Category Archives: Teaching/Thinking about Education and Literacy in African America

Self-Taught! (Part I: African American Union Soldiers)

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In the second week of class, we will focus on Heather Andrea Williams’s book, Self-Taught, with the goal of framing African American Literacies in the 20th and 21st century in this crucial history.

We will begin class by discussing Williams’s work more fully.  But we will also spend part  of this class focusing on the role of African American Union Soldiers during the Civil War as a critical aspect of the history of African American Literacies.

There are, of course, so many intriguing literate characters, literacy events, and teaching moments that we could highlight from Williams’s book:

  • The role of black children themselves, many of whom were born into slavery but who experienced freedom AS the ability to learn to read and write OPENLY (children who would also “read” white paternalism alongside their books, given the ways they would trick northern, white missionaries who couldn’t tell them apart and, thus, report that their names were things like General Lee and Stonewall Jackson)
  • Teachers who crafted their literacy pedagogies and community teachings in hiding during slavery and showed up in full, visible force at emancipation
  •  Black women’s day-planning, all of whom were formerly enslaved, who became “stay-at-home moms” for the first time, solely for the purpose of learning to read and write and attending school with their children
  • the whole arsenal of skills-building underneath all of that financial literacy that let recently emancipated people who made less than $10 a month buy the materials to build their own schools and take care of the teachers (which included physical defense as much as monetary support)
  • the re-organization/re-scripting of menial work, work that looked no different from what black people had done in slavery, by taking every and any free moment or many turns with the plow to get in a quick lesson from the infamous blue-back speller (which became popular, no doubt, in part from emancipated slaves’  extensive use of this  text, a text with the central goal of replacing British English with an American English)
  • the imparting of the communal philosophy of “each one, teach one” to design the teaching of reading and writing (where even small children were considered masterful teachers and expected to share knowledge)

All of these and more could be a point of focus for Williams’s book.  Unfortunately, we can only focus in closely on one aspect.  So we will spend class time looking at one iteration of the literacies that the blue-back speller witnessed: letters and petitions written by black Union soldiers to various commanders and administration;  letters from wives and family members of soldiers to various commanders and administration; letters from soldiers to wives and family and vice versa. Williams compels us to see these African American Union soldiers in the Civil War as ushering in new definitions of literacy: both how one acquires literacy, why, and to what ends.

We will look at a few spaces, directed at teachers, where we can find the online writings of black Union soldiers.  Though these texts are invaluable, these texts have been heavily edited and altered.  While I understand scholars’ decision to do this because they don’t want audiences to assume these men’s ignorance, the editing obscures the histories of literacy that Williams lets us see.  When you begin to realize that for many of these soldiers, they had only been LEGALLY ALLOWED to read and write for less than a year, all of those editing “mistakes” are indications of heroism, not failures to learn mechanics. In class, we will instead use the documentary histories that Ira Berlin, et al have created so that we can see these black men’s actual words, spellings, etc.  From that, with Williams’s research as our guide, we will get a sense of who may have learned to read and write as former slaves and/or as soldiers.  Most crucial, however, is that we have a living testimony and voice of the men and families who pushed the United States much further than it ever intended to go when it enlisted black men and abolished slavery.

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What Time Is It?

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If I could become any kind of new media composer today, I would be the AfroDigital version of Jimmy Jam (a name I have always adored) and Terry Lewis, with every and anything that would entail, all the bells and whistles that we have come to expect from them and all the new surprises awaiting us, and just when we thought they were done!  If you grew up listening to the SOS Band, Cherrelle, Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation, Klymaxx, and, of course, the Time (and so many others), then you might have a sense of what I am getting at here.  I know that their music doesn’t translate simply as a digital movement, but it is their collaborative presence that I have in mind: what I thought of, way back when, as my generation’s version of Ashford and Simpson (who fueled the music of Tammi Terrell and Marvin Gaye, Chaka Khan, and so many others.)  You just know when you are in the presence of these folks’s creations which seem to take on a life of their own for many moons to come.  I think that’s what digital spaces have to offer black communities: a unique AND African-Americanized presence that you come to know and incorporate into how you live your life.

