Abstract
A First Assignment
Every professional identity has an origin story, and mine begins with a grade I did not deserve and a grade I did not earn. In the fall of 2010, I entered the Silberman School of Social Work at Hunter College, City University of New York, eager to learn the craft of helping. The first assignment of my graduate education was a reflection paper on Peggy McIntosh's (1989) widely assigned essay, White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack. The essay presents a catalog of everyday conditions, 26 of them in the version I received, that the author offers as evidence of advantages afforded to White people in American life. The pedagogical intent was familiar and, on its face, admirable. Students were asked to confront the unearned advantages that shape opportunity in a stratified society.
I took the assignment seriously, which is the very thing that got me into trouble. I read the list carefully, item by item, and I found myself in disagreement with its central premise. My disagreement was sincere, and it was reasoned. I wrote what I believed. What I learned from the consequences of that honesty has shaped 16 years of teaching, research, and public writing. I share the episode now because the field continues to wrestle with the questions it raised, and because younger colleagues continue to face the choice I faced.
The Invisible Knapsack
McIntosh's (1989) metaphor of the invisible knapsack has become one of the most influential teaching tools in American higher education. The argument holds that White people carry a set of advantages they neither requested nor notice, ranging from the mundane to the consequential, and that becoming aware of these advantages is a first step toward a more just society. The metaphor is memorable, and its popularity is understandable. It gives abstract structure to lived intuitions about unfairness, and it invites self-examination from those who benefit from existing arrangements.
I want to be fair to the essay and to the generations of instructors who have used it in good faith. Inequality in the United States is real, measurable, and morally serious. The honest study of advantage belongs in social work education, where students prepare to serve people who have been failed by institutions. My objection in 2010 was never to the study of privilege. My objection concerned the analytic precision of the framework and the assumptions the assignment made about me before I had written a word.
From White Privilege to Green Privilege
Reading the 26 conditions, I noticed a pattern. The conditions tracked money. They tracked neighborhood, schooling, occupational status, consumer access, and the security that accompanies wealth. A great many of them described the experience of an affluent household with remarkable accuracy and described the experience of a poor household poorly, regardless of the race of either household. I argued in my paper that the list documented what I would later call green privilege, the privilege of socioeconomic status, with race serving as an imperfect proxy for class.
The distinction matters for a discipline devoted to precision in assessment. Race and class are correlated in the United States for reasons rooted in history, and no serious person denies that correlation. Correlation and identity are different claims. A wealthy family of color enjoys most of the conditions on McIntosh's list. A poor White family in Appalachia or rural Idaho lacks most of them. To read the catalog as a description of race alone is to erase the prosperous person of color and the struggling White person from the analysis at the same time. My central claim was straightforward, and I still hold it: the assumption that every person of color is socioeconomically disadvantaged is a racial assumption, and racial assumptions about individuals are the definition of the problem the assignment claimed to address. I developed this argument at greater length years later in an invited lecture on White privilege and green privilege, and the seed of it was planted in that first graduate paper.
The Contradiction in Condition 22
One item on the list crystallized my discomfort. Condition 22 reads, “I can take a job with an affirmative action employer without having coworkers on the job suspect that I got it because of my race” (McIntosh, 1989, p. 11). The condition is offered as evidence of White advantage, and the logic is coherent on its own terms. I noticed something the assignment did not anticipate. The condition asks the reader to accept that a person of color in a professional setting will be presumed less qualified. The exercise that was meant to dismantle racial assumptions reproduced one of the most corrosive racial assumptions of all, the suspicion that a person of color in a position of accomplishment arrived there through something other than merit.
I sat with that contradiction. The framework asked White students to recognize that their peers of color labor under a presumption of unearned placement, and the same framework asked students of color to affirm that presumption as the truth of their own lives. I declined to affirm it about myself. I had earned my place in that classroom. The assignment, as graded, required me to narrate my own diminishment in order to pass.
The Spirit of the Assignment
My paper came back failed. The written feedback explained that I had “not understood the spirit of the assignment,” and that I would be permitted to revise and resubmit. I have thought about that phrase for 16 years. The spirit of the assignment, as I came to understand it, was not analytic rigor, careful reading, or independent reasoning. The spirit of the assignment was agreement. I had read the text closely, engaged its claims directly, and offered a defensible counterargument supported by reasoning about class and race. None of that satisfied the rubric, because the rubric, whatever it claimed to measure, was measuring conformity.
There is a quiet violence in the phrase “the spirit of the assignment” when it is used this way. It tells a student that the form of scholarship has been performed correctly and that the content of the conclusion is the problem. It communicates that some conclusions are available and others are foreclosed, and it does so without ever stating the rule openly. A student learns the rule the way I learned it, through the experience of being penalized for honesty and then offered a path back to good standing that runs through self-betrayal.
A Social Experiment
I am a social scientist by training and by temperament, and I decided to test a hypothesis. My hypothesis was that the grade reflected the worldview I expressed and had little to do with the quality of my writing or thought. I revised the paper. I changed the perspective to align with my White professor's. I left the grammar unchanged. I left the length unchanged. I left the structure, the level of detail, and the quality of the prose unchanged. The only variable I altered was the viewpoint, which I flipped from disagreement to agreement.
