Prejudice

The author uses Magna's negative experience teaching at Lashington & Wiis University in order to explore the ways in which institutionalized racism impacts the black American individual. When Magna is originally looking for teaching jobs, she hopes to find a position at a school "in Southern California whose English department had so many black professors she'd gotten hairstyling ideas on the campus visit" (195). However, Magna fails to secure the position, and is forced to accept a post at the Southern university Lashington & Wiis. The culture at Lashington is inherently toxic and threatening, social trends which are also embedded into the surrounding town's history and community. After meeting with the university president after yet another racist experience, Magna realizes there were a wealth of "other things [she] would have told him if he had wanted to know about her life here at Lashington & Wiis . . . About correcting the word...