“I don’t know any black woman that could go out here and make a sex tape and get a cupcake line, a clothing line, a perfume line, and be touted around on the arm of an athlete like this is my girl, cuz you know when we do that kind of stuff we called Supahead… I’m [not] put on a pedestal like the other women.” ~Sherri Shepherd
These were the words spoken by Sherri Shepherd on a panel discussing black men and women’s relationships. I was struck by the relevance and accuracy of the sentiment but also by her ability to push this reality much farther than how we usually like to see and talk about such issues: as “double standards.” This notion of “double standards” just doesn’t go far enough and stops incredibly short of any real analysis. I prefer bell hooks’s terminology: “imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy”— a totalizing and interlocking system. Strange as it may seem, there was something, or rather someone, in particular who triggered my memory of Sherri Shepherd’s words and my general disdain for every everyday discourse that names social violence on black women as “double standards”: that person is Lauryn Hill.
Quite frankly, with the exception of my classrooms that enroll large numbers of young black women, most of what I hear black folk— men and women alike— discuss in relation to Lauryn Hill is her mental and emotional collapse after her album, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. Between the emotional abuse she has obviously endured from her partner, the inability to perform with her original music and hence the bands she deploys, the legal tax issues she faces, and the allegations of mental breakdown and drug use, she gets dissed all around. And yet, every time I see Bobby Brown or Q-Tip, I suspect the crackpipe is not far away. In the words of Rick James, cocaine is a helluva drug! I always (secretly, I admit) wonder when Busta Rhymes is going to leave the steroids alone because something just ain’t lookin right (I say the same about L.L. Cool J and Botox). Wesley Snipes still ain’t figured out what taxes are. I am also amazed by the way we enshrine Eazy-E without nary a word that the brotha died of AIDS with seven children from six different women. Needless to say, that brotha was clearly into some shit (not unlike the many, many men Supahead so fabulously chronicled for us). The folk who are so curiously silent on these issues are the same fools who diss Lauryn. Double standards? Naw. There’s more than just that going on here.
Like what I recently said about Aja Monet, Lauryn Hill gets love from my students every semester. I don’t even have to bring her name up— they will do the work. I am noticing this more now as I close out a semester of teaching black women’s rhetoric. I see my students’ embrace of Lauryn Hill as a way they combat a system intent on stealing a black woman’s light, a system that they too are up against.
I am confident today that my students have a substantial, new body of knowledge on black women’s history, that they even know some rhetorical theory as well as black feminist thought. But what I am most impressed with is the way they fight for black women’s lives: they fight to let. black. women. live. That’s what I see them doing with Lauryn Hill against an “imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy” that intends to obliterate her. I stand with my students on this one: much love to you, Lauryn!
Last week in class, we finished unit six. In that unit, I asked students to hear, see, and draw a line of connection between black women in 1970s Black Power Struggles, Black Arts Movement, and contemporary spoken word artists. I received an email one night from one of my beloved students, Karina, who asked that I include what she saw as one of Aja Monet’s most impactful poem, “Is That All You Got?,” in the list of Monet poems that I offered. Here is that poem:
I was actually introduced to Aja Monet, the youngest national poetry slam winner, through my students, not through New York City’s poetry events. I can honestly say that I have never had a class of young people where someone did not know Monet’s work and this spans quite a few years of my teaching now. I am only now realizing that Aja Monet ‘s words and visions visit my classroom in each semester that I teach undergraduates. It speaks to me about what Monet is speaking to these young black men and women. In fact, Karina’s one request as a high school graduation gift was Monet’s book of poetry, a book I have now added to my own shelves. There are certainly a set of go-to essays and other texts that re-circulate back into my classroom and I know now to add Monet’s poetry to this set.
I have listened to this poem over and over this weekend, hoping to hear my students better. Mainly what I hear now is that they have been through some things, are looking back on it, and are seeing just how and why they are going to make it through because as Monet puts it: “Is that all you got? What the f**k is you broken for?” It’s a reminder that I am also thankful for.
