Why I’m Proud To Be a Woke Professor

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

I was driving from Myrtle Beach to Davidson College when it hit me. I didn’t know the status of my younger brother’s criminal case. 

James was facing charges for his involvement in a shooting and could spend the rest of his life in prison if found guilty. He had gotten into it with a younger man after an argument at a store in St. Stephen, South Carolina, where we grew up. He’d already served more than 15 years for his role in a shooting years earlier. 

I sent a message to my oldest brother—we call him Moochie—who was more than a decade into his freedom after serving more than three decades in various South Carolina prisons. He quickly responded and asked one of our nephews to set up a conference call with James. Another nephew we call Smooch is nearing the end of a 25-year sentence, while my youngest brother, Jordan, is serving a 22-year sentence in federal custody. 

The call happened last fall. It felt as commonplace as it did surreal. Commonplace because members of my family will have spent north of 125 years in prison when all their sentences have been completed, surreal because the next day I would stand before a few dozen mostly privileged Davidson College students teaching them about the principle of free expression, the intricacies of debate and deliberation, and the intersection of empathy and the criminal justice system. 

I’m a professor of practice in the Communications Studies Department at Davidson, a long-time journalist, and the author of three books. I spent much of my 30-year career with McClatchy, which owns The Charlotte Observer and The News & Observer. I’ve had many editing and reporting roles, including investigations into state child protective services and how the Federal Bureau of Investigation blamed the wrong family in a 13-year-long search for a missing girl, nearly destroying them.

In my first semester at Davidson, my students reexamined a decades-old local shooting that left a young Black man and a white police officer dead, and they uncovered information news outlets had missed. More recently, I guided a student’s independent study that led to one of his friends being freed from prison 12 years early.

This semester, my students are tackling how AI affects our ability to spot fake news, the interplay of race and politics in the media, and ethics in research. I make clear to my students that they can’t master my courses unless they examine every issue from every angle using well-established journalistic principles. That includes identifying “knee jerks,” the automatic reactions we have to images or words that affect our ability to pursue truth as objectively as possible; finding credible sources to test and challenge our assumptions; and basic reporting and interviewing techniques to deepen our knowledge.

“At the beginning of each semester, I tell students I relinquish my right to be offended by anything they say.”

In my classes, supporters of abortion rights have to not only understand the views of its opponents, but empathize with them—while digging through every relevant fact to justify or change their own opinions. The same goes for other hot buttons of the day. Trans athletes in women’s sports. Hyper partisanship. Who is “allowed” to say the n-word. Religion’s complicated relationship with civil rights. The public reaction to Charlie Kirk’s killing. The Duke lacrosse case, covering sexual assault allegations, and trauma-informed reporting. The Trump era and the Epstein files. 

Nothing is off limits. At the beginning of each semester, I tell students I relinquish my right to be offended by anything they say. I’m the dude with the power to assign them grades, but I don’t want that dynamic to dissuade them from speaking freely. I also tell them it’s okay if their classmates get offended during uncomfortable discussions because figuring out how to resolve such conflicts is a vital part of the educational process. 

Frankly, that’s the easy part of my job. I know how to teach students about the basics of reporting and interviewing, and how to guide debates about thorny issues. That sort of free speech and discourse is in vogue on college campuses today.

The hard part is knowing when I should share personal stories to make connections that can’t be made as effectively any other way, including my family’s interaction with the prison system. 

That’s the kind of “woke” teaching that has led to attacks from conservative politicians, commentators, and journalists. These folks are scrutinizing professors’ syllabi for signs that we’re trying to indoctrinate students rather than educate them. But a list of assigned readings and speakers won’t give you a clear picture of what I try to impart to my students or how I do it.

Woke professors have been called ugly names. We are not only godless, we’ve been repeatedly told, but both anti-Christian and antisemitic. We’re anti-American and anti-family, and value superficial diversity at the expense of expertise and merit. We despise and want to “cancel” all conservatives. 

“There is a wisdom in what Richard Nixon said … and I quote, ‘The professors are the enemy,’” then-Sen. JD Vance said during a speech before the 2021 National Conservatism Conference. 

I would laugh off the absurdity if those claims and lies didn’t have such serious consequences. Davidson, as a small liberal arts college, is exempt from some of the pressures my colleagues at public universities face amid federal funding cuts and politicians dictating DEI decisions. If anything, Davidson has tripled down on protecting free expression in recent years.