The revised paper earned 100%. The same sentences, the same paragraphs, and the same command of language that had failed now received full marks. The independent variable was my expressed worldview. The dependent variable was my grade. The relationship between them was complete and unambiguous. I had run a clean experiment with a sample size of one, and the result has held up across everything I have observed in the nearly two decades since.
I do not share this to congratulate myself for cleverness. The experiment left me unsettled, because it confirmed something I did not want to be true about the profession I was entering. I had discovered that I could succeed in graduate school by reciting conclusions I did not hold, and that the surest route to academic reward was the performance of belief.
What the Grade Measured
The experience taught me to distinguish between two things that are easily confused in higher education. The first is academic ability, which includes the capacity to read closely, reason rigorously, marshal evidence, and write clearly. The second is ideological alignment, which is agreement with the instructor's worldview. A healthy classroom rewards the first and remains neutral toward the second. My classroom rewarded the second and treated the first as decorative. When a student can earn a failing grade and a perfect grade for the same prose, the grade has stopped measuring ability and has started measuring obedience.
This confusion harms everyone in the room. It harms the dissenting student, who learns to hide. It harms the agreeing student, who is denied the experience of having beliefs tested and is handed unearned confidence in conclusions reached without friction. It harms the instructor, who loses access to the very disagreement that would sharpen the course. It harms the profession, which credentials practitioners trained to read the room before they read the evidence. I have made versions of this argument in peer-reviewed work on ideological homogeneity and on the preservation of critical thinking in social work education, and the argument traces directly to that first assignment (Alam, 2026a, b; Alam & Thyer, 2026).
Benevolent and Vicarious Racism
I have tried, over the years, to understand my professor with generosity, because understanding is the beginning of any useful critique. I believe she thought she was doing something good. I believe she experienced herself as an ally, as awake to injustice, as an advocate for students like me. She likely believed that by enforcing a particular reading of privilege, she was protecting people of color and advancing our interests. Her intentions, as far as I could tell, were warm.
Warmth is not the same as accuracy, and good intentions can produce a distinctive kind of harm that I have come to call benevolent racism and vicarious racism. Benevolent racism is the impulse to rescue people of color from themselves, operating on the unstated assumption that we are not sophisticated enough to interpret our own lives. Vicarious racism is the practice of feeling injured on behalf of a person of color who reports no injury, and then treating that person's contrary testimony as evidence of false consciousness. My White professor experienced my experience for me. She had decided in advance what my life as a person of color must contain, and when my account failed to match her template, she corrected the account rather than the template.
This is the mechanism by which performative activism teaches people of color to self-oppress. The student of color learns that the acceptable narrative is one of disadvantage, that reports of agency and success are unwelcome, and that the way to be a good minority in the classroom is to confirm one's own marginalization. Any testimony to the contrary is treated as a mirage, a denial, or internalized something. I was being trained, gently and with a smile, to participate in my own diminishment.
The Monolith Myth and Intragroup Diversity
The deepest error in that assignment was the treatment of people of color as a monolith. The framework assumed that skin color predicts experience, that experience predicts belief, and that belief can therefore be assigned to a student in advance on the basis of appearance. This is racial essentialism, and it is precisely the logic that antiracism claims to oppose (Kendi, 2023; McWhorter, 2021). When a framework expects intragroup diversity among White people and denies it among people of color, the framework has reproduced the hierarchy it set out to dismantle.
Communities of color are not hive minds. There is enormous variation within them, in income, in religion, in politics, in temperament, and in the meaning individuals assign to their own lives. The historians Fields and Fields (2022) observed that diversity in many institutions has come to mean assembling people who look different and think the same. That definition was operating in my classroom. My visible difference was welcome. My difference of mind was a problem to be corrected. The presence of a person of color who reasoned independently created friction precisely because the framework had no category for him.
I have spent much of my scholarly life documenting the costs of this monolithic thinking and arguing that the recognition of viewpoint diversity within and across groups is a precondition of honest social science (Alam & Rueda, 2025; Watson & Alam, 2025). The principle is simple. People deserve to be encountered as individuals with the capacity to define themselves. A discipline that cannot extend that courtesy to its own students will struggle to extend it to its clients.
Self-Determination and Nothing About Us Without Us
Social work rests on a small number of bedrock values, and self-determination sits near the center of them. The NASW Code of Ethics commits practitioners to respect and promote the right of clients to define their own goals and to make their own choices (National Association of Social Workers, 2021). The value assumes that people are the authoritative narrators of their own lives, that the social worker enters a relationship to support agency, and that imposing the worker's preferred narrative onto a client is a breach of the relationship.
My first graduate assignment violated the value it should have modeled. I was denied self-determination over the meaning of my own racial experience. The authority to define what it meant to be a person of color had been claimed by someone else, and my role was to ratify her definition. The irony was total. A profession built on the client's right to self-define was teaching a student of color that he had no such right over his own story.
