Dr. Siobhan Brooks does not have the background that some would deem fitting of a college professor. Her mother spent years hospitalized for a mental illness and raised Brooks in a San Francisco housing project. Plus, she’s part of two groups of people who have been historically ostracized—African-Americans and the LGBT community. In the classroom, though, she may be just what her students need.
“I think I offer a unique perspective to different issues that my students can also relate to,” says Brooks, an assistant professor at California State University, Fullerton.
During the 2016-17 academic year, she will introduce a course to students that embodies not only her identity, but shares the untold stories of people like her.
The first class of its kind in Fullerton’s Department of African American Studies, she will teach the course The Black LGBT Experience .
Each week has a theme “that’s probably something that’s familiar to students in terms of Black history, but they just don’t know the LGBT contribution to that part of our history,” Brooks says, noting that Black gay people are represented in periods from slavery, the civil rights movement, and the Harlem Renaissance to present-day hip-hop and the Black Lives Matter movement.
For Brooks, exploration of racial identity came in the 11th grade during a college prep class, which was mostly filled with Black and Latino students. A Black woman from San Francisco State University was her instructor.
“It was the first time that we talked about ourselves as people of color,” Brooks recalls. “This was the first time we were forced to look at what’s around our neighborhoods—why are there no grocery stores, for example—things that I just thought were normal in my neighborhood, that I was able to start doing critical analysis.”
