Separate But Equal. Debt Slaves.

“To separate them from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.” – Chief Justice Earl Warren in Brown v. Board of Education, 1954.

May 16, 2013 by Bob Livingston

On May 17, 1954 [59 years ago today], the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a unanimous decision, ruling in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka that racial segregation in public educational facilities was unConstitutional. The case was brought on behalf of Linda Brown, a black girl from Topeka, Kansas, who had been denied admission to her local elementary school on the basis of her skin color.

At the time, public facilities were segregated based on the justification that a 1896 Supreme Court ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson that “separate but equal” accommodations in railroad cars conformed to the 14^th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection. But in Brown’s case, the all-white school she wanted to attend was closer to her home and was far superior to the all-black school that other children of her skin color and from her neighborhood were required to attend. For more read here.

Today, students of color and poor whites in industrialized countries like the UK or the US still struggle for access to the right to an education but it’s not skin color that limits most anymore. The film DEBT SLAVES gives us a view into the problems college students are facing today. I wish I could an embed it here but trust me — you want to what this short but engaging film by young film-maker Makeda Mantock in association with the Guardian and the National Union of Students

In the US it is said that there remains a 60% drop out rate for high school and 40% drop-out for college. Students today, who are emerging adults, have “money on our mind” and cope with being “burdens on parents and the state.” There’s little time to focus on a higher education that could solve the needs of society and dreams of our societies — the next generation.  Who would have thought Dr. King’s Poor People’s Campaign would include college students?

Wonder if there will ever be a National Union of Students here in the “Untied” States of America (where separate but equal remains in higher ed in subtle and not-so-subtle ways)?

Please watch the short film DEBT SLAVES from the Intergenerational Foundation Young Film-makers’ short film competition.

What I love about this short film is its use of a personal poem (written and co-directed and co-produced by Havana Wellings-Longmore, performed excellently by several actors). It’s got a hip-hop and spoken word feel though in reality it’s scripted and performed with veracity. The flow and the passion is palpable and speaks to issues college and university students around the world are struggling for. #powertothepeople #educationforall

We just ended our spring semester at Baruch College-CUNY on Wednesday. After engaging and empowering 33 diverse emerging adults in my political sociology course to “go public” — to plan and launch public speech acts around issues they cared about for at least 20 people –  I noticed we never once considered working together as one group, as a collective on one collaborative act. That would have been social power in a social setting. In any event, the class tracked over 400 courageous acts throughout the semester. Many if not all now feel empowered to express their freedoms and practice their civil rights like never before.

Unionizing efforts may seem long gone in higher ed but I just bet eventually these emerging adults are gonna surprise us all. I’ll be waiting!

No More Debt Slaves!

Up with the Learning Revolution!!!

What If Higher Learning Was All About Remix? (On Foucault)

“People know what they do; frequently they know why they do what they do; but what they don’t know is what what they do does.”
― Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason

For about 4 years now, I’ve been experimenting with an assignment of remix in writing and other practices in my classroom where students emulate and replicate being consumers of their own productivity inside a given text or framework. I was in a course exploring how one can be empowered by ANY communication, verbal or non-verbal. It was not an academic training, thankfully, but it was a 10 month course with a weekend long training in Los Angeles once every two months and meetups with local participants here in NYC every week for, yes, 10 months. The meetups were practice sessions for completing homework between the five weekends. The course was called Partnership Explorations.

If anyone knows me personally, they know that for years I’ve said that academia beat my love of reading out of me. Perhaps it started earlier when being book smart and “talking like white people” made me assign a separation from my people to reading. I loved Shakespeare as a teen and wanted to read Freud by my mother thought it was taboo for some reason she never really explained back when I was 14.

By the time I reached the Partnership Explorations course in 2004, I was eight (8) years into being a tenure-track professor. I taught at NYU then and I hated reading books and never read anything outside of work needs. I loved the Internet and probably read as much online as some do from hardback novels. But I resisted reading. Always fell asleep. LOL. I read from cover to cover one book in maybe 10 years, a confession no self-respecting professor should probably make, but it’s true. [The book was The Funeral Planner by Lynn Isenberg, a womanist entreprenurial comedy based around my alma mater, University of Michigan. It was mature, sophisticated Chic Lit.]