This experience shaped my doctoral work years later. My dissertation examined service user inclusion in social work education under the banner of the disability rights slogan, Nothing About Us Without Us (Alam, 2018). The slogan insists that decisions and descriptions concerning a group must include that group as full participants. The principle that animated my dissertation was the same principle that had been denied to me in 2010. The people whose lives are under discussion must be allowed to speak about those lives, and their testimony must be permitted to complicate the theories of the people who study them. I did not realize at the time that my dissertation was, in part, an answer to a failing grade I had received nearly a decade earlier. The arc of a research agenda often runs backward to a wound.
The Making of a Professor
I want to be precise about what that experience did to me, because it did not make me cynical. It gave me a vocation. Standing in the aftermath of that experiment, holding two grades for one paper, I thought for the first time that I might become a professor. The thought arrived as a conviction that this needed to change, and that the way to change it was to enter the room where grades are given and to teach differently.
I have tried to honor that conviction. In my own classrooms at Yeshiva University, the City University of New York, Boise State University, the University of Nebraska, and now Fort Hays State University, I have built courses around a method I call point–counterpoint, in which students are required to argue positions they may not hold and to encounter the strongest version of views they reject (Alam, 2026, b; Moore & Alam, 2023). The method protects dissenting students by making dissent universal and expected. It protects agreeing students by denying them the comfort of unexamined conclusions. It grades the quality of reasoning and remains neutral toward the destination of that reasoning. A student in my classroom can reach my conclusion or its opposite and earn the same high marks for the same rigor. I designed the method, in a real sense, to make impossible the experience I had as a student.
I have also tried to keep the question open in public. The phrase that titles one of my keynote addresses, on the responsibility that accompanies the doctorate, asks what we are not allowed to ask. That question is the through line of my career, and it began in 2010 with an assignment that told me, without saying so, which questions were off limits.
Heterodox Social Work as a Path Forward
The episode I have described is a single data point, and a single data point proves little on its own. I would not be writing about it for this journal if the pattern stopped with me. Research on the experiences of ideologically dissenting students in social work programs documents the same dynamics I encountered, including instructors who devalue and stereotype students, who use authority to shut down discussion, and who make assumptions about students based on identity (Fram & Miller-Cribbs, 2008; Mirick & Davis, 2021; Ressler & Hodge, 2003; Thyer, 2010; Toft & Calhoun, 2021). Courageous social work students have recently written about their reluctance to express dissenting views, including Cantu (2025), Jordan the Social Worker (pseudonym, 2025), and Blair & Nichols (2026), among others, demonstrating that this is a widespread problem. The structures that failed me in 2010 are structural, and they call for a structural response.
That response is taking shape under the banner of heterodox social work, an effort to advance viewpoint diversity, constructive disagreement, and open inquiry within the discipline (Alam & Rueda, 2025). The effort is not an attack on the profession's commitments to justice. It is an attempt to fulfill those commitments by holding the discipline to its own standards of evidence, self-determination, and respect for persons. A profession that prizes the client's voice must prize the dissenting student's voice. A profession that warns against imposing the worker's worldview on the client must warn against imposing the instructor's worldview on the student. A profession that studies power must study its own.
Concrete reforms follow from this commitment. Accreditation standards can be written to protect epistemic pluralism explicitly, and colleagues and I have argued for strengthening the forthcoming Educational Policy and Accreditation Standards in exactly this direction (Council on Social Work Education, 2022; Twis et al., 2026). Rubrics can be designed to assess reasoning and to remain silent on conclusions. Reading lists can pair canonical texts with their most serious critics, so that students encounter McIntosh alongside scholars who contest her framework. Classrooms can become brave spaces where disagreement is the expected condition of learning rather than a risk students take with their grades (Lukianoff & Haidt, 2019). Faculty can practice the self-determination they preach by inviting students to define their own experiences and by treating contrary testimony as data rather than error.
Conclusion
I have carried two grades for 16 years. One paper failed because I told the truth as I understood it. An identical paper, altered only in its viewpoint, earned a perfect score because it told my professor what she wished to hear. The episode taught me that a classroom can reward agreement and call it rigor, that a framework meant to dismantle racial assumptions can smuggle them back in, and that a profession devoted to self-determination can deny that self-determination to its own students of color.
I have also come to see what the experience gave me. It gave me a research agenda on viewpoint diversity and self-determination. It gave me a teaching method built to protect the student I once was. It gave me a vocation rooted in the conviction that this needed to change. McIntosh asked her readers to unpack an invisible knapsack of unearned advantage. I am asking social work educators to unpack a different invisible knapsack, the one we hand to students when we reward conformity and call it understanding. The weight of that knapsack falls hardest on the students who think for themselves, and our discipline is poorer for every one of them we teach to stay quiet. The remedy is available to us, and it is consistent with our deepest values. We can grade ability and leave belief to the student. We can let people define themselves. We can practice, in our own classrooms, the self-determination we promise the world.
