Category Archives: Black Perspectives on Neoliberalism

Love, Patriarchy & Capitalism: Prototypical

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heart-of-moneyThough I don’t talk much about relationships on this site, intimacy is as political as anything else.  Relationships, families, and  co-habitation are mediated by a stunning marriage of patriarchy and consumerism.  So much of the partnering that I see seems to work like business ventures: dating is like making an investment and getting the right woman/man is like selecting a good stock option. Heterosexual women are considered accomplished when they find a benevolent patriarch (i.e., Steve Harvey) who will protect and provide for them even if the women are as dumb as hell (which, for patriarchy to work, is usually most desired).

Our language often reveals just how difficult it is for us to re-script these kinds of relationships. Here’s an example. An acquaintance (we never spent any time together so I can’t call him much else) once called me, in a very round-about way, his “prototype”, emboldened by Raheem DeVaughn’s cover of Outkast’s problematic song (a man celebrates that he has fallen in love AGAIN and is grateful that he has now found his “prototype” because if things end, he can presumedly be better at falling in love… AGAIN.)  I’ve never been impressed by this masculinist discourse. I’d be silly to think a man has called me, and only me, his “prototype”— that’s a line, not a life choice. Unfortunately, too many women might see a compliment in this foolishness. In a patriarchal system, men’s definition of and giving of “love” holds the most value, even if that really only means consumption, power, and objectification. Many might be confused by my offense here, so let me cut straight to the point: a WOMAN is not a prototype so, when in doubt, avoid any discourse that calls her a thing on-the-way-to-the-next thing.

I did tread lightly here: I didn’t even respond to this “compliment” at first, I then stated on the next day that I didn’t get the intention of these words, and then, finally, I asked, casually so, for the brotha’s intention.  No in-depth answer was forthcoming.  When I then later pressed for a real explanation while indicating that I was offended, the brotha still wouldn’t budge, talked about guitar solos instead, insisted that he meant something else without any discussion of that something else, and just got rude and accused me of not listening (and, yes, I responded back to that).  There was no apology and no reclamation of a sexist offense.  While it might seem like I am focusing on a rather trivial conversation, the larger issues of patriarchy and consumption are all tied into this seemingly small interaction.  This exchange is exactly what bell hooks talks about in The Will To Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love (there are many interesting discussions about this book amongst men; I like the way the blogger and activist, Alex Knight, describes patriarchy as terrorizing his life and emotional maturity).  When men choose patriarchal power this way (and hooks calls emotional withdrawal/withholding, etc all forms of patriarchal power/male control), there is a real danger for both men and women: men give up the ability to really love, feel, or communicate when they only take their place as patriarchs; women embrace violence by allowing male domination and power to script their daily lives.

Because the song does not re-invent the definition of prototype, it’s a problem to use this language in reference to women.  Let’s look:

Definition of Prototype
From the OED: c.1600, from Fr. prototype, from M.L. prototypon, from Gk. prototypon “a first or primitive form,” properly neut. sing. of prototypos “original, primitive,” from protos “first” (see proto-) + typos “impression” (see type).
popular definition: an original type, form, or instance serving as a basis or standard for later stages.