In my first academic job, I arrived after a 2-3 year commission of faculty who evaluated that university’s core/ liberal arts curriculum. That commission wrote a report detailing what the challenges were. The administration reflected on that report for another year. I was later assigned to a new committee that would discuss the commission’s report. That took another two years. When I left that committee and university, a new committee was designed to come up with a report that outlined a plan on what to do next. 5 years of students graduated and nothing changed; it looked like the next five years would promise more of the same.
I noticed some strange stuff in my first year of department meetings when I was an assistant professor. I once had a question about students’ progress in the program (which was a certification program) so I saw my question as vital and requiring an answer… as in, ASAP. It was a two-hour meeting with lots of discussion but I was confused by the end and said as much. I had class the next day and needed to tell my students something and needed to ACT on a decision. So at the end of the meeting, I asked: what did we decide here? The answer was this: that we need to keep talking about this. In the three years that I was there, I never got any answer to that question; we just kept talking. I stopped asking and got annoyed with even listening since the circuitous, nit-picky-do-nothing-and-go-nowhere dialogues just gave me pounding headaches. I designed my own process with my students in my classes, processes that the department could have learned from and adopted had folk not spent their time trying to standardize a curriculum that couldn’t work. When I realized there was no way to do real or important work in that space with infrastructural support– whether it was from colleagues, the chair, or upper levels of academic administration/management— I left. It was a good call on my part too; with no sense of urgency or political vision, the department has all but folded now.
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I still remain stunned by the unwillingness of faculty to fight, to see education as a way to critically intervene in the world, to think politically about what literacy and learning mean in the 21st century, or to actually engage polemics and research on higher education and learning. It’s frightening, especially since the current educational system we are in is one predicated on our demise as teachers.
This kind of culture in the academy was just not something I could get used to:
The kind of culture that says everything is okay and, if not, we can just ignore everything, make gradual changes, or just talk for a decade (I mean this literally) about what we will do. There’s a kind of white bourgeois privilege here that does not imagine there is an urgency or danger to other people’s livelihood and progress when all you do is talk and stall. I am reminded of that infamous text that seems to populate all composition textbooks: Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” Bourgeois “progressives” are still all about waiting while other people suffer.
The kind of culture that says let’s just find a way to co-exist with the existing social forces, even if we do not want to. I hear this kind of selling-out from many white liberals in relation to assessment and standardization in schools today. I find it utterly irresponsible…and stupid. What exactly do we think black communities have been doing all along since Brown v. Board of Education? We have been making our peace with a system that promised improvement but gave very little, if any, for a longlong time now. Making peace with the way things are could only be a perspective that comes from white privilege; that’s the only perspective that could see ACCOMMODATION as something new… or viable.
I am thinking about these things because I was recently on another committee to evaluate the core. As one assignment, we had to write about what we think students should be doing/learning in Core/Liberal Arts in the 21st century. I liked the homework assignment and plan to move forward on my ideas in my next classes:
Take on current information about new global markets and the connections to 21st century imperialism
Speak to and locate racial oppression in a Post-Katrina nation-state
Speak to and locate male dominance in new Benevolent Patriarchy (women are outnumbering male college students more and more, but this is not bringing us any closer to gender equality in higher education… can we talk about this?)
Craft new rhetorical mobility and design competence in a multi-media and digital universe
Develop new worker consciousness in current modes of capitalist production (are we going to keep ignoring our students’ increasing debt, students’ increasing inability to find a job or one that can pay off those debts, and the corporatization of professions that makes professional jobs today look more like factory assembly lines?)
Reframe the standardized education students have received (this is the most tested and standardized group of students in the world and ever in history) and work toward counter-standardization as an educational and human right
Internalize and apply real tools for cross-racial dialogue and alliance in a multiracial/multilingual world
Make daily decisions about the planet with an eco-consciousness that will not destroy the environment we take for granted (it’s not an option to just ignore this)
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Of course, right-leaning white liberals will accuse me of indoctrination but this will be what my curriculum for first year writing does and interrogates in the future anyway. I am not looking for student agreement here, just engagement, something I think I am pretty good at. I suspect that, once again, the curriculum and strategies that I devise will be ignored while faculty sit on more commissions and committees, talking about and doing nothing. I’ve seen how it goes down.
