Teaching Black Women’s Rhetoric: (Re)Hearing Feminist Discourse

Posted on by

It only occurred to me late in the semester that I could make a youtube channel with my current course, African American women’s rhetoric (it is called BlackWomynRhetProjct Channel).  I have organized the class chronologically so in some ways, this new epiphany could only come now.  I guess that will be my excuse because, really, I should have been doing this all along.  The website is good to archive the daily reading and writing assignments, but the channel lets me create a much richer archive of materials for students to use as both reference and supplement.

As soon as we left the early Civil Rights Movement and entered the 1970s, the videos and documentaries of historical footage as well as current speeches and lectures given by black women increased 100-fold.

So my class now begins to draw more and more from multimedia sources rather than just print sources.  This is much bigger than whether or not we have students read digital texts or print texts in our classes, a simplistic conversation that many teachers seem to think is some kind of hallmark of new, critical-digital pedagogies.  My class is not about reading for reading’s sake, but about (re)hearing black women by examining their multiple rhetrics.  If the text is online, good; if it’s in print, that’ll work too.  Who cares?  My job is to make multiple texts accessible to my working class undergraduate students in financially accessible ways.  The fact remains that when you are dealing with historical black women, YOU READ WHATEVER YOU CAN FIND WHEREVER YOU CAN FIND IT!  Who publishes and who gets a voice is still controlled by a white dominant culture, whether that be digital or print, so you can still count on black women not being equally or respectfully represented in any space.

But that does bring me to youtube, where, arguably, I spend too much of my time.  Let’s face it: by 2010, the amount of videos being uploaded to youtube was the equivalent of 180,000 feature-length movies per week.  In less than a week, youtube generates more video content than Hollywood has done in its entire lifetime.  Now I won’t act like that is cause for celebration; it just means I have some greater odds to find some black women on youtube than in Hollywood (which won’t require an avalanche of material for that comparative statement to be true).  I have seen more than my fair share of videos on youtube of black men who pontificate that black women are just copying white women, that white feminism has corrupted black feminist souls and minds with arbitrary discussions of patriarchy, that black women are not as worthy of attention/love/partnership as other more domesticated women of color (who are, of course, lighter in hue), that black women emasculate black men in the ways they treat the fathers of their children, that black women are actually white men in disguise when they boss black men around too much, that black women can be casually/publicly named bitches and hoes (words used as regularly by online “talk show” hosts as rappers).  I could go on and on with these examples.  I stopped reading video comments a long time ago so that I wouldn’t be continually insulted by outright, deliberate misogynistic slurs (i.e., which songs compliment “bedroom mixes” and other sexual encounters). Needless to say, if I just watched youtube, I would think that most black men who talk about black women sound ABSOLUTELY NO different than white-racist Daniel Moynhan who, in his 1965 Moynihan Report, blamed all economic “failures” of black communities on the nature of overly-aggressive black women.  I place these kinda folk in a special youtube category: DAMN FOOLS WITH A VIDEO CAMERA…UPLOADED.  I mean, really, the kind of stuff these folk say makes me wonder if they really get that people can hear them?

So yeah you hafta wade though some realllll dumb bullshit on youtube (I just don’t have a more polite way to say that, sorry). But then… yes, but then…. you can find the footage from the documentary on Shirley Chisholm that got lost on the chopping block, that one sentence that means the world, like this jewel:

“I want history to remember me… as a black woman who lived in the 20th century and who dared to be herself!”

There is the ability to watch Barbara Jordan’s speech on Nixon’s impeachment, play it back over and over and over, for free, so you and your students can hear those pauses and annunciations that she makes, see the photo where Jordan is sitting right next to Shirley Chisholm, and marvel at how, at 2 o’clock in the morning, Jordan opens her statement to Congress by letting them know she has an unwavering commitment to the U.S. Constitution (and seems to know it better than anyone else in the room) even though she was never included in its original framing!!  Yesterday, in class, I could hear my students take on the rhythmic pronunciation patterns, pauses, and accents on words like SUS-PEC-TED in their own language to talk about Jordan’s language.  And as a class, we could all hear how Jordan takes the words of the Constitution and almost takes you to church (her father is a minister so this is not simply a misapplied, figurative expression here but a description of the format in which Jordan recites text to an audience) while, at the same time, offers a closing statement in what feels like the kind of trial where you’d hope Jordan was the  lawyer on YOUR side (Jordan is a lawyer so this is not an accident either though these hearings are not a trial.)