With this “prototype” labeling, a lot is revealed: women are types and there is one model to be molded, not that much different from people I know who have one specific kind of car that they like. The very definition assumes a manufactured object where new replicas/women will be created, distributed, sold.  It’s almost like watching the next women come down a factory assembly line and checking their parts to see which ones came out right.  480barbiesIf this all seems like a harsh indictment, I should add that this same man would do things like run down the list of: 1) birthdays or birthmonths for his ex-girlfriends, including his “baby momma” who bears the same sign as him, with almost identical birthdate (thus making them, fairly recently, the perfect match); 2) the various attributes of these women’s personalities as well as their other, um, attributes, and; 3) the various gifts he gave these women (with lists of what they liked to eat).  When MY BIRTHDAY came around, this man didn’t even remember and accused me of not telling him the date. I didn’t care so much about the missed birthday, except for the fact that I had actually told him the date— it was the precursor to his aforementioned 3-point discussion.  As you can see, he was more interested in the memories of his pre-“prototypes” and zodiac matches. When women are mere prototypes, as this case shows, they are things and so, as objects only, they are not worthy of real care, remembering, priority, or value.  I could tell more stories like this but, more importantly, this brotha would insist that he does not run game as a playa-playin’-on and that he works wholeheartedly at anti-patriarchy.  Choosing to name and relate to women as “prototypes” after previous conquests (and thinking single women just want your “seed”) is a virtual blueprint for misogyny, not a meaningful way to live, love, and raise a family.  I don’t want to suggest that heterosexual men are the only ones who treat women like commodities because heterosexual women try to manufacture men too (loving a man based solely on what he can do/perform vs. allowing him to be fully human); men just have patriarchy on their sides and, therefore, are encouraged and seemingly rewarded when they promote this system.  My point is that framing relationships outside of and beyond the patriarchy and hyper-consumption in which we live is a feat most of us are not achieving, with the various men making covers of this song a striking example.  There is a tragedy here, one that hooks continually warns us of: without the relinquish of patriarchy, even when men are tryna do right for they women, like these musicians perhaps, they still only turn women into things/objects/prototypes.

Now some people tend to think that I go off the deep end with my politics and, well, I don’t care. The fact of the matter is that we are in a system and no one’s language and actions are innocent.  I am not suggesting that all is lost, only that there is real talk AND work to do. At the end of the day, loving/being with someone beyond patriarchal violence and consumerist logic is amongst the most revolutionary and human things we can do. Of all things, love—black love— needs to be radical.

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Professional-Managerial Class (PMC): Becoming/Dis-Becoming Writing Teachers

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classwarfare1At the 2013 Conference of College Composition and Communication (4Cs) in Las Vegas, I had the opportunity to be part of a workshop designed by Shannon Carter, Deborah Mutnick, and Steve Parks.  It was a fruitful workshop that centered real dialogue … while also producing more than just dialogue.  On one of the panels during the workshop, Kurt Spellmeyer asked us to contextualize and trouble our academic identities and positions as the Professional-Managerial Class (PMC).  Part of his discussion focused on Barbara Ehrenreich and John Ehrenreich’s 1977 essays in Radical America called “The Professional Managerial Class” and then later,  “The New Left: A Case Study in Professional-Managerial Class Radicalism.”  Their current extension/revision of that work is called “Death of a Yuppie Dream: The Rise and Fall of the Professional-Managerial Class.”    Marc Bousquet, at a later point in the workshop, pushed us to see that no radical activity or revolution will come from the professoriate; otherwise, we would have seen that already.  He urged us, instead, to see ourselves as and act as a working class, which would mean a class consciousness where we work, radically so, in our own class interest.

“Death of a Yuppie Dream” frames analysis of current modes of capitalist production, mass consumption, and neoliberalism.   Here we are talking about our current social circumstance where once autonomous professionals, the Professional Managerial Class, the PMC (doctors, engineers, lawyers, professors, etc), who have been defined by specialized knowledge and standards, now experience corporate domination and exploitation rather than the private autonomous spaces that once defined their work.  While the PMC often acted as a kind of buffer between vulgar consumption, profits, and exploitation, the PMC has also been its own worst enemy— basically, a buncha sell-outs.  Today, the PMC has been downgraded (i.e., more adjunct hiring than tenure track professors), absorbed into corporations (i.e., HMOs, large corporate law firms vs. private practice), and has faced serious decline (i.e., the dearth of journalism jobs). Meanwhile, a new kind of complex, multi-tiered management system exists to control labor, high-tech machinery, and consumer culture where the new PMC, especially the high-paid managers (i.e., upper level administration/managers), look more like CEOs than the autonomous professionals of the past.  The Ehrenreichs convincingly show that the PMC became “the rationalizers of society” who conflicted with capitalists but who also positioned themselves away from and, often, in opposition to the working class that they fully exploited.  The Ehrenreichs also want to point out to the PMC that we are as dispensable to capitalism as the factory workers ousted from assembly lines for “third world” labor exploitation.   In other words: what the hell are we holding on to this system for?  The Ehrenreichs helped me to see and understand the kind of cultural logic that I see operating in college writing programs in this particular moment much better.