Obviously, I think these nine points are the role of a liberal arts curriculum, work that I think traditional disciplinary structures do not even come close to. We keep talking about the theories of Freud, classical literature, Greek empires, blahblahblah that students need to know and the students keep asking us about their debt, about the world in which they live, about their livelihood and living wage, about the realities of digital design in their lives. My definition of a liberal arts/core curriculum has nothing to do with the disciplines and their canonical texts/ideas at all. A liberal arts/core curriculum is the framework for the intellectual culture of a college… it is a deep, meaningful, intellectual engagement with ideas and contemporary social issues, not a set of isolated skills to measure.
What I am left with now is not so much about student identities or ideas about what students need to do. I am thinking more about faculty identities and what faculty need to do. As faculty, we need to ask ourselves: What should Core/Liberal Arts FACULTY be doing in the 21st century? We will need to fight for exactly the kind of intellectual and political culture that I am describing here … an intellectual and political culture diametrically opposed to our current corporate models of higher education. At best, we faculty of the PMC have been D students in achieving this.
Imagine that you are a black woman who had a full-day, grueling job interview and then returned to your hotel room to speak to your partner until 1am in the morning, though you needed to return to the interview at 8am the next morning. In the course of the day, you did not encounter any other black person so you know that taking this job will be more than a notion. Your partner, a black man, is in distress via work-related issues (since his job looks similar) and so that is all that you talk about because, after all, this is what it means to truly support someone. However, never once, not even in the weeks and months later, did he ask you what happened at that interview (and clearly a lot happened since the interview lasted for more than 15 hours). As a black female professional/academic, this scenario is more common than not and approximates the kinds of conversations I routinely have with many girlfriends— married, dating, looking, AND single-by-design. And while this example is certainly from a now bygone and regrettable past, it ain’t that past as to represent some kind of different century when women were supposed to just be barefoot and pregnant… and yet, you would think so.
After Tyler Perry dropped yet another movie about purposeless/pathetic/pathologized black women, I spent my last week talking to many black female students about their anxiety that their professional success will make them undesirable to black men, the message they receive everywhere around them (the weeks after a Tyler Perry movie are always a rollercoaster ride in my office with young black women who want to talk about relationships). Even Tyrese, RayJay, and Keith Sweat give dumb, misogynistic advice in new relationship books targeting black women now. To quote Keith Sweat himself: sumthin sumthin just ain’t right. With Steve Harvey’s banal relationship books topping numerous bestseller lists (and considered one of the top 10 bestselling relationship books of all times) followed by his movie that grossed 28 million dollars in its first week, there is obviously some real big money in black men telling black women what to do. I usually ignore this stuff because it is just so simple and played-out but I end up chiming in, if only to shift the direction of the conversation when I am talking to young black women.
