An Observation on Martin Luther King, Jr., Day

"WHY IS IT THAT MLK IS CELEBRATED SO MUCH, BUT MALCOLM X IS SLOWLY SLIPPIN OUT OF OUR MINDS, HE TAUGHT US HOW 2 STAND UP, AN FIGHT THE MAN WIT THERE OWN SHIT."

I often decry the sanitizing and beatification of MLK, Jr., because it makes him all conveniently palatable and ripe for consumption. It makes him safe for white people to admire and accept and celebrate.

But I don't often mention the flipside of what that means for his image. The quote above was written by one of my cousins. I've heard the same derision repeated by students in my classes. They think of MLK, Jr. as obsequious, unreal, too willing to compromise, the polar opposite of their image of the fierce, uncompromising Malcolm X (and I should talk about the construction of him at some point). They claim to respect MLK, Jr. and his work, but they feel that he could have gone farther and that he too easily said "what white people wanted to hear."

And, after a mental eye-roll and side eye, I ask them, can't they imagine, given all they've learned over the course of an "African American History from 1865 to the Present" class, that there would've been people who thought of him as uncompromising? Who didn't want to hear his messages of social and economic justice and equity? Who thought of him as a threat? I also ask them to define militant. Is it a term that has to be rooted in the willingness to take up arms?

Typically, I can at least get them to re-consider. But the idea that I, as a "progressive" historian, am considered the ridiculously "revisionist" one?

I think, in the future, I will have my students spend a few minutes juxtaposing my cousin's quote, their own perceptions, and this article by Fred Grimm, which notes:

The icon of the national holiday, the Disneyfied hero celebrated by school kids, a replica of the original made into someone palatable to business and civic leaders across the political spectrum, hardly resembles the righteous rabble-rouser who inflicted so much discomfort on the American establishment.

[snip]

[M]odern powerbrokers, in their prosaic tributes, tend to forget the Martin Luther King Jr. whose causes would have a stinging resonance in 2012 America.

After a year when some political leaders have tried to gut public worker unions, they might find it a bit inconvenient to recall the Martin Luther King who was gunned down in Memphis in 1968 during a campaign to organize the city garbage workers.

In a time when the American middle class has noticed that the one percent was scarfing up an ever greater portion of the nation’s wealth, while its own relative buying power has been frozen since 1970, King’s demands for economic justice might seem just a bit too contemporary. (Someone might also notice that his movement’s Resurrection City, the shanty town protest against economic disparity, erected a month after his death, might as well been called Occupy Washington.)

Amid so much apprehension over the lack of judicial restraint in the use of roving wiretaps and other surveillance authorized in the Patriot Act extension signed by President Obama, our political leaders would rather forget about the Martin Luther King whose home, office and hotel rooms were bugged, for years, by the FBI. (J. Edgar Hoover explained the “unshackled” surveillance of King as a way to track, “the most dangerous and effective Negro leader in the country.”)

After a decade of war in Afghanistan, with that long, bloody, pointless diversion into Iraq, it’s doubtful that the we’ll hear our President or congressional leaders from either party quote from King’s anti-war speech in 1967, when he called the United States, “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”

Certainly, the politicians behind the coordinated campaign in 14 states (including Florida) to enact new voting restrictions, would be vexed by the Martin Luther King who fought to bring voting rights to the disenfranchised.

And I will remind them that King himself acknowledged and accepted the fact that, in his time, he was considered "an extremist":

...though I was initially disappointed at being categorized as an extremist, as I continued to think about the matter I gradually gained a measure of satisfaction from the label. [...] The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice? [...] Perhaps the South, the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.

The one-dimensional, heroic caricature that we have made MLK, Jr., into does a disservice to the legacy of our creative extremists and the work of dissenters in shaping and re-shaping this country.

Weekend Crises

I graded papers this weekend. That created the first crisis. Roughly 20% of the students in this small class plagiarized. Another 50% percent did their own work, had great ideas, but lacked the organization, details, and analysis to make their exams good.

