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

Occupying Wall Street: Literacies and Education for the 99%

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Today I had the opportunity to facilitate a discussion with two, wonderful colleagues, Christine Utz and Jon L. Peacock, both creative writers who worked as two of the 60 writers to create the text, Occupying Wall Street:  The Inside Story of an Action that Changed America.  Unsurprisingly, it was probably one of the most direct and unflinching conversations that I have been involved with about social action and critique against capitalism in my current space (Here is the plan/outline of today’s discussion.)

I have read/heard many people talk about Occupy Wall Street (OWS)  as a literacy/educational movement, but usually only in the context of the uses of social media.  I think we miss so many ideological issues when we only focus on these seeming processes of participants’ and onlookers’ conversations and discourse arenas.  The OWS book really helped sharpen these thoughts for me.

In particular, I am struck by the educational, participatory model that OWS models for us.  To get at what is radically literate and educational in OWS, we have to look particularly at the nestings of horizontal participation and the value of labor.  What I am also interested in is the galvanization of a new kind of (college) student.

On the heels of Hurricane Sandy’s still disastrous impact in New York City, with so many of my students and colleagues still without electricity and/or homes, I keep thinking back to this past summer.  My Brooklyn neighborhood, in its pre-gentrification phase, was primarily people of color who worked for the city— municipal workers (I, myself, was a public high school teacher when I moved in). One neighbor, one of the few oldheads left on my block, works for Con Edison so I have witnessed, vicariously through him, the complete disintegration of workers’ dignity and actual jobs in these past 14 years living here, all alongside the CEOs of this utility company bursting at the seams in profit.   Yet I have heard very few activists, including those of color, embrace and/or link the strike that these Con Ed workers waged for a good part of last summer, many of whom were people of color, to the very conditions that so many poor communities of color are facing in NYC post-Sandy: the slow work and/or overwhelmed-ness of Con Ed workers (many of whom were downsized or ousted long ago) and the general degradation of poor and working class peoples (that results in the downsizing of their jobs and the supersizing of CEOs’ pockets).  Given how difficult it often is for even activists to see just how linked our fates are as workers, I am struck by the ways OWS made these connections real, especially for college students, who organized alongside and with labor unions as part of the work they did at OWS.   Here we have an educational climate that, by and large, tells you that you are simply supposed to get your degree, whatever the financial debt may be (which, after all, helps you value the degree as it adds to schools’ financial portfolios), compete and beat out everybody else for that job at the end of the line, and not think about any one but one’s self (with little critical awareness of that self).  And yet, despite all of that and maybe even because of it, here we have college students walking out of classrooms to work with union organizers and other workers at OWS.  This requires a complete mutation in how you define and do the work of being a “student” and that, to me, is what we need to be theorizing and defining as the new literacies and educational praxis of OWS.

I am also inspired by the way the book was written which, as Jon showed us, is further indication of  the way work was organized and valued at OWS where every role is seen and valued vs. commodified according to individualistic monetary gain.  I see the book as a history of OWS but also as an unfolding of its praxis/theory of social change. Christine also pointed out, rather brilliantly, that the book is also a protest manual and in that sense, it seems like something invaluable to those of us interested in literacy and education for change which must, at its heart, always be doing some protest. 

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Oya’s Teachings

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Hurricane Sandy humbled every one of the 19 million people in the New York City metropolitan area. But it humbled some more than others in an increasingly economically divided city…

Instead of heading home to their families as the winds picked up, the city’s army of cashiers, waiters and other service workers remained in place.

Divides between the rich and the poor are nothing new in New York, but the storm brought them vividly to the surface. There were residents … who could invest all of their time and energy into protecting their families. And there were New Yorkers who could not.

Those with a car could flee. Those with wealth could move into a hotel. Those with steady jobs could decline to come into work. But the city’s cooks, doormen, maintenance men, taxi drivers and maids left their loved ones at home…

Manhattan, the city’s wealthiest and most gentrified borough, is an extreme example. Inequality here rivals parts of sub-Saharan Africa. Last year the wealthiest 20 percent of Manhattan residents made $391,022 a year on average, according to census data. The poorest 20 percent made $9,681.

