One Monday morning in late fall, my back and neck ached as I sat at my desk at the community college where I had recently started teaching. I tilted my head in a painful stretch as I waited to meet with the students in my writing class for office hours. I wondered if the garden I’d been toiling over was worth it.

He made his way around the seminar table to stand at the podium and present the paper reflecting his semester-long wrestling match with challenges to everything he had been raised to accept without questioning. “He” is a young white man – a law student – who looked as if plucked from Hollywood Central Casting for a crowd scene of stereotypic “Bubbas” attending a rally of the Ku Klux Klan.