This class has turned out to be a lot more difficult than I anticipated because quite a few of the students came in not ready to do the work required in upper division classes. Grr.

But here is the main crisis. Crisis One facilitated an emergency moscato-run. I returned home to find...

MY CORKSCREW WAS NOT WORKING.

And so I was reduced to this chisel-and-shove game involving a paring knife, a steak knife, and, as my need and desperation grew, a small hammer.

You know how sometimes you say f*ck it and just push the cork down into the bottle and swill down cork with your deliciously sweet wine? Well, yeah, no. This one wouldn't budge. I swear we worked on it for an hour.

Finally, the bottle just cracked and off popped a smooth piece of glass. My niece looked at me, ready to toss it.

"Girl, get my glass," I told her.

Nativism 2.0

Emily linked to Uniball Roller, who shares the story of:

tender2be, a college student without a credit score, a [probably-off-the-books] job on the side, and a baby on the way, [who] wants to know how to get an apartment without a credit score or a cosigner.

Another LJer, brooklynknight, puts two and two together and quickly comes up with seven. In response to her query, he posted:

I... gandered at her Journal and looking at it (she lives on cash and refuses to get credit, her LJ is russian) and I got the distinct feeling she might be here on an expired visa.

[snip]

if she is indeed an illegal immigrant then I have no desire to help her, I don't want her child born here either and frankly If I could prove she was an illegal I'd forward all the information on her I could get to INS/ICE.

Tender2be denies that her visa is expired and tells brooklynknight to

send your energy in more positive direction, 'd be better for you

Now, of course, brooklynknight's concerns have already been shaped by a misogynist nativism--the belief that tender2be is an immigrant trying to get over on 'the system' and the idea that immigrant women view their children as little more than assets through which they can attain a desired status (i.e. the anchor baby argument). There's also the fact that she repeatedly tells him she's not an immigrant (here on a student visa) but he argues with her about her own status until someone explains student visas to him.

After tender2be's initial response to him, brooklynknight's sexist/nativist tirade continues. Apparently, she was not sufficiently obsequious or threatened. He is offended by her tone and reports that he has exploited the perceived power differential between them:

In any case, the tempo of your reply has further raised my suspicions.

I've just sent all the information I've found on you to my friend at the local ICE office. If you're here legally, well you've got nothing to worry about and good luck!

He believes she is an undocumented immigrant, he claims to have just set her up for possible detention and deportation, and he signs off 'good luck!' As Emily says:

He thinks she'll be A-OK as long as she's got papers. Clearly, he hasn't heard of American citizens being deported.

Of course, when he is called out on his assholishness, he claims that he has nothing against immigrants--he just wants to make sure people "do it the right way."

The douchery... it boggles!

(Crossposted)

Again.

Another 11-year-old child, Jaheem Herrera, has hanged himself "after enduring extreme daily bullying that included antigay taunts."

This is how his best friend described Jaheem's agony to Jaheem's mother:

He told me that he’s tired of everybody always messing with him in school. He is tired of telling the teachers and the staff, and they never do anything about the problems. So, the only way out is by killing himself

Via

Notes from the Academy

My colleagues and I talk a lot about students’ sense of entitlement and (depending on where you teach) privilege. Some of the things they ask demand are unbelievable.

I want to share a story with y’all, a bit of what I alluded to at the beginning of this post and here. I spent quite a bit of time talking about the freedom movements of the 1950s and 1960s in my post-45 class. I heard by way of one student, that another older, white, male student liked my class, but since he’d “lived through all of that,” he’d really wanted to hear more about Sputnik and the space race than I’d offered. The student who relayed the story to me said that she asked him, “Did you look on the history site and see what her specialties are?”


I was glad for her little nudge, but this is something I’ve encountered repeatedly, albeit not always so nicely worded. In my first set of evaluations eons ago, I had a student say, “She’s a good teacher, but she talks too much about race.” I also “focus a lot” on gender. I get related comments often—if not in bulk (one or two a semester, at most).

