How we cite our quotes: (Page)
Quote #7
A man spat at me on a bus once when, thinking I was Israeli, he discovered I was an Arab. And once at a College Feast at King's College, where I had gone as someone's guest, one of the young fellows of the college sitting at the head of our table told me that he was a staunch supporter of Anthony Eden and that the Suez Canal should be in British hands—the Egyptians didn't have the engineering capacities to keep the canal open. (190)
Despite this encounter, Ahmed tells us that she didn't feel that racism was really an issue in the protected academic world of Cambridge. But her experiences—like this one—really do prove otherwise. Ahmed explains that with no sophisticated vocabulary to discuss issues of race and no minority community with which to share experiences, it was pretty difficult to sort through these confrontations when they happened. It also seems easy for her to brush off these two encounters as isolated incidents, rather than as signs of institutionalized racism.
Quote #8
But it was not those histories that we had lived that were at the center of our studies, nor was it the perspectives arising from those histories that defined the intellectual agenda and preoccupations of our academic environment. Of course, the histories and perspectives that defined not only the curriculum but also the theoretical perspectives and issues of the day were those of the countries to which we had come, societies that were at the very center of the Western world. (211-212)
In grad school, Ahmed finds herself scrambling to catch up with her American and European classmates. It's not because she lacked intelligence or capacity—it's because academic life centered on theories created by and for an audience that was largely white, Western, and male. It's an alienating experience, especially since Ahmed and other minority students could have had a lot to contribute, say, to a discussion about socialism and revolution. For Ahmed, it meant that what she was studying felt seriously irrelevant to her life outside the classroom.
Quote #9
This insidious, built-in denigration of women was what we lived with and imbibed. In exactly the same way in those days the steadfast, insidious, built-in denigration of blacks, Muslims, Arabs, and people of other cultures and the colonized generally was just the ordinary academic fare. (237)
Can you say "marginalization"? The texts she read in Lit class consistently presented a less-than-favorable view of people who were not male or white—or upper class or straight, etc. The problem is that the students were meant to take these views as objective truth.
This eventually leads to discontent among students in those marginalized groups and then questioning the validity of such tainted views—and then change. Ahmed tells us that eventually, the desire to shift minority perspectives and experiences from the edges of academia into the spotlight created new programs of study, like women's studies. It's an intellectual revolution that brought Ahmed to America.