I think about digital presence a lot lately, moreso than before, because I am more conscious of the digital spaces that I inhabit.  Immediate, in-time interactivity like twitter is sometimes important to me, but not always.  Even digital texts that are not updated can offer me multiple experiences, voices, and mental images vs. the usual, calcified and static repository of non-dynamic texts.

Here are some texts that I have come to enjoy because every time I enter them, I am, in fact, ENTERING something, becoming part of someone’s/something’s dynamism. Though the text doesn’t really change, I am still offered a new experience, a new way of hearing and seeing, each time I enter.

Johndan Johnson-Eilola’s “Polymorphous Perversity in Texts”, in the summer 2012 issue (16.3) of Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy offers me a way of thinking about academic research and writing where the ideas just literally jump out at you.  On top of that, Johnson-Eilola even offers an 89 MB zipped archive for readers/players/co-imaginers to go off and play some more.


I was inspired by this collaborative movement (movement is the best word I have because text just doesn’t seem expansive enough).  This movement represents a course called “English 696e: Spatial and Visual Rhetorics” at the University of Arizona. The collaboration of amy c. kimme tea, adrienne crump & elise verzosa, crystal n. fodrey, anita further archer, jennifer haley-brown, ashley j. holmes, marissa m. juarez, londie t. martin, and jenna vinson allows you to see the work of a classroom as a relational space of understanding, conflicts, and contradictions so that we can now EXPERIENCE a whole range of perspectives.  I can’t imagine a better entry point into a classroom and its composing.

I like the possibilities that such digital texts offer me.  In my ideal world, I would re-mix all of this with a Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis vibe.  It is only when I imagine the kind of new knowledge-making that Johnson-Eilola and English 696e’s collaboration make possible, alongside the presence and worlds that black cultural icons like Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis have created, that I can imagine any reason and purpose for building digital competencies, code fluency, and tech skills.

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Inflecting and Bending: Black Life, Language, and Literacies

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On this first day of school, I want us to begin to craft metaphors, tropes, or images that can best capture African American Life, Language, and Literacies.  The trope I choose today is inflecting and bending: inflecting the social world in which you live but always bending it to your own purposes and vision at the same time.  The best way to explain it is to do as the Staples Singers once crooned: take you there.

It is February 13, 1983 and it is the NBA All-Star Game hosted by the Los Angeles Lakers.  Here is what I remember from the starting line-up: MVP Julius “Dr. J” Erving, Isiah Thomas, Moses Malone, Maurice Cheeks, and Larry Bird… up against Magic Johnson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Alex English, David Thompson, and Maurice Lucas. I was 12 years old watching at my father’s home since he had the biggest television.

I watched for three reasons: 1) it was the all-star game; 2) Dr. J was in it, and; 3) Marvin Gaye was singing.  I have no idea who won (I’ll throw up my East Coast signs here and, most naturally, go with that) and I no longer remember Dr. J’s plays though my eyes were riveted on him.  I do, however, remember my jaw dropping, everyone in the room being speechless and almost in tears, and then cheering louder than the Olympics Games for this move right here:

While I have offered Marvin Gaye’s rewriting of the National Anthem in personal terms, there is a larger historical and political terrain.   As we move through the semester in this course, you will see how African American literacies have to be conceived inside of rigorous historical knowledge.  Marvin Gaye’s anthem is no exception.

The timing of Marvin Gaye’s 1983 anthem and its impact come at a very specific time in U.S. history of race relations.

The organized struggles for African American empowerment that characterized earlier Black Freedom Movements of the Civil Rights and Black Power era had moved to urban city-centers.  So you had a new populist movement of black, urban, working class groups in what you might call the Second Great Migration.

Black urban city-centers were looking at a level of militarization and police surveillance that they had never seen, triggered largely by the State’s (i.e., Cointelpro, J. Edgar Hoover, etc) ongoing covert and overt attacks on the most radical black activists.

Middle class blacks were abandoning urban city-centers for greener pastures, not unlike Gaye’s original recording label, Motown, which had abandoned its black-community-base of Detroit, went Hollywood in the hopes of tapping into a more mass-consumer culture, and set up in Los Angeles.  Meanwhile, a largely working class black culture found their jobs transformed by Post-Industrialized economy into a service-based economy, creating mass poverty and even bigger racialized gaps in wealth in the U.S.