So when the course instructor of Partnership Explorations said there were 5 recommended books I confronted my bias. I loved the course but reading books… Each of the weekends involved sharing individually to a group of 300 participants about what you were learning about yourself and your conversations with 20 people we were expected to track in our lives.

I read one book completely. Dire Mastery: Discipleship from Freud to Lacan and I read the first 50 pages of The Order of Things: The Archeology of the Human Sciences by Michel Foucault. Not unlike in the halls of academia, everyone in the course found the book confounding and many hated it. Though I had exposure to Foucault’s work on sexuality and liked it in grad school, this was different. I LOVED it. But still didn’t finish it. My habits were then not servicing any interest in reading more. But the preface of that book wOw-ed me.

Thus began an experiment with slow learning for me. Teaching students to replicate the preface of the book (found here: The Order of Things, 1970) in my African American music courses, my jazz course and my hip-hop courses. I have them do it early, the first weeks of class, to throw them into the world of their own thinking and sorting – reordering the mental maps of the subject they are about to encounter newly and in new ways hopefully.

In all the years since 2005 when I began assigning it, I have never written my own version but I have meticulously edited over 200 versions, I’d say. Often rewriting it for them to see other ways of thought,  to instigate and agitate their thinking (vs. thoughting). Yesterday I wrote my first draft. Today my second.

From my non-academic training,  I often challenge myself to do the work that I assign in my classes. It should be a requirement, I have learned from this practice.  It was my students’ experimenting this winter intercession that inspired me to share my own version. I’ve learned so much from my students in this and other assignments about the “sociology” of people’s experiences with black women in hip-hop. It’s like taking a sociological sampling of culture.  I wrote them earlier today: “It’s your mind each of your need to consider learning more about and intervening in the social constructs you simply inherited that were begun by people long dead and gone but that we transmit and carry on unthinkingly about race, gender and music-making. This is your opportunity to shine! Here is mine…”

Prof. G’s Foucault Remix (2nd draft):

This began as a riff off a intellectual rhymebook not well known, nor understood, inside the ivory towers of its social commons where even PhD students front in abstractions, wastin their breathe on what they “took away” from some book as if they were jookin on a basketball court (not!). It began out of a non-academic course I took on discourses and the partnership of language to uncover what’s unsaid and unknown. It arose out of the pain that shattered, as I read my participation in academia, all the familiar landmarks of my former thought — black and female thought, the thought that brands the video vixen of our hip-hop age and our corporate geography — breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which I as a black woman, a performer, and a scholar had become accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing racist and sexist things students carried with them, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse their age-old distinction between desire and ambition.

This riff quotes a ‘certain true mathematics encyclopedia’ contributed to by the fellowship of Bernice Johnson Reagon (If You Don’t Go, Don’t Hinder Me), Audre Lorde (The Uses of the Erotic read here in her own words), Tricia Rose (Black Noise and Hip-Hop Wars), Jeff Chang (Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: A History of a Hiphop Generation), Joe Schloss (Making Beats and Foundation), and many other oracle mathemeticians, an encyclopedia in which it is written that ‘humanity in hip-hop is divided into: (a) true to Rha Goddess not Gangsta, (b) masculine masoleum, (c) domesticated pornography sold to the white masses selling black behinds, (d) Sucka MCs, (e) a Blige(d) or Beyonce(d) , (f) Fiiiiiine!! (with an extreme nasal sound to intensify meaning and syncopation), (g) rhyme retreatists, (h) not included in the present classification = invisibilified, (i) dope fiends diggin in the crates, (j) bounce, bass, snap, house, (k) Is that your real hair cuz I can’t get a comb through it?, (l) whatevah, (m) just breaks on the Billboard charts that won’t last long if they hear its a female, (n) that from a long way off look like I got fries to go with dat shake and imma reach out and take that junk in the trunk public violence.