Those comments used to get under my skin. I now take them as a compliment of sorts. Somewhere along the way, I had a moment of clarity. I won’t say that students can’t help determine what I teach—I love when they ask to hear more about a subject, for example. And I try to give examples that are relevant to where they are (Texas)—in my survey, when we talk about other ways PoC tried to better their conditions during the Depression (since they were so often left out of the New Deal), we spend a nice amount of time on the San Antonio pecan shellers’ strike and the revitalization of the NAACP in Texas during the 1930s.

But for students to think that they can demand that I, a black woman historian, teach in a way that excludes or doesn’t “focus a lot” on race or class or a number of other factors, when my syllabus lists as an objective “To enable you, as a participant, to… recognize the role factors such as race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and ability have played in shaping policy, institutions and relationships within the U.S.” is ridiculous.

In a sense, they are asking me to teach a history that disappears me.

I'm starting to think that my life in the academy will teach me as much about race and gender privilege as my life in a rural, southern town.

How Not to Teach Middle Schoolers about the Middle Passage

When I took an African American literature class as an undergrad, my teacher tried to demonstrate to us physically the nature of the middle passage. Nothing in a well-lit, comfortably-temperatured university classroom can suffice, but she tried anyway.

She had all of us who would gather into a corner and move closer and closer to each other until the girl nearest to the wall asked that we stop. Many of us were visibly shaken, unable to put words to our feelings when the professor asked.

It was a voluntary activity and I still have mixed feelings about it (she did not tell us that we would be closing in on ourselves).

And we were, in terms of age, adults.

k8 sent me this article about a similarly-minded teacher of middle-school children:

WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. – A white social studies teacher attempted to enliven a seventh-grade discussion of slavery by binding the hands and feet of two black girls, prompting outrage from one girl's mother and the local chapter of the NAACP. After the mother complained to Haverstraw Middle School, the superintendent said he was having "conversations with our staff on how to deliver effective lessons."

"If a student was upset, then it was a bad idea,"* said Superintendent Brian Monahan of the North Rockland School District in New York City's northern suburbs.

Well.

There are so many levels of wrong in this that I won't pretend that I can address or even see them all. It's not a matter of being age inappropriate (my point above was that I don't know if such activities are appropriate for any age in a classroom setting). But I am struck by the fact that the teacher called on two teenagers, two girls who, like so many teenagers, may have been inordinately self-conscious of being the center of their classmates' attention in what they perceived as a negative light.

And then she thought it was okay to BIND them. To tie their hands and feet. With apparently no thought of how traumatic that may have been, no knowledge of any experiences these girls may have had that BINDING them might trigger, no thought to how absolutely powerless and vulnerable and scared it makes you feel when some one else strips you of the ability to control or move your own body.

She also did not think about what these girls' perception of slavery was. So many black people are taught that it was shameful for slaveowners and the enslaved. That the whole identity of our ancestors was subsumed by the designation "slave," because so much of that history comes from the slaveowners. That there must have been no pride, no dignity, no agency, no self-definition.

And always, beneath the surface, is an unspoken accusation of almost-complicity--that people of African descent accepted slavery and the Jim Crow aftermath meekly until the 1950s. One of my comps questions was about the "lack" of what would commonly be called slave uprisings. One of my white male students in my African American history class asked me, when we discussed Redemption, "Why didn't black people do something, stand up for themselves?" and none of my responses was enought to change his opinion or stop the dismissive shake of his head.

I have heard black people my whole life say, "I couldn't have lived back then, because I would have..." We are ashamed because we were taught the "happy darkies working in the field and being beneficently cared for" lie so long. We are also taught that our "honorable" history begins and ends with the Civil Rights Movement.

And she asked those girls to assume all of that in a classroom:

On Nov. 18, [Eileen] Bernstein was discussing the conditions under which African captives were taken to America in slave ships. She bound the two students' hands and feet with tape and had them crawl under a desk to simulate the experience.