I am still often shocked at how readily faculty, those on the tenure-track who have made it into the PMC, will themselves advocate for the most corporate structures to mechanize writing and writing programs:

  1. one, standard syllabus that everyone can implement across a hierarchy of adjuncts, graduate students, junior faculty, and senior faculty;
  2. a set of standards/tests/assessments to ensure that students master exactly the kind of PMC logic that the Ehrenreichs criticize— discipline, appropriate academic curiosities, and “bureacratic modes of communication”;
  3. common assignments to be measured across one numerical system so that #2 can be automated more smoothly.

These mechanisms are not about education; they are the cultural logic of  mass production and consumption. The idea that conversation and dialogue with colleagues can produce consensus and community may as well be a foreign language and concept in this iteration of the PMC’s co-signing of automated/techno-regulated systems.  When it comes to under-represented college students of color in these systems, well there’s just no way for there to be a happy ending here.  Faculty of color really have no business being on board with these cultural logics when, at best, their focus on cultures and diversity will only be commodified, the new 21st century Booker T.’s, a fact that shouldn’t surprise given that bodies of color are always for sell across historically varied modes of capitalist production.

In true, sell-out fashion, the PMC becomes exactly the kind of “rationalizers” of capitalism that the Ehrenreichs critique with this mantra, ad infinitum: we are only being realistic. If the teaching of writing can be so “realistically” and simply automated, measurable, standardized, and replicated across multiple spaces, then why do we need full-time teachers… or teachers at all?  The ironic thing is that if the PMC does not turn against its own exploitation and begin to irrationalize capitalism and corporate, mass-automation, we only make ourselves more obsolete.  It seems true then that the lack of a class consciousness means you only undermine your own fool self.

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Flip-Floppers & Tuskegee-Experimenters

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flip-flop1Academic Flip-Floppers have always been quite perplexing to me. Perhaps I am just too naive and keep expecting more when I ought to know better by now.  Flip-Floppers are those scholars who tag along with the newest trope, fad, or jargon in the field and then spit it out whenever they can.  Treated like flip flops, ideas become something of mere discardable convenience that don’t require real support or substance.  This is because the new idea isn’t something the Flip-Flopper really agrees with or lives by because word is not bond right here.  The new idea just has to be a trope that can get the Flip-Floppers some attention, accepted conference panels, or publications.   I have in mind right now the folk who I have seen on panels and whose work I have read about code-meshing, when just a few years (or months) prior, they espoused very vociferous public claims about the inevitably (and therefore their embrace) of teaching standardized English, a platform totally incompatible with politics surrounding code-meshing.  I am not saying folk can’t change their mind and get turned around but that’s not what’s going on here.  I usually just get up and leave or stop reading when it comes to Flip-Floppers like this; I can’t waste my time with people who don’t believe in what they are saying, do something different from what they profess, and just want to commercialize and commodify thinking and research.

The Flip-Floppers are the more benign players in the academic, neoliberal hustle though.  The Tuskegee-Experimenters are closely related but in much more dangerous ways.

It’s almost a cliché to now claim one’s scholarship is connected to social justice.  But for the life of me, I often cannot figure out what on earth many people mean by this. When graduate students ask me how to do educational scholarship and social justice, I try very hard to get them to hold on to the here-and-now.  They usually want to talk about the big movements, protest campaigns, and activist groups way OUT THERE that we can join and create (all of which are certainly critical).  But what I also want to focus on are the interventions we can make RIGHT where we are because the barriers and oppressions of the world are always right there in front of you.  You never have to travel far or wide.

