into tears when confronting difficult subject matter in the classroom that is intimately connected to “real life.” In the classrooms of many black professors, that tearful student is usually a white female. Indeed, a black female feminist colleague asked me to address this issue, hostilely referring to it as the “crying white girl syndrome.” Tears surface so often in the classroom when the racial dynamics of white and black are being discussed because so much shame and guilt emerges; there is not an emotional distance when the issue is race that there may be with other less loaded topics.