If her point is to teach that the middle passage was devastatingly traumatic, why would she want middle-schoolers to re-enact it?
_____________________________________________
*Emphasis mine, because I didn't realize there was a correlation between students' " upsetness" and the determination of whether or not something is a "bad idea."

I've Found the Solution

...to the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.

Call your best friend and talk for almost an hour about a little bit of everything and a lot of nothing.

Laugh a lot.

Get the validation you shouldn't need, but, ah, well.

Get over yourself. I want to be the perfect teacher already. I'm enjoying my "small" African American history class, but the students in my large survey--which is primarily lecture interspersed with brief discussions (usually analyzing various audio and visual clips)--just aren't engaging like I want them to for the most part. Some days they ask the best questions; some days they look like zombies.

Initially, I worried about it on my own, not wanting to get ideas from my colleagues because I am so determined to appear like I have it all down pat. But I talked to a couple of people in my department and found 1) other people are trying to figure out how to best teach and reach students in the large classes 2) I'm not the only young(er) woman to have to pull a white male student aside and say, "The way you are addressing me before class is not appropriate and it will stop now" and 3) I am not the only new professor ever to have to write lectures for classes further on in the semester--honestly, I made it up to the Depression during the summer and I did teach post-45 in the spring so I can cull from and expand upon some of those (I'm good for the social movements of the 50s and 60s and the early Cold War, for example), but I still need a stronger WWI lecture, a good WWII lecture, and I want to write some killer ones on society and culture in the 80s and 90s.

I know this is not news for most folk, but it's hard for me to reach out for help and advice--always conscious of being "one of the only-" and so I don't want to admit weakness. But that shit was killing me and I'm so glad I did. Turns out, there's a slight chance that people aren't expecting me to be perfect!

And the last part of the solution--go to sleep, so the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day can become a memory.

Life in Rural America (Union Parish, part 1)

Finally, I'll begin with the schools in Union Parish, where I taught briefly. I also plan to talk about the community, the economy, and anything else that the Union Parish residents who are offering input would like. Here's my perspective as a teacher. Next up, the perspective of some parents.

When people ask me why I gave up teaching, my answer amounts to something like, “I loved the kids, but teaching in poor school districts is hard.” They ask for examples—after all, aren’t teachers always complaining that there’s not “enough”—resources, time, money? And so I give them examples.

Like how, my first year, I had 33 fifth-graders in a small classroom in which you still had to get permission to turn on the air conditioner. Or, how our playground had one small swing set that the fourth through eighth grade had to share and a decrepit basketball court that the boys claimed, early-on relegating girls to the status of observers and facilitating the habit of standing around in small, exclusive cliques. Or, how the only ancillary was PE (no music, art, etc.) twice a week, for 45 minutes, if the PE teacher came on time--he wasn't going to keep them over if he was late.

That 45 minute period was the only during-school planning period we had. In addition to the lack of a planning period, there was no duty-free lunch, so you had to shuffle your kids through a 20-minute lunch break during which cafeteria employees and district officials expected you to keep the kids virtually silent.

Oh, and the textbooks that fell apart and (to the horror of a historian!!!) the social studies texts from pre-the fall of Communism. I taught there from 1999-2001. Some of my kids’ textbooks had my cousin Trinity’s name in them. Trinity was in the fourth and fifth grades in the 89-90 and 90-91 school years.

But mostly I tell people about the fraction test that I tried to give my fourth-grade class back in the winter of 2000 (yes, I remember). Black and white copies in my school were like some illicit drug—available, but you had to pay dearly, by begging and describing why you needed them, and endure abuse, from the office staff and teachers’ aides, to get them. Keep in mind, there is no Office Depot or whatever right down the street. The local bank would make a few copies for you for 25 cents per page or, if your pastor or church secretary felt sorry for you, you could use the church's copier.