Today, I am watching and selecting lectures by and documentaries about  Angela Davis (there isn’t much available on youtube spanning her 1990s lectures but I suspect that will change soon enough.)  This gives me the chance to move students’ images of Davis past her iconic figure in the 70s with an Afro, mouth always wide open, on the FBI’s Most Wanted List and show her as a full intellectual-activist, now and back then.  I have just finished the second part of her lecture (click here for first part) at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in downtown Atlanta on March 24, 2009 for the keynote address of Emory University’s Women’s History Month.

What I am struck by at this moment is the importance of (re)hearing feminist discourse because, in this second part of the video, Davis talks about the ways in which we must challenge many of Obama’s policies.  What strikes me  here is how differently she does this, while still maintaining a kind of class/imperialism analysis.   Davis mobilizes her critiques without the stain of the anti-black subtext that I feel and hear from the White Left/non-Black Left, folk who I have never seen or heard think deeply about the racial apartheid in which we live and that they benefit from.  I just don’t trust them when they launch their mouth-grenades on black folk and neither should anyone else.   Davis also mobilizes her critiques without the kind of ego-driven, look-at-me-look-at-me, spotlight-mongering tendencies of people like Cornel West and Tavis Smiley, though she is clearly as iconic and famous as they are.  While I have agreed with many of these critiques from these camps, there has always been something amiss for me, a real kind of disrespect that cannot be removed from the fact that Obama is a black man, just in the way that these activists frame their rhetoric.  Davis reminds just how differently Black Feminist Rhetoric operates and why her critique is one that I can hear and see as transformative. I need to make sure that I hear this kind of Black Feminist Rhetoric more— I especially now see the ways youtube can drown out the other voices once I find the right spaces where black women are being heard.

Related posts:

No related posts.

“How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against Democracy”

Posted on by

The National Conference for Media Reform just closed the first day of its events.  Out of money, time, and energy, I, unfortunately, could not attend so I have especially appreciated the conversations Juan Gonzalez and Amy Goodman are broadcasting at DemocracyNow.org where they talk with Robert McChesney on his new book, Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against Democracy (with links to the first chapter on the website). The discussion opens with words from the media activist, Aaron Swartz, who tragically ended his own life this January after being demonized and surveilled after essentially e-liberating academic scholarship.

McChesney describes google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple as both monopolies and empires that have changed the internet at the levels of access, use, and application with no real separation from a national security state.  Along with Gonzalez, McChesney advocates for a political-economy of the media, going so far as to call AT&T, Verizon, comcast/cable a cartel that has essentially privatized the internet.  I tend to agree and wonder how and why we, as writing teachers, would ever frame technology in our classrooms and with students outside of these kinds of conversations.

The best take-away from the conference seems to be that communities and groups ARE taking the media into their own hands. And while the conference sounds like it is very hands-on, it is also minds-on, something that doesn’t always happen when we turn college writing classrooms into tech labs and demos.  Writing in the 21st century has to be about more than new tools and technologies. First and foremost, we need to talk about exactly what this conference seems to be reaching for: a cultural revolution.  This, to me, seems like exactly what black radical traditions have always been about anyway… we have never NOT been in need of cultural revolution.

Related posts:

No related posts.

“Because of Whiteness as Property”

Posted on by

MJCongratulations to Dr. Mary Caruso who defended her dissertation this week!  After losing her beloved mother/best friend just weeks before the final defense, she has now crossed the first major threshold in her life without her mother by her side… but her mother has certainly been looking over her!

Dr. Caruso’s dissertation asks us to think deeply about race when we imagine higher education today.  Using a private college that is 66% minority/underrepresented group and 44% white, she highlights the obvious path of an ever browner college student population and how those students understand and live race today.

The very language we use now does not seem to apply.  “Minority” has no meaning here: white students are still the largest population in Dr. Caruso’s study but students of color carry the majority.  The OCR (Office for Civil Rights) and U.S. Department of Education currently has a category, Minority Institution, for colleges like this that serve a majority of students of color via multiple groups (as opposed to one minority group) in its classifications of the many colleges enrolling significant numbers of “minority” students:

These designations have been important in the past because universities become eligible for grants, contracts, or benefit programs; however, even the OCR concedes that its listings are never complete or total.

Given the number of colleges already officially registered in these categories, it becomes baffling as to how and why scholars in composition and writing studies so steadily imagine its college student today as one who is white, middle class, and Christian.  The default position for many white researchers in the field is what Bonilla-Silva has taught us is color-blind racism: this means you simply do not mention students’ ethnic and racial backgrounds in your study at all, which ends up being just another whitening tactic.  When I asked Dr. Caruso why these white practices were still so dominant in the field, she brilliantly referenced Cheryl Harris’s work on whiteness as property and argued that as field/discipline, whiteness is its property.  This means that who the college student is imagined as, which professors get to write/publish about “today’s college students” and their learning and how, and what we offer to college students does not look that much different from white neighborhoods and banks who make sure people of color are not moving in or white professionals who have fled to suburbia’s zoned schools that keep students of color out.