All told, Manhattan’s richest fifth made 40 times more money than its poorest fifth, up from 38 times in 2010. Only a handful of developing countries – such as Namibia and Sierra Leone – have higher inequality rates…

~These are some of David Rohde’s words for the Atlantic this week

Though Hurricane Sandy has left the NYC area now, she is obviously still with us.  My own university’s students were evacuated and moved to other dormitories with classes canceled all week due to the wind damage on multiple campuses.  The next two weeks of my classes will be completely redesigned, to say the least.  And still, we fared so much better than others.  Businesses (the Mom-and-Pop joints vs the chains) in my own Brooklyn neighborhood are only slowly, very slowly, piecing things back together again.  David Rohde’s words (above) really resonated with me today and reminded me of the ways that capital’s newest modes of exploitation leave the rich safe in even a storm, something that should not surprise us given what we saw with Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.  I appreciated Rohde’s words but it didn’t take a hurricane to see the inhumanity of Manhattan’s elite and their world against the supra-humanity of the working class/working poor folk who keep this city afloat even when there is no superstorm.  So today I also have some other thoughts here… namely, that the safe-keeping of the elite comes solely from the care of the rest of us, what Rohde points out.  This means that we know how to give care to others and to ourselves.  I would dare to even say that all we impoverished or just-gettin-by caretakers know the path to a looming humanity that the wealthiest 20 percent simply will never reach.  That’s simply the price they pay for their capital.  We need never wonder  if real solutions to serious social issues will ever come from them.

I was really moved by the email sent out today from Resident Teacher, Shastri Ethan Nichtern, of the Shambala Center in New York City.  Nichtern wants us to think deeply about all of the messages of loved ones trying to contact us and about all of the support that everyday people are giving to one another.  Nichtern reminds us that, at times like these, nature forces us to connect with our own humanity and the humanity of others.  The connections we make take on new meanings, a kind of vividness not unlike what happens in meditation practice.  As Nichtern says: “we don’t have to work to uncover our heart, because the tragedy uncovers Bodhicitta for us. The tragedy itself IS open-heartedness… It is a heartbreaking time, but a ripe time for practicing, connecting with each other, and helping those who need it as much as we possibly can.”  I am moved by these words and by those with the humanity to reach such possibilities.

I told my students this week in our revised curricular plan for our course African American Literacies and Education that I felt compelled to make a nod to Oya (a daunting figure that the African Diaspora has re-Christened and brought with them all over the “New World.”)

Though I am not an Orisha scholar, I do know that Oya is considered one of the most powerful Orisha, a Warrior-Queen, responsible for, you guessed it, HURRICANES and all things related to storms and winds.  Oya brings rapid change to the places that need transformation.  She is both ardently loved and deadly feared and for good reason: she can destroy everything in her path, whether that be injustice or an entire village.  Oya also protects all women, especially their leadership power, in order to make sure that we all know that she can strike you down just as easily as she can shelter you, all of which are necessary to bring about change.  It should be quite obvious, especially this week, why people of African Descent, and black women in particular, from Cuba (where she is called Olla) to Haiti (where she is called Aido-Wedo) to New Orleans (where she is called Brigette) to Brazil (where she is called Yansa), would hold on to Oya so fiercely and lovingly.  This is a point that seems an appropriate reminder in an African American Literacies/Education class since what we have here is a system of meaning that not only attempts to understand and contextualize hurricanes and storms as central to an ecosystem but also, simultaneously, offers a completely different metaphor for women’s discourse, public life, and humanity!  There are always alternative systems of meaning and some of us maintain them, despite the devastation and daily havoc that capitalism has always wreaked on our lives.

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“Digital Griots” in the Era of Technoracial Formation

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This week in class, we are reading Adam Banks’s Digital Griots: African American Rhetoric in a Multimedia Age.  We’ll spend some time in class digging into the concept “Digital Griots” so that we can really take on this concept.

Prior to making the decision that this is what we would do in class, I had begun reading the last few years of texts in the journal, Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy.  When I did a search on the terms, race, black, and African American, on that website/journal, all that consistently came up were reviews, actually, of Banks’s books, both the first book, Race, Rhetoric, and Technology: Searching for Higher Ground and now his new book, Digital Griots.  That’s all!  I can’t say that I was very surprised, though I do confess that I was very disgusted that, yet once again, the worlds of school, literacies, and textual production were overdetermined as white.  My point is that it becomes quite clear that there is a white void  that Banks is writing into (making it questionable if that journal has the history and political tools to actually offer relevant reviews), so I need to make sure that my class stops, pauses, and tries to really wrap ourselves around this concept of Digital Griots and what the cultural memory and presence of African American deejays offer us in terms of new technological and creative productions.