The school wanted us to use, primarily, the purple ditto copies. When I taught fourth grade, the new principal quite generously offered us 200 black and white copies per month (hah!). By the time of the fraction test, mine were used up. And though a co-worker offered to let me use some of her allotment, the principal said no. So I made ditto copies.

Blurry ditto copies on which the kids couldn’t see into how many sections a shape was divided or how many were shaded or if that number was 1/3 or 1/8 or 1/2. So I showed it to the principal.

And he said, “I’m sorry.”

I made a transparency of the original and had my kids copy the problems from the overhead. By the time they finished copying it, after I walked around pointing out errors and reminding them, "please don't begin until you have all the problems copied!", and I'd read over them aloud to make sure we were all on the same page (many children have problems transferring from board/screen to paper), they didn't have time to take the test that day. So, I took the original, drove the 20+ miles to Ruston and made copies.

And I realized, as much as I loved my kids, with a base salary of $18,600 (with a master’s degree), I couldn’t keep supplementing and buying things and trying to fill in the gaps. And I wasn’t one of those super-creative teachers who could make everything from scratch (scratch materials cost money, too, btw). That's always been strange to me, the expectation that teachers are to be these selfless, constantly giving, unconcerned about money, always super-resourceful, uber-noble individuals. Teaching in poor circumstances does inspire you... sometimes. I learned to love construction paper, glue, and cardboard. I learned to hoard nubby pencils, loose leaf, newspapers, and boxes.* But, sometimes, it just makes you exhausted beyond words.

So, I sent out the three PhD applications I’d been thinking about.
________________________________________________
* On supplies, for comparison, my son attends public school here that is consistently ranked highly in the state accountability system. The school does not send out supply lists in the summer. Instead, the PTO puts together the supplies the teachers want, boxes them by grade, and sells them at a marked up price to raise money for the PTO. The teachers there have no qualms about sending out a note the night before requesting that the kids bring something to school the next day, sending lists of things for you to buy for school activities, requesting certain types of notebooks or brands of supplies, or requesting that all the children bring a sack lunch on certain days. In Union Parish, doing such things were frowned upon because they 1)presuppose that the parents had time and money to go to the store 2) assume that the small local stores would have a wide variety of supplies for reasonable prices 3) ignore the fact that perhaps the parents of children receiving free or reduced price lunches (as the majority in my school did) had no money (especially in the middle of the week) to buy a lunch (duh!). Though the faculty at my son's school are nice, they are a bit cushioned and smug, I think, and sometimes I want to point these things out to them.

Prayers

I'm just now sitting back down and seeing news reports about the shootings at Virginia Tech.

I'm keeping them in my heart.

Breaking Down

Okay, today was a bad day, made worse by the fact that there was no exact reason for it to be bad. My advisor told me she liked what she was reading and made some preliminary suggestions that included small things like "you have to use the date as well as the volume and issue when you cite articles." No, "elle, this is the worst thing ever!" I found out that I could bring some of the government docs from my university home, saving time and money. My car interior finally dried out from its shampooing and it was well worth the money.
And on and on.

And still, I felt out of sorts.

Then one of my students, a fresh-faced boy with a nice smile, came to my office after class to tell me he might miss an upcoming quiz. I had my generic look of disbelief pasted on and then he said:

"Because I got called back to active duty and I have a screening that day."

My jaw dropped. "Oh no," I said. "If you've been once-"

"That's the way it works ma'am," he told me.

At which point, my eyes filled and I shook my head. "But it's not fair," I said.

Of course, he tried to comfort me. "It's okay." he said. Then he smiled and tried to make a joke: "I'm going to try to get out of it."

When I didn't visibly "cheer up," he added, "And if have to go, it won't be until the fall, so I can finish the class."

That damned class was the last thing on my mind but I told him, quite feebly, "You'll be excused from whatever."

I know some people will be horrified, but I don't care that that kid saw me get emotional for a minute. All I could think was, My God, what if he doesn't come back?