An Open Letter to My Students

June 7, 2020

To All of My Students (Former and Present*),

It is my sincere hope that this letter finds you in good health in the midst of a pandemic. I write with some urgency to let you know the most important thing I might write: each and every one of you matters. Each and every one. I hope you know that.

If you are one of my black or brown students, I know you question this at times. I know. I see you and know why. I know because I have lived it. I know you may have shown up to your college class to face surprising glances at your presence, or after venturing to raise your hand, you received doubtful stares or perhaps no glance at all from the instructor. Or, after actively participating in a group project, you were only made to feel by your teammates that you did not pull your weight. Or, for some of you, you have been made to feel less than by peers of your own race or ethnicity, because being “smart” meant “thinking you’re better than us.” I also know these moments need not have happened constantly or frequently for them to have affected you. Deeply. They get in your mind space, so that with each killing of a black or brown boy, girl, man or woman by those sworn to protect them, it feels suffocating and personal, and you think, “it could have been. . .”

If you are one of my white or non-racially or ethnically marginalized students, I also know you. I also see you. I have delighted in teaching each of you just as much as my black and brown students. I did my best to teach you as you. And, I’m grateful that you saw me for me. I will never forget when one of you, in the first few weeks after I started teaching at the collegiate level, leaned in during office hours to say, looking a little sheepish ‘you know, when I saw Professor Sterling written on my course packet I expected to be taught by a white-haired man. But when I saw YOU in the front of the class, young and hip looking, black, I couldn’t believe it. I thought, wow. Is this okay to say?’ This moment, other moments, are the reasons I teach. I teach to break down stereotypes. To challenge assumptions about who can stand in front of classrooms to foster learning. I teach because I love to teach. And I see how on your campuses, in your dorm rooms, in your classrooms, and on Zoom calls you are challenging the status quo. Thank you for recognizing we are better than this moment. And we have to be. But you also recognize that we are this moment.

So what do we do now, at a time when many of the racial injustices that were invisible to many have spilled out in broad daylight, too heavy to ignore? My answer, given cautiously knowing the weight of its meaning especially now, is that when you feel you are able enough, after you have paused long enough to give yourself the space you need, you get to work. If there is anything your teachers, lectures, professors and educators have been trying to instill in you since you were little, it is that this life takes hard work. You know it, too.

How? Well, perhaps unsurprisingly, I have a guiding framework for an answer and it is this: work at your margin. Remember what a marginal effect is in a regression equation from your coursework—it’s how a change in an outcome is generated through a change in one element, while holding all others constant. Some of you might be motivated to shift course after the events of the last several months, and take on a new career path. But most of you will not. Working at the margin means understanding your comparative advantage. When I think of the students I have taught over the last nine years, I’m overcome by an embarrassment of riches. Use your unique knowledge, talent, and skills you have already obtained for change.

Working at your margin means reframing our mindsets. Decades of surveys by social scientists tell us that there is a chasm in how much progress black and white people think we are making towards racial equity. White people think we have made a lot of progress. Black people think we have not. The reason for this chasm is due to what social scientists call anchoring: whites look at progress that has been made from the 1950s and 1960s, and see drastic change, and blacks look at the present, at the lack of equal housing, education, and policing. One group sees progress, the other group sees stagnation. We can shift and align our mindsets to celebrate progress from the past, use the present as a source of agitation, and gaze into the future together to conceive of just how much more can be done.

Working at the margin means you continue to occupy the places and spaces that you do, but you do so differently. When at your companies, attending school, purchasing products, taking vacations, you do so with your eyes open, and ask what can I do now, in this moment, to enact change? Maybe it is acknowledging a co-worker whose ideas are ignored at meetings by asking them to elaborate or by building on their ideas. Maybe it is asking why the cashier has been giving a group of black teens in the store suspicious glares. Maybe it is asking why there isn’t greater diversity in your child’s preschool. Whatever places and spaces you occupy, do what I hope you learned in all your courses: ask questions.

In closing, working at the margin means being clear on why you are doing what you are doing. Pushing for racial equity is not about a focus on a “few bad apples,” or even solely “helping black people.” In 1954 the decision to integrate schools in Brown v. Board was not merely for black children. The psychologists studying children that laid out a basis to end segregation drew out the fact that white children are harmed psychologically by segregation. In fact, some historians suggest what ultimately may have tipped the scale for the Supreme Court were arguments not about the damage being done to black children but to white children from segregation. When we work at the margin, we have to be clear that doing so is not just for some of us. It is for us all.

It has been and will continue to be my humble honor to teach. Thank you all for changing me in important ways.

My Best,

Adina Sterling

*After receiving my PhD in 2011 from Emory University’s Goizueta Business School, I had the pleasure of teaching at Washington University in St. Louis from 2011 to 2015 in the undergraduate and PhD programs at Olin Business School, and from 2015 to the present at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business in the MBA, MSx, and PhD programs.