tuskegeeHere’s what I mean.  I have never taught a single semester in these last five years where  young black women didn’t come to me to describe the kinds of mean-spirited, violent, racist diatribes thrown at them by faculty and staff on campus.  These are not isolated experiences— but are systematic, systemic, and routine.  And for those who are not accosted outright, they just feel like something ain’t right: when they talk, the room goes silent, like their presence is tolerated but never really desired.  The examples are too countless to name. And so I wonder about these folk who are wondering so much about what kind of activist projects they need to do way OUT THERE somewhere when the oppression they assume they are analytically aware of is right there surrounding them each and every day.  How do you acknowledge, resist, or transform systems you do not see?   This is where the Tuskegee-Experimenters come in.  I am talking about the multitude of people who I see, especially white scholars but more increasingly scholars of color too, who write about students of color, “diversity,” critical theory, anti-colonialism, or anti-racism, but do not notice, much less act on, the everyday violence inflicted on students of color in our institutions.  And by saying Tuskegee-Experimenters, yes, I am invoking “The Tuskegee Study of Syphilis in the Negro Male.”  I do not mean this as a kind of hyperbolic statement but as a kind of historical fact about the ways that research on black bodies has consumed those bodies, in fabulously parasitic and/or deathly fashion, without ever truly helping black folk or even intending to help them.  That tired mantra everyone uses today about one’s publication shedding light on a subject and, therefore, helping communities of color is just that: TIRED.  You can’t solve social injustice if you bask in the privilege of never seeing it.

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“I think this anthropology is just another way to call me a nigger.”

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drylongso-self-portrait-black-america-john-langston-gwaltney-paperback-cover-art

“I think this anthropology is just another way to call me a nigger.”  That’s a heavy title for a blog post.  It is the epigraph to the introduction of John Gwaltney’s Drylongso, words spoken by one of Gwaltney’s research participants. Drylongso remains the book I turn to when I see/read/hear mainstream white scholars christening themselves and their research as THE work that critically engages race and the lives of people of color, all while, of course, maintaining their own white privilege in academic institutions (and often perpetuating acts of racial violence rather than fighting against it).  I don’t mean these things in the abstract either, I mean everyday practices that I have witnessed… but those details will be for another post for another time.

What you see with Gwaltney’s methodology and politics are communities of black folk who unwrap oppressive white worlds with wit, political consciousness, and uncanny navigational abilities.  Gwaltney’s book, first published in 1980, chronicles his interviews with more than 40 African Americans, mostly working class, from 12 northeastern black communities in the early 1970s.  Gwaltney’s very methodology and communications are a community endeavor.  As a “blind ethnologist,” Gwaltney was, quite literally, escorted and driven to each interview setting, what he calls “seminars,” where his participants kept and transported his tape recorder, typewriter, and brailler.  Reciprocity is the foundation on which Gwaltney built this study, making sure he was not one of those academics who talked with “paper in hand.”  Like I said, I come back to this study when I encounter white scholars who imagine that they and their white colleagues originate and ground intellectual and social analyses on race.  I am thinking of one of my graduate students who is focusing on Derrick Bell, Cheryl Harris, and Richard Delgado who had to listen to a white male tell her she needs to incorporate the work of (white) scholars in his field who have already addressed the issues of race she examines.  Gwaltney, however, reminds us that these scholars maintain codes of race and white liberalism more than they have ever analyzed it (what Delgado called “imperial scholarship”)… as Gwaltney’s epigraph, a quote from a black factory worker, states:  “I think this… is just another way to call me a nigger.”   

1I am also thinking about Gwaltney in relation to a white scholar whose work on race I have valued, particularly the arguments that have remained undervalued in ways that I have always found perplexing.  I am talking about Catherine Prendergast’s text, Literacy and Racial Justice: The Politics of Learning after Brown v. Board of Education.  I won’t go into detail here and spoil what I say in the inaugural issue of Literacy in Composition Studies next month.  I will just say that I have always found it interesting that there has been no real, vociferous debate around one of Prendergast’s most critical contributions, her chapter on Shirley Brice Heath’s Ways with Words, chapter three.  After that chapter, given Prendergast’s racial analyses, some of this stuff we talk about in composition-rhetoric studies should just be a WRAP!