As someone who has only taught a majority of college students of color by CHOICE and DESIGN, most of what I read in the field feels, at best, irrelevant.  It is an honor to get to work with people like Dr. Caruso who do more than chronicle the writings and teaching of students of color (as white researchers often do in voyeuristic, parasitic fashion like the spectacle Holloway describes).  Dr. Caruso knows to interrogate structural racism and institutional racism.   These supra-organizing structures are more than just the theme of first-year courses, as many in the field so stunningly and stupidly proclaim.  Structural racism and institutional racism are the stories that all of us in higher education live in, some of us just choose not to promote those stories. 

Related posts:

No related posts.

Black Bodies, Public Spectacle, and Narrative: Lessons from Karla Holloway

Posted on by
Henrietta Lacks

Henrietta Lacks

I recently listened to a talk given by Karla Holloway at Georgia Tech University.  In her talk, Holloway discusses Rebecca Skloot’s book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, now destined for HBO, courtesy of Oprah Winfrey and Alan Ball.  In her book trailer, Skloot herself confirms that it is the characters that basically make this science book readable and riveting to a general audience.  Henrietta Lacks, known by the medical/science industry as HeLa, was a poor black tobacco farmer whose cells were taken without her knowledge in 1951 for developing what we now know to be the vaccine for polio and the central tools for cloning, gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, and more.  Her cells have made billions of dollars but her family, then and now, do not have even health insurance.  The story is now widely known and was even dramatized/re-mixed by one of the Law and Order episodes.  What Skloot’s book does though is take us deep into the interior of this family, putting her, rightly so, in the direct line of Holloway’s fire.

In her talk, called “Henrietta Lacks and the Ethics of Privacy,” Holloway asks a compelling question: “which bodies have earned the public presumption of the right of privacy and which are available, reasonably available, for public scrutiny?”   Her own research shows that it is blacks and women who are most “readily rendered up for public storytelling,” what she calls a “persistent loss of privacy” where privacy is a “right” only granted to some audiences.  Holloway connects Skloot’s book to shows like the Real Housewives series and their exploitative representations of women, Maury Povich’s media publication of paternity cases, and Jerry Springer’s public consumption of community and family dysfunction.  She sees these media empires as the motivation and subtext for the ways in which Skloot invades and publicly showcases the lives, medical records, and stigmatized diseases of Henrietta Lacks and her family.  The most intimate medical histories are made public in this book, alongside a kind of voyeuristic unveiling of Deborah Lacks’s (the daughter) challenges with understanding medicine/science, the details of one of Lacks’s son and his time in prison, and even the amount of Deborah’s disability checks. Deborah Lacks actually dies before the manuscript was published so there clearly was none of what we qualitative researchers like to call “member checking” on the final product here.  Holloway reveals that she herself is uncomfortable in even summarizing Skloot’s book because it would mean participating in the very violation of this family’s history that the book exploits. What Holloway clearly shows here is a kind of parasitic relationship between a wealthy white journalist mining the stories and family histories of the Lacks and to brilliant fanfare given how well the book has sold and been awarded.  In sum, Henrietta Lacks’s body was “stripped” as a spectacle, first, in the name of science research, and now in the new telling that Skloot engages.   Holloway doesn’t hesitate to connect this history of violence and exploitation on black bodies in the name of academic research and public spectacle to James Marion Sims and his experiments on black slave women (Sims invented the speculum, made of bent spoons, to see inside of women’s uterus) and Katherine Stockett’s imagination of race in The Help.

What Holloway also compellingly shows me is that the focus on crafting a tantalizing, evocative narrative about black women’s bodies is rooted in historical white violence. A story is not good because it is widely read by and marketable to a general public already mesmerized by the likes of “Real Housewives,” Maury, Jerry Springer, The Help, and the general set of pathologies and dysfunction under capitalism.  This is not to say that black people do not themselves choose to offer their bodies and stories up for public spectacle, only that there is a history of white supremacy and consumption that makes this thinkable and desirable.

I am compelled by Holloway’s discussion as both a qualitative researcher and a writing teacher.  How you write, what you say, how you say it, who you talk about, and what you say/include are always deeply political and enmeshed in the ways that the culture tells you to consume black bodies. If the narratives we write as and about black women do not take as their first call of duty an unflinching critique of the unjust systems in which our bodies get defined and used, including the marketing and/or academic systems that tell/sell our stories, it seems to me that we are just being served up again as a James Marion Sims’s experiment.  Holloway has a stunning critique of these unjust systems and points us toward new directions in how we analyze, write, and talk about those systems too.

Related posts:

No related posts.