Nonetheless, some of us end up in databases such as the Professor Watchlist, a Turning Point USA program designed to shame and rid academia of those deemed too woke. I’ve been listed for a couple of years, seemingly because they did not like what I had written for CNN, The Charlotte Observer, and other outlets. I received multiple death threats from as far away as Texas that disturbed my wife and colleagues. But it hasn’t stopped me from teaching the way I know I’m supposed to teach.

If They Could Hear Me Now 

During the spring of 2025, I was standing in class when one of my most boisterous liberal students raised her hand. 

“If only they could hear you now, in here quoting the Bible,” she said before chuckling. 

The they are those who believe woke professors are hostile to religion, particularly Christianity, and are trying to indoctrinate their children. I’ve heard from plenty of them, particularly after my name showed up on the Professor Watchlist. 

I had just quoted Luke 12:48: “From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked.” 

It came up organically during a discussion about the best ways to understand “white privilege,” an ad lib that could be traced back to my roots in St. Stephen Holiness Church. 

White privilege, I told this class, could be considered the academic version of “God’s grace.” God expects more from those who have more. That responsibility is privilege, not burden. I said that many Christians believe that only those God privileges are entrusted with stewardship. 

I wanted them to consider the argument and interrogate it like we interrogate everything, to tear it apart or explain why it makes sense. It’s one of the most effective ways to get students to understand the importance of relying upon critical thinking rather than our engrained, unexamined reactions.

“Honing critical thinking techniques is the foundation of what I do, which means teaching students how to grapple with complex problems instead of providing quick answers.”

Though fewer Americans now identify as Christian or as religious at all, the country is still predominantly Christian in makeup and culture. Christians believe grace is a beneficial, unearned gift that can neither be returned nor forfeited. It’s yours forever. 

Social scientists view white privilege similarly. The United States is becoming more racially diverse by the year but is still majority white. A white person growing up here, where whiteness was legally prioritized and preferred a century before the country was founded, received an unearned gift at birth. It matters not that you didn’t ask for it; it will always be yours. 

How is growing up white in a predominantly white society different from grace? I asked my students. They discussed in small groups, then as a class.

I knew the analogy only goes so far. Each is an unearned benefit, but Christians consider grace an unequivocal good available to everyone, while white privilege is reserved for one group and considered unfair and a primary source of inequality. Grace emanates from an all-loving God, white privilege from a white supremacy inextricably bound with our country’s founding—about 41 of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence were enslavers of Black people they didn’t consider fully human. 

As the students batted around the analogy, I pushed them to go deeper. How does it look from a macro perspective, meaning from a group or institutional level? What about the micro or individual level? 

Some students argued the existence of poor white people in America undermines the concept of white privilege, despite white people being disproportionately better off than their Black counterparts. (We tackled how Asian Americans and Latinos fit into this equation in a later discussion.) How can every white person have white privilege when white suffering is real? 

That’s a fair question, I said. But can’t that critique also be applied to grace? 

God’s grace is always available to everyone, no exception, which is a macro-level Christian belief. And yet, micro-level realities aren’t nearly as neat and clear. One toddler dies from an aggressive cancer despite his mother’s nonstop prayers, while another survives despite his parents never darkening a church door. Does that outcome undermine the concept of God’s grace? 

I don’t answer those questions for my students, though I have strong beliefs about each. I grew up learning it was imperative to believe in grace despite ever-present deep poverty, structural racism, and discrimination. Black pastors taught us to believe in the macro of grace even if our micro didn’t make it obvious. Our family held firm to a deep-seated belief in the Almighty even when my oldest brother went to prison or my mom endured domestic violence.

The point is for students to grapple and struggle, to examine their own beliefs, how they came to them, and decide which to retain, which to discard. Where they landed in that class wasn’t nearly as important as how they arrived at their conclusions.

I did not have that exercise, or the Bible verse, on my syllabus. It came from the flow of class that day. It’s like a good interview in journalism. You prepare knowing some issues you have to cover, but sometimes your subject says something that throws off your plan. If you aren’t paying attention or are unwilling to take the unexpected opening, you’ll miss the real story. 

That’s why I see the potential chilling effects of the University of North Carolina System’s decision to require professors to put their syllabi in a searchable public database, as well as new laws and policies dictating that professors must stick to topics and material that are “related” to the course. What does that even mean? And why should anyone other than the person charged with creating the course and standing at the head of the class decide? 

A syllabus is a guide, not a straitjacket. It can’t fully capture what happens in class any more than an out-of-context video snippet can. When Charlie Kirk was killed, I received several messages from students asking what that meant for their safety. Those came as the Charlotte area was debating the political and social implications of a young Ukrainian woman being murdered on a light rail train. 