With Motown perhaps as a guiding (because now even more co-opted) symbol, the black protest movements of the 50, 60s, and 70s were now commodified.  For instance, Martin Luther King and, albeit to a lesser extent, Malcolm X’s images could be found everywhere but their visions for equity and equality were not: blacks faced a level of economic and social inequality in the late 1970s that was arguably worse than what they had faced in previous decades.

Gaye’s 1971 album What’s Going On (which included the song of the same title, where he charted his own brother’s military service in Vietnam, and ended with the song, “Inner City Blues”) have made him an iconic figure in the Black Freedom Movements.  Gaye already had a rhetorical excellence such that black audiences came to expect him to do all of the following:

  • offer his own personal experiences as a lens into a larger black struggle
  • critique American imperialism at home and abroad
  • capture the best of what Soul music is and does— merge R&B and Gospel to capture, inspire, and sustain mass freedom movements
  • bring back the Blues (in both titles to songs and style) as central to the framing of black, urban life
  • layer a falsetto, mid-range singing, and a gospel shout into one seamless whole (it even sounds like he is saying oh lawd in between lines of the Anthem)
  • articulate a voice of resistance in a public black discourse despite all of the State efforts to thwart that voice;
  • grieve and lament the Freedom Struggles of the previous era (we don’t often talk about it this way but the deep need for a  communal grief after brutally violent assaults and murder on beloved heroes and heroines, towns, and communities was dire)
  • seemingly predict the world stage that Hip Hop would take given the kind of Hip-Hop beat that Gaye sets his version of the Anthem to

and last, but not least, and perhaps my own most favorite “bullet” of all…

  • resist, as best as he could, the public expectation and marketing desire that he present himself as a black male sex symbol (part of the reason he chose to perform so many duets with leading black female singers) though he didn’t back down from themes of black love (I stress this final point given both popular and academic tendencies to make opposite camps of music with overt themes like War in Vietnam vs. music about love/sensuality)

I suggest here that we stop and pause… and really listen again… listen to Marvin Gaye again, but this time with the intentionality of really hearing all of this African American history and experience that Marvin Gaye consciously represented.  This time, HEAR this history in Marvin Gaye’s rendition of the anthem…. (and let it play again)

All of the history that I have presented above are right there in Gaye’s deconstruction and reconstruction of the “Star Spangled Banner” and it was what my own family and countless other black families sitting around the television were both consciously and unconsciously responding to.  The “Star Spangled Banner,” composed by Francis Scott Key, which gained anthem status in 1931 had only once before been so radically altered (and was then also regarded controversially): by Jose Feliciano at the 1968 World Series.  Gaye’s choice to so dramatically alter the Anthem (which Whitney Houston was herself inspired by when she sang her version at Super Bowl XXV with its now platinum record sales) for televised sports showed his right and responsibility to politicize the African American experience and to do so, quite literally, in the context of one of America’s most sacred texts.

Gaye inflects all of the history of his moment, but he bends it his way, toward his history and towards the future he wants to create. Democracy, as represented by the Anthem, as represented by Gaye’s revised version of it, is now an African Americanized/African American-inclusive Democracy.  

Think about the ways Gaye and his audience are reading the world.   And now think about how and why Gaye and his audience are (re)writing that world.  This is what we look at when we talk about African American literacies.

 

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eBlack Archiving and Pedagogy

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I never asked Tolstoy to write for me, a little colored girl in Lorain, Ohio. I never asked [James] Joyce not to mention Catholicism or the world of Dublin. Never. And I don’t know why I should be asked to explain your life to you. We have splendid writers to do that, but I am not one of them. It is that business of being universal, a word hopelessly stripped of meaning for me. Faulkner wrote what I suppose could be called regional literature and had it published all over the world. That’s what I wish to do. If I tried to write a universal novel, it would be water. Behind this question is the suggestion that to write for black people is somehow to diminish the writing. From my perspective there are only black people. When I say ‘people,’ that’s what I mean.

~Toni Morrison

If I had to define what AfroDigital texts look like and do, I would re-mix Morrison’s arguments above and include issues of digital composing and design.  I am drawn to her singular goal of offering an unapologetic, self/community-determined right to think, imagine, and create with and for black communities.  An AfroDigital pedagogy would seem closely related.