Now let’s imagine another scenario. A black woman’s partner disappears for 6-8 weeks to focus on his own project but expects that she’ll be there waiting when he returns. The culture of patriarchy nurtures men to live this way as stoic, individual prototypical Lone Rangers who keep to themselves, presumably able to move through the world all alone and on their own, so this scenario should not seem so strange. On the rare occasion when the partner checks in (maybe between coffee stops and drinks at the bar), she is expected to listen and give support. Nevertheless, he never once gives any such support to her though her own project is just as critical during this 6-8 week period. Though there were some occasions when she was supported (like, maybe, in the very beginning), those occasions are not in the majority because, after all, as a black woman, she is regarded as someone made of Teflon. As such, her person isn’t seen as needing the same kind of care, attention, or defense as a non-black woman (or in more pessimistic terms, black women are simply not as valued as white women or other non-black/women of color so are not seen as deserving of care). It’s not an understatement to say that many of us feel like we are supporting and holding up the world and never getting that back in return from anyone anywhere. Self-help books do get some of it right though: folk (family, friends, partners) will take and take and take and give almost nothing, but ONLY if you let them. These texts, however, offer no critical social-help. The kind of support that women need in these new work-worlds that look unlike what women have ever entered in such large numbers is simply not forthcoming from many male partners at home. Unlike what you get in mainstream discourse, black women are not trippin’ because we make more money than black men, because there is no one to date, or because we have terminal degrees with extra letters behind our names now (see what I have to say about what it is like to be a black woman in graduate school and you will really understand that we do NOT experience ourselves as being on top of the world). You have to wonder how and why white mainstream pundits and black male public figures so frequently talk this way about black women. We can STOP talking now about how to “find a good man,” the mantra you hear ad nauseum. This notion of “finding a good black man” sticks too closely to the good man/bad man binary under patriarchy (a good man is, after all, just a benevolent patriarch). We need to instead START talking about building a partnership with a LIBERATED MAN (yes, they exist), which is what I think Jill Scott has in mind here:
These very public (and lucrative) discussions about cultivating black professional women to find black male partners is just a cover-up for the real issues: what will happen to partnering in a patriarchal system when the economic world no longer gives ANY man the sole capacity to be bread-winners (poor black men have always faced this)?Will we re-script maleness or just blame this newest lack of breadwinning on women/feminism rather than on new modes of capitalism? Will femaleness get re-scripted or will we go to work, come home, and then act as if we are still stay-at-home moms so that patriarchy can look in tact?
Old, patriarchal models won’t serve working women well who need the same emotional support that men have always been able to count on from women (see the above examples). The crisis of patriarchy under new capitalism means white supremacy punishes black women the most by labeling us as most undesirable or irrational (or just such robust workers/cotton-pickers that we won’t need anyone or anything). These exaggerated levels of attention that get paid to professional black women who are “unable” to “find” “good, black men” COULD actually point us in the direction of a new rupture of patriarchy if we see that, at root, that is really what we are talking about. Black women’s discourses can lead the way here just as much as when black women became the first and only women to openly and publicly critique male physical and sexual abuse via the Blues— a historical fact that I see as the single-most important contribution of Angela Davis’s book, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism. The fact of the matter is that the model of male breadwinner/patriarch and stay-at-home wife (or the almost stay-at-home wife with a man who earns twice as much and who, therefore, has the career/needs that take precedence) is no longer viable for anyone except a very small 5% of the wealthy, elite. That was never viable for working-class black people anyway but now a more multi-hued middle class is getting to experience what po’ black folk have always faced, hence, all this attention. And in true American fashion, the nation will work out its psychoses on black bodies. Unless you are with a trust-fund baby or a Wall Street crook, you gon be workin in the 21st century. Old notions of domesticity just won’t cut it, not even for white male patriarchs. I suspect black women will be the ones to take on this charge of re-framing how we understand these old notions though we won’t be acknowledged as such… right now, that is certainly what my office hours are looking and sounding like.
Quite frankly, with the exception of my classrooms that enroll large numbers of young black women, most of what I hear black folk— men and women alike— discuss in relation to Lauryn Hill is her mental and emotional collapse after her album, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. Between the emotional abuse she has obviously endured from her partner, the inability to perform with her original music and hence the bands she deploys, the legal tax issues she faces, and the allegations of mental breakdown and drug use, she gets dissed all around. And yet, every time I see Bobby Brown or Q-Tip, I suspect the crackpipe is not far away. In the words of Rick James, cocaine is a helluva drug! I always (secretly, I admit) wonder when Busta Rhymes is going to leave the steroids alone because something just ain’t lookin right (I say the same about L.L. Cool J and Botox). Wesley Snipes still ain’t figured out what taxes are. I am also amazed by the way we enshrine Eazy-E without nary a word that the brotha died of AIDS with seven children from six different women. Needless to say, that brotha was clearly into some shit (not unlike the many, many men Supahead so fabulously chronicled for us). The folk who are so curiously silent on these issues are the same fools who diss Lauryn. Double standards? Naw. There’s more than just that going on here.