In relation to Digital Griots, I have also been thinking about an essay by Tara McPherson in the edited collection Debates in the Digital Humanities that a colleague, Sophie Bell, suggested our program read.  McPherson’s essay is called “Why Are the Digital Humanities So White? or Thinking the Histories of Race and Computation” and is, in my mind, the central piece of the entire collection.  I love her question because I can immediately insert any number of institutions and practices: Why is Abercrombie & Fitch so white?  Why is Wall Street so white?  Why is Hollywood so white?  Why is administration in higher education so white?  The list of possible questions is simply endless but what I like about McPherson is that she offers up some answers.

McPherson convincingly shows me that the gaps and whole-scale omissions in merging race and technological productions is an EFFECT of the designs of technological systems in post-World War II computational culture.  That’s one helluva notion, though this is surely not news for those who study this culture.   Her discussion focuses on the operating system of UNIX, the operating system for digital computers, though her discussion can also be applied to C programming given the focus on modularity.  The work of programmers then was always intimately connected to racial paradigms even if that was never the overt tactic or intention.  The logic of UNIX is, thus, a cultural logic with its:

  • embrace of multiple languages and systems that mirrors the typical mindset of neoliberal multiculturalism (the idea that a seemingly egalitarian field can exist that ignores social, material hierarchies)
  • design of covert systems that mirrors the move away from overt racism (Jim Crow signage, lynching, de jure segregation, etc) as if racism is now gone
  • focus on modularity (that now organizes capital) that mirrors the “containment” of large black, working-class/working-poor populations in city centers through the governmental housing initiatives that divested all energies and monies from de-proletarianized/ravaged black city centers
  • framing of a modular code that mirrors the bureaucratic standardization of divided disciplines and entrepenurial-inflected knowledge in the academy
  • privileging of text that mirrors post-Cold-War methodologies in the humanities that devalue context in favor of a new kind of valuing of text
My simplistic summary notwithstanding, McPherson shows that “technological formations are deeply bound up with our racial formations and that each undergo profound changes at the mid-century” so much so that these are “feedback loops supporting each other.” To use more of her words, there are “technoracial formations” where race is “a ghost in the digital machine.”  So I walk away from McPherson’s discussion ready to take on her suggestions: 1) engage David Golumbia’s work on the cultural logic of computation; 2) look past simple screens, narrative, and images and into machines and labor; 3) critically interrogate race, culture, code, and computational systems (in fact, McPherson argues that if we can learn critical theory, then we can learn code too).

For this week, with Banks’s Digital Griots at center, I am thinking about what it means to bring a consciously-determined black perspective to these discussions that McPherson has triggered for me, with the African American cultural formation of the deejay as signpost and guide.

 

(photos are of DJ Premier)

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“It Bees That Way Sometime”

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nina-simone-240px_mediumWhen your guy has got his hat
and made himself hard to find
It doesn't mean you should go crazy
It could be that way sometime

Find yourself another love
Who will treat you good and kind
Return that love he gives to you
It also bees that way sometime

Baby, yes it does...

When you think you've found a love
And you have peace of mind
Somebody else steals his heart
Yes, it also bees that way sometime

Baby, yes it does...

Don't let the problems of this world
Drive you slowly out of your mind
Just smile, look at the problem
And say it bees that way, bees that way sometime

Baby, yes it does...

I will be, also be that way sometime
Can also be that way, it also bees that way
Bees that way sometime

This week, we are teaching ourselves the rules/prescriptions/grammars of African American Language (AAL) using Lisa Green’s African American English: A Linguistic Introduction.  So what do these lyrics and song from Nina Simone have to do with that?  Seemingly, everything.

I want to remind us here of Smitherman’s 1977 book, Talkin and Testifyin, and her chapter named after this very same Nina Simone song (chapter two).  Issues such as signifying, semantic inversions, and the blues notes in Simone’s “It bees dat way sometime” made Smitherman move away from coinages like “dialect” and “Black English” to calling this system of speaking/thought a “language.” For this reason, in this class, you will also hear me say AAL/African American Language.

Here is what Smitherman (1977) argues:

Here the language aspect is the use of the verb be to indicate a recurring event or habitual condition, rather than a one-time-only occurrence.  But the total expression— ‘it bees dat way sometime’—also reflects Black [Language] style, for the statement suggests a point of view, a way of looking at life, and a method of adapting to life’s realities. To live by the philosophy of ‘it bees dat way sometime’ is to come to grips with the changes that life bees putting us through, and to accept the changes and bad times as a constant, ever-present reality. (p. 3)

So while tonight’s class is certainly more about learning rules, let’s not forget what these AAL grammars mean and do in the world as a languaging/living/breathing belief system.  Let’s remember Nina Simone and how/why saying and knowing that “it bees that way sometime” is part of an ideological system that, sometimes, is the only thing that can get you through the day.

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