I recently observed an intro to lit class taught by a Graduate Teaching Assistant in which a youngundergraduate presented a brief biography of Gwendolyn Brooks and announced that she had no idea how the biography related to the poem “We Real Cool,” “unless” she said, “it has something to do with race.” Struck by the enormous blindness of the observation, I tried to determine if the student refused to connect the issues of race and gender in the poem to an historical context of racism and sexism in our society because she is “over” race and gender, or because she is so deeply entrenched in racist, sexist perspectives that she failed to see the tensions illustrated in the poem. Later, I continued to think about this young woman, and I reached an assessment that I prefer: rather than deeply racist and sexist or pathologically banal, I think the student is simply afraid of the immense power and pain associated with racial and gendered conflict in our society – perhaps in her own life. Such fear has a way of paralyzing the analytic brain, creating a radical disconnect between the student and the text. In this paper, I want to talk about diagnosing the disconnect and some strategies I’ve found useful in giving students access to their emotional responses to texts.