Part of the obscurity around Prendergast’s challenge to Heath’s work comes from the fact that few compositionists really know educational histories of race, connect that history to their current work, or know the history of race across a K-16 spectrum.  Heath just gets relegated to the K-12 scrapheap, seen as work that is intellectually beneath composition rhetoric. On the flip side, educational scholars in k-12 realms do not respect composition studies as work with rigorous methodologies, social science lenses, or publication standards.  Mix into that cauldron, a legion of white composition scholars who write about race in the most liberalist and anti-critical ways and you got one helluva eclipse-stew on Prendergast’s chapter three.  If we knew any better, we would know that Heath’s Ways with Words helped launch the disciplinary norms we deploy to talk about multiple languages and students of color in post-Brown schools that see large numbers of students of color today.  And if we knew any better, we would see that those disciplinary norms have, at their root, a very conscious and deliberate erasure of analyses of race.

chain gang

This photo depicts a chain gang near Asheville, NC in 1915 (see NC Office of Archives and History in Raleigh, NC). Following Reconstruction into the 1950s, chain gangs were used to re-organize slave labor: black men like those pictured here essentially built and maintained the public roads and highways of the South. It was only when road building was more mechanized that this system of neo-slavery subsided.

My focus on Gwaltney here is not coincidental. He conducted his study at almost the exact time Heath did hers— publication dates are also very close to one another.   As a refresher, Heath’s linguistic ethnography broke new ground in how it documented the literacy practices of a working class black community and a working class white community in 1960s/1970s South Carolina; both communities, according to Heath, had the same conflicts with the middle-class schools, thus, positioning these social clashes with school as a cultural clash.   But all of this clashing in school together was the result of desegregation and the Civil Rights Movement, which Heath’s book leaves unaddressed, precisely the thing that Prendergast takes up.  This notion of a culture clash also, non-coincidentally, does very little to take up the  histories of structural racism that impede white communities’ ability to respect communities of color who, left at the bottom, do not need to be seen, heard, or taken seriously.  Prendergast reminds you that Heath quoted people like a white working class male who said he only went to college when the town’s mill (where he worked) began hiring blacks because “when the niggers (pause), uh, the blacks, you know, started comin’ in, I knew that wasn’t for me.  I wasn’t ever gonna work for no nigger….”  Obviously, his clash ain’t with the white middle class folk… and it don’t sound like his clash is about “culture” either.  So here we have a canon on the cultural and social meanings of literacy that precludes a real conversation about race, all while acting like it is having just that kind of conversation… nuthin like talkin outta both sides of your mouth.

And so, now, to my last point.  I must admit that I almost fell outta my chair when I read Prendergast’s dissection of Heath’sWays with Words. Prendergast goes to the library that has archived Heath’s notes from her study and reads that stuff (hard-core right there!). Of course, she finds a gem: a letter Heath wrote to a colleague/respondent dated September 13, 1975 about a conversation with a black father who wasn’t too impressed with the research that Heath was doing. According to Heath’s notes/letter, the man told her: “I’ve heard my wife say you study me and other people, and I want to know how you do it and why… I also want to know why you care so much about my wife and kids… there is this black-white thing.  I am what I am and you are what you are.”  Heath decided that those last lines were about the “am-ness” of two human beings and that this was a conversation about gender.  Now see, I like to read these lines aloud to black folk, especially those who call themselves ordinary— drylongso— black folk. I have never found one who shares Heath’s interpretation or who regards such “researchers” as smart people (but I’ll keep looking for the naysayers.)  Here is where I insert Gwaltney back again.  I hear this man telling Heath EXACTLY what Gwaltney’s participants openly discussed and critiqued about academics and their research on Race and Black Folk:  “I think this… is just another way to call me a nigger.”   I am with Prendergast on this one: we HAVE to take these omissions seriously.  Despite self-celebratory claims suggesting otherwise, it looks like many of us have offered up pedagogical and language theories inside of and into a racial vacuum.

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