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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Miranda’s Daughters & Consumer Culture

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The last time that I taught African American Women’s Rhetorics, I received a thank you letter from a black female student at the end of the term.  I am always deeply touched when I receive such letters, and always from students of color, who I don’t think always give themselves enough credit for the deep intellectual work they do themselves and want to, instead, credit the teacher.

This letter, though, was a bit intriguing.  In it, the young woman thanked me for getting her to love reading and writing again: the last time she was so engaged was when she was reading and then mimicking in her writing, the Twilight series.  Now, I consider myself someone well-versed in popular culture, or rather in the context of new capitalism today in its creation of what should be more aptly called: mass consumer culture.  Nonetheless, I just hadn’t paid any attention to this series at all.  I’m not sure what my fog was about since the reminders, ads, and paraphernalia are everywhere.  This past summer I decided that I needed to really hear what it was that my student was saying to me so I watched the entire series.  I am so thankful that I had my sister-friend and professor at Spelman, Michelle, one of the fiercest thinkers I know, who really helped me deal with how traumatized I (still) am by this series.  Imagine my surprise when I learned that this series was about…drumroll… vampires!  And white vampires, at that, in white cake make-up so that they can look even whiter within uber-wealthy elite circles, aesthetically enamored by white canons of art. Meanwhile, a community of Indigenous folk are animals/wolves living in poverty and out in the wild who cannot fully control their primal urges.  At the center of this foolishness is a young, sweet, innocent white virgin who everyone loves, adores, protects, and builds their life around to the point where she has no authority or personality (except for pained, cross-eyed, seemingly-constipation-induced, facial expressions… the acting is just horrible!)  I watched the series almost frozen… and deeply impacted by how much work still needs to be done when young black women are coerced into believing that any part of this story, a story that my student is/was literally reading and writing into her own life, will ever represent their own social circumstances or life opportunities as black women.  I have heard many activists argue that we need to stop criticizing young women for consuming popular culture like this because we have to meet these young women where they are.  I agree.  Of course, we need to meet them where they are (and where else would we meet them anyway: the moon?) but we need some analysis to comprehend these locations.

Of course, I go straight back to Wynter’s essay, “Beyond Miranda’s Meanings,” that I have already talked about here.  It seems that the mass consumer culture that is targeting youth has simply recreated Prospero, Caliban, and Miranda where the presence of black women is again in absence.  Wynter’s essay takes Shakespeare’s play, The Tempest, and shows how Miranda, the only woman in the New World/Island is a “mode of physiognomic being” that gets canonized as the only “rational object of desire” and, therefore, the “genitrix of a superior mode of human life.”  In sum, she argues that being a black feminist/womanist means contending with this mode in a way that must rewrite the entire episteme.  Black women’s absence is, thus, always “an ontological absence… central to the… secularizing behaviour-regulatory narrative schema… by which the peoples of Western Europe legitimized their global expansion as well as their expropriation/marginalization of all the other population-groups of the globe.”  I can’t think of a more relevant context for Wynter’s essay, despite post-modernist pundits that would suggest such categories are no longer entrenched (Have they not watched this movie?) than this movie/series my student is so compelled by.  It becomes even more horror-laden when you think that Twilight has its adult-counterpart in the mega-million-selling sensation, the Fifty Shades series, whose story almost mimics the plot of Twilight.  Obviously, it ain’t just kids who like Miranda’s saga and for whom mass consumer culture continually reproduces her, what Wynter more aptly calls a “regime of truth.”  This seems directly related to what Wynter called the “situational frame of reference of both Western-European and Euroamerican women writers,” a frame that she contends even critical theorists like Irigaray did not fully escape.

From the time I first read  “Beyond Miranda’s Meanings,” I have been drawn to Wynter’s notion of what it means to shift or mutate an age/epoch/episteme into another, a shift she doesn’t feel most bourgeois African American feminists actually achieve (often mimicking or refiguring “Miranda” and other forms of empire).  Her 2000 Interview with David Scott in Small Axe (Volume 8) also challenges how I think about popular culture/mass consumer culture.  In the interview, she argues that an economic/bio-economic conception of the human mandates that capitalism currently functions as the only mode of production for our everyday expressions (see page 160). Her argument convinces me that what we often do theoretically and academically in scholarship about mass consumer culture reifies these bio-economic conceptions.  There seems an undeniable willingness to engage scholarship itself as a commodity for writing/researching about grossly commodified, popular culture. I do follow popular culture and think it is critical to understand how oppression and domination look and get maintained.  However, Cedric Robinson‘s warning is one I can’t ever forget: black intellectual work always gets commodified, as easily and readily as the work of any rapper, singer, dancer, actor/actress.   Investigating popular culture in a way that shifts our current bio-economic overdetermination is a feat different from producing writing/research that will be widely consumable.  Maybe many of us have gotten to a place where we think the commodification and mass appeal of black intellectual thought are the same things as a deep, political and intellectual engagement with it.

