“When I walk in to teach black studies, some students aren’t sure I’m the professor,” he says. “I get it. It’s about expectations.”

Posted in Excerpts/Quotes on 2021-10-29 16:22Z by Steven

Born in Berkeley, California, to a white Jewish father with family in Elmont, Long Island, and a black Episcopalian mother with deep roots in Boston, where the family would settle when Zebulon was 3, Miletsky’s blended heritage and a pale complexion that sometimes gets him mistaken as white has informed each move of his life. That means personally — he’s now married (his wife, Karla, is Latina) with two young sons and lives in Bushwick, Brooklyn — and professionally. The ever-echoing theme: That dividing line between black and white…

…“When I walk in to teach black studies, some students aren’t sure I’m the professor,” he says. “I get it. It’s about expectations.”

Joe Dziemianowicz, “Stony Brook professor’s biracial heritage has lessons for life, classroom,” Newsday, February 26, 2020. https://www.newsday.com/long-island/stony-brook-professor-to-lead-black-history-month-panel-in-brentwood-1.41980672.

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Stony Brook professor’s biracial heritage has lessons for life, classroom

Posted in Articles, Autobiography, Biography, Campus Life, History, Media Archive, United States on 2021-10-29 14:57Z by Steven

Stony Brook professor’s biracial heritage has lessons for life, classroom

Newsday
2020-02-26

Joe Dziemianowicz, Special to Newsday

Stony Brook University Assistant Professor Zebulon Miletsky holds a photo of his parents, Marc and Veronica Miletsky. Miletsky draws on his own biracial past to delve into conversations about race in America. Newsday/Thomas A. Ferrara

A week and a half ago, Zebulon Vance Miletsky, who will be leading a talk on African Americans and the right to vote on Feb. 27 at the Brentwood Public Library, was zipping through a PowerPoint presentation in his “Themes in the Black Experience” class at Stony Brook University.

He got to a slide with bullet points on the renowned black historian and activist W.E.B. Du Bois. Miletsky, an assistant professor in Africana Studies and History, went off-script. He shared an anecdote with his students about the time a young Du Bois offered a white girl a valentine and she turned him down flat. Because he was black. It left a mark.

Du Bois went on to become the first African American to earn a Ph.D. at Harvard. “Childhood things shape you,” the professor added.

Miletsky, 45, speaks from experience…

Read the entire article here.

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