The two events didn’t seem connected to me, but headlines of public, seemingly random killings so close together had unnerved the students. It didn’t help that I was also on the watchlist, which created concerns about my safety, and that Davidson was about to allow a Turning Point USA chapter on campus. (On free speech grounds, I agreed with Davidson’s decision to permit the chapter, despite the national group having put a bullseye on my back.) 

The students linked the aftermath of the Charlotte stabbing and Kirk’s death. They made that connection. They made it clear it was top of mind. I had neither of those events on my syllabus. But the next day in class, we discussed both because I knew they would be distracted if we didn’t, and a distracted student is less likely to learn. I used those events as substitutes to teach the same skills I had planned months earlier when I was building my syllabus.

But any bad-faith group can pick up a syllabus and declare a topic isn’t “related” to the subject and make a professor’s life a living hell, which has been happening all across the country. Add to that UNC-Chapel Hill’s inexplicable move to allow recording professors with neither their knowledge nor consent—a policy which has thankfully been rescinded—and conservative politicians falsely claiming teachers are trying to indoctrinate students, things can feel bleak. 

And on many days, they do, particularly for colleagues who are more vulnerable, those who must think about work visas and immigration status, and those laboring at institutions that believe in free expression only when that value isn’t tested. 

Though the best teaching is grounded in proven practices and principles, it isn’t paint-by-numbers. Even the bumper sticker mantra “teach how to think, not what to think” is a muddled message in the daily grind of the classroom. Sometimes effective teaching requires both. Honing critical thinking techniques is the foundation of what I do, which means teaching students how to grapple with complex problems instead of providing quick answers. 

I often refuse to provide my opinion even when my students desperately want me to. But I tell students in no uncertain terms that slavery was the primary cause of the Civil War, that the Big Bang Theory is the best scientific explanation we have for the beginning of the universe, that Earth is not 6,000 years old, that the Holocaust happened. 

I can’t teach students how to think without grounding the lesson in facts. And sometimes I can’t know what that lesson will be, no matter how well I prepare for class.

Stay Woke

In the discussions about white privilege and Kirk’s killing, I was able to adjust mid-class because I am woke. Counter to what you may have heard, wokeness is not about trying to make white students feel guilty or conservative students feel bad. It’s about recognizing the universality of our humanity and the different situations and circumstances each of us faces. 

Wokeness—the real thing, not the bastardized version used to demean diversity, equity, and inclusion—has roots that go back to at least the early 20^th century. In its original iteration, woke “just means being politically conscious, aware, like ‘stay woke,’” Ohio State University professor of literacy studies Elaine Richardson told NPR. 

It’s believed to have first taken root publicly in a Black protest song by Huddie Ledbetter in the late 1930s. He warned Black people about visiting Alabama after nine Black teenagers were falsely accused of raping two white girls, an event that helped spark the Civil Rights Movement. 

“So I made this little song about down there [Alabama], so I advise everybody be a little careful when they go along through there, but stay woke, keep their eyes open,” Ledbetter told an interviewer. 

By the time I began using the term and heard my kids and Black students doing the same—in addition to its use in songs by popular 21^st century Black artists—it maintained its original meaning but was updated to mean to be less selfish, to understand that there’s a larger world with complexities of which we each need to be aware. It was one of the ways I saw young Black people connecting to each other in positive ways, to educate themselves and others about issues that didn’t always get the attention they deserved. 

To “stay woke” meant to be connected to broader humanity. And the only way to do that is to examine, to question, to not fall for simple-minded slogans that could mislead—in essence, to think critically. That’s the meaning I am using in this piece.

I’m a woke professor because I embrace critical thinking and teach it, as well as a love of our common humanity. Even when it’s hard. Especially when it’s hard. Even when it is inconvenient or unpopular with those who’d rather I take the easy road, to go along with traditions that have long led to inequalities we should not accept. 

I’m a woke professor because I refuse to deny the fullness of a person, including those who have done dastardly things. It’s why I won’t acknowledge only the good that men like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington did, but also their role in the institution of race-based chattel slavery. 

It’s why I will acknowledge that there can be good in young Black men who commit violence, even though I was taught that they must only be seen through the lens of their worst acts. 

I’ve decided not to give into the shame some people want woke professors to feel. 

I’m not ashamed that I might learn my brother has been sent back to prison right before I teach elite college students. I won’t excuse the harm my brothers have caused, but I know they are complex humans who should be seen as such. I’m not ashamed of questioning our country’s founders, who were primary actors in one of America’s original sins. And I’m not ashamed of recognizing the full humanity of the least of these—yes, another Bible reference.

Because I’m woke, I plan to keep teaching my students to keep their eyes—and minds—open, too.