As for my Twilight-loving student, I think/hope she will still hold on to what she walked  away with: a deep anger that Twilight was imposed on her will and imagination rather than the singular text of the semester that really rattled her and got her to love to read and write… Ida B. Wells’s The Red Record.  In other words, I hope she/we will move beyond Miranda’s meanings and I hope she/we can move closer towards that kind of epistemic shift that Wynter always describes.

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Radical Feminists of Color & Composition Studies: Contradiction in Terms?

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I once received a very curious letter of recommendation when I chaired a search committee for a writing program.  The letter was written by a prominent white female scholar in my field, often praised and respected for her progressive feminist scholarship and perspectives on race, class, gender, sexuality, oppression, et al.  The letter was written for one of her white male graduate students.  This particular composition-rhetoric scholar took it upon herself to offer a lens into the caliber of his teaching (his dissertation involved literary theory so the scholar had not, in fact, seen any of his scholarship, only his teaching, as she was the teacher of record for his required teaching practicum in the Ph.D. program).  The letter was pretty much the standard, praise-full candidate letter but then she switched it up: she began comparing this man’s teaching to the “great Hollywood movies on teaching” (yes, this is an exact quote that I have never been able to get out of my head) like Freedom Writers.  She compared his ability to get students excited by traditional lectures to what Michelle Pfifer’s character does in the “great movie,” Dangerous Minds.  And she described these movies and this man’s teaching with deep awe and admiration.  Now everybody who I know/read who sees themselves connected to critical literacy/radical pedagogy has criticized these movies for their depiction of white women as the saviors of the savage, natives in the urban schools of the big, bad, dark, ghetto jungles.  Everybody…. I…. Know.  And yet, somehow, this woman, someone considered a progressive feminist rhetorician, missed the whole damn message.  I mean, really?   Even  Mad Tv gets this:

Now I don’t mean to suggest that the field has only produced and/or rewarded the kind of white feminist scholar who I have described.  She is not the stand-in for all, for sure, thank goodness.  Nonetheless, I still got some questions.

This memory was triggered for me this week while I was attending the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA).  As it so happens, I was really drawn this year to black and Latina women who talked about the paths they have taken as scholars/activists/intellectuals/feminists.  I was also really drawn by these women because they had once been connected to my own field, a field which none of these women remain linked with, a field in which I get letters like the one I described above from someone widely respected as a “feminist.”

My ears first perked up when Beverly Guy-Sheftall began to describe that she started her career the same way I had: teaching remedial English/writing classes, in her case, at Spelman.  Though I was not at an HBCU like Guy-Sheftall, my experience at an urban college with classrooms 100% black and Latino/a, more than 25 years later from Guy-Sheftall’s start, was no different than what she described: an unyielding white, male, racist, patriarchal curriculum and structure.  She went on to describe how she and students organized the takeover and kidnapping of trustees until they agreed to elect, for the first time ever, a black woman as president of Spelman; she told this story alongside tales of Toni Cade Bambara teaching black women’s literature courses in her home, non-credit-bearing, because the university would not allow Bambara to teach such courses.

Later in the conference, I was stunned even further to hear that both Ruth Zambrana and Bonnie Thornton Dill had worked as open admissions administrators at the City University of New York (CUNY). For all that I have read and heard about open admissions and “remedial education” at CUNY, I have never heard the names of the black and Latina women who made those spaces livable for the first large wave of black and Latino/a students to get college degrees in New York at universities that never really wanted them there.  Never!  And yet, here they were right here, telling their stories.  I had not known any of these histories of Guy-Sheftall, Zambrana, or Thornton, but more strikingly, it reminded me of something I DID already know: that the field of composition had written the history of open admissions, “remedial”/basic writing of the 1970s without a SINGLE utterance of the work of black and Latina women/radical feminists of color.  And these women were, of course, there all along, women who, as far as I am concerned, did not get taken along and/or did not want to be as the field moved “forward.”

At the conference, I had a conversation with a woman who I had never met who said that she feels more energized and politically engaged at NWSA, given her focus on issues of social oppression and repression, than she does at the major composition conference that we both attend.  I agreed with her and, in fact, told a good friend today the same thing, inspiring me to write this post, after I described to him the solidarity I felt at NWSA.  Like I already said, what seems most relevant for me now is that none of these women whose stories I have chronicled here stayed connected to the field.  I can’t say for sure at this juncture whether or not my fate will be the same.

It was Guy-Sheftall who really took my breath away at the conference.  At the close of her presentation, she described herself as someone who, if she were to die tomorrow, has done exactly the kind of work she wanted to do and lived exactly the kind of life she wanted to live: one that was never dictated by the name of the school she taught at, her salary, or her reputation, but by the work she could do within the terms of her own self-definition as a radical black feminist.  She challenged the audience of mostly women of color in that room to see to it that they did the same.  I was so inspired by that statement that I gave it its own category here… I intend to live my life, both on and off campus, in the same way.

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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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