I’ll start here by wondering/wandering about the intellectual, textual community that digital texts can  provide.  I mean something beyond (for now, at least) the seemingly endless experimentations in classrooms with new technologies as if the experimentation itself is the pursuit of knowledge, a rigorous theory of new media, or the creation of socially critical or meaningful action.  I have seen enough youtube videos online made by young people, often for their classes, that deploy quite ingenuous uses of technology but say nothing critical about black communities, fail to transcend the tradition of book reporting, or, at worst,  showcase dazzling multimedia tools about nothing.  I love when these kind of tech-creative projects are done by 11 and 12 year old students but when the creators are college students, I have some questions, to say the least.

So I am not talking about digital products as the sole marker of an AfroDigital pedagogy.

I am also not talking about the replacement of books and articles since nothing of the sort would be true of my own life.  The reading that I do on blogs and other websites does not replace the reading that I do in books and articles, some of it online/e-Book and some not. Nevertheless, I still believe that it is simply no longer enough for a group of students to connect with one another in classroom dialogues or via online discussions alone.  Nor is it enough to simply read a book outside of the digital universe that can give vision and audio-dimension to the text. We need to contextualize the world of ideas as part of the digital life that many students already have.  For an AfroDigital pedagogy, I am talking about the creation of a fierce, eBlack mini-archive that complements each of our classes.

While students certainly have access to more information and knowledge about black communities and their histories than ever before,  I see no evidence of a greater understanding of power, race, and culture today than 20 years ago when I first began teaching when there was no such thing as google, iTunes, or widespread use of DVDs.  I don’t expect this understanding from young people since this is the reason, after all, that they are in my classes.  However, to talk about the unlimited exchange of knowledge that can be found online severely miseducates students.  A google search, for instance, is as coded by money, power, and access in relation to whom and what gets listed, not unlike previous power dynamics that determined whose books/nations made it into a library or printing press.

When I want to link course content to various websites and videos, I clearly need to know that content first in order to sift through the options.  For instance, I wanted to build connections for my university program to current scholars’ counter-standardization and counter-testing movements in New York by locating politically challenging video-presentations.  I had to know first to look for Pedro Noguera and Michelle Fine because what I got before including their names in my search was inane, at best, and racist, at worst.  What about our students who do not know Fine and Noguera as critical, radical thinkers and educational activists?  Do we assume they will find these sites and people on their own because the internet is so amazing in the way it equalizes information-gathering from multiple perspectives?  Do we assume the internet is so highly interactive and engaging to young people that students will automatically do the work of sifting to find radical nooks and corners?  Do we assume they will know, in the example above, to follow the NYCLU on twitter to see the latest activist work they are doing in and for schools?   And if they are following NYCLU on twitter, is that the beginning and end, the creme de la creme, of their intellectual work? I say no on all this.

Do we just include a link on a syllabus (or classroom text) or pull up a video in class where oftentimes, like in the case of the panel which hosted Noguera and Fine, contending for our attention, are comments from racist whites about how and why they refuse to send their white children to schools with the poor and dumb black kids in the district?  After all, isn’t this what digital spaces allow— free exchange of ideas we may not get otherwise?  I say no on all that too.

I can’t afford to assume that our digital universe readily provides access to students to fully humanized representations of black communities.  I can’t assume that the most race-critical perspectives have been digitized and easily located for them.  I can’t ever assume that students’ possession of a new technological toolkit means that students have a radical or culturally-relevant use of it. So as I plan my class this fall, I am mindful about one, important use of my own website: to gather up and (re)present digital texts as a mini, eBlack archive so that my students and I can focus, think, be, do, and listen better to the black communities we are learning about.

When I first began using the term, AfroDigitized, in 2005, I had not heard the 2001 “The Shrine” album compiling a variety of artists from Africa forging what they call futuristic and future sounds of the Motherland.   After now hearing that album, I like the term even more as well as this notion of looking and listening digitally to the future, as if it were already here, rather than assuming that we have now is enough. These realizations, at least for me, are small but necessary first steps toward an AfroDigital Pedagogy.

 

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