In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing black women, women and girls everywhere as well as conscious fathers, apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of a rhyme and a video screen, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of patriciarchal and post-colonial system of hegemonic thought, is the limitation of our my own thinking, the stark impossibility of ever being without that.

The source of my remix/sample is the “Preface” from Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things (1970).

“Knowledge is not for knowing: knowledge is for cutting.”
― Michel Foucault, The Foucault Reader

The Power of a Counter-Offer in Life

Over a year ago, I decided to “defect” from academia and various twists and turns in life have led me back to the classroom for a little while longer. This summer I am teaching two cultural anthropology courses at Baruch College-CUNY. Each class has 19 students.

Every semester and every class I teach always has a unique ecology based around some theme that often relates to empowering emerging adults to own their own greatness.

I have begun to think of ecologies more and more in this context because I am interested in the sustainability of ambitious thinking and adulthood.  Social ecology “is defined as the science of the relationships between human populations and communities and their environments.” The relationships between students/teachers in a classroom, the communities in which  an institution is based and the communities students and the teacher represent as well as the urban environment of Baruch College in NYC are but one example of a complex ecology. The classroom alone is one, too.  

College students today, no matter what level–first years or seniors–do not view themselves inside a context of greatness. They are rarely related to, each and every one of them, as great citizens or great human beings and for the most part, as a few of my students confirmed this last week of the summer session, they await permission from their professor to assert any identification with that greatness. It simply never occurs to the members of that ecology to express themselves, transact from one instance to another, as student-as-adult.

Faculty committees from CUNY to Cali universities can alter their curriculum all they want, but if there isn’t a significant shift in student-as-adult, rather this or that student functioning and interacting as an adult, there can never be a revolution in learning in higher education. Not to mention that the cultural or institutional environment itself cannot be altered by a few curricular changes in a course in this or that major or liberal arts requirement.

Without a sea change in the entire ecology, what I sometimes call “a sustainable classroom model” where the true resources are not the books but are the people and their social openness, transparency, connectedness and empowerment, there cannot be any real change or transformation of learning and thinking.

So I constantly engage my students individually and collectively in a conversation for greatness and one mechanism I use is implemented primarily at the end of the semester. It’s introduced during the first days of the course but it’s true power comes at the end of the course.

Based on the premise that there is always 100% of the course left, I require students to do complete work to pass the course. They must complete 100% of the homework no matter what by the end of the class. AND they have an option on all assignments to “counter-offer.”

A counter-offer requires a student to assess:

1. what would be of value in completing what’s expected of them for a specific assignment and
2. what would not undercut what I , as the professor, am expecting of them in a way that would not be belittling of their greatness as a student, adult, citizen and human being.

This requires engaging them in a conversation for what it means to be “adult” in their relationship with themselves, the professor and their work. It is not an easy conversation.

An ebook I wrote with a former cultural anthropology course in the Spring of 2010 asked students to write a short essay about “what mattered to you” and it took those 28 students 3-4 weeks to write a 300-600 word essay because no one ever asks them what they thought … about themselves and their lives. This in my mind confirms a hidden and unspoken phenomena in most college classrooms. We are perpetuating a reality of “academic” thought, rather than “real thinking” (yes,  I need to add scare quotes here because it has become an abstractions in most classrooms.

We ended up naming the ebook SPEAK!: The MisEducation of College Students but I remember during the production process, a student asked me what writing about what mattered to them had to do with Baruch College. A good Socratic method of teaching requires that we explore the questions, not find quick answers. I responded, “I don’t  know. What do you think?” Another student piped up, “We’re Baruch College!!” And so the process had truly begun. That ebook has been read by over 7000 times since May of 2010.  In the past is was customary for a student’s final work to be read by one person–the professor–and that it had no reach whatsoever including that feedback from their work was rarely returned to the student before they received their final grade. So in essence any feedback didn’t matter.

These students continue to impact people beyond their classroom and what mattered to them continues to inspire students and readers elsewhere long after they’ve left my classroom.

GETTING THE POINT

So here’s what the counter-offer provides students. A chance to negotiate their work inside a commitment they have witnessed me negotiating with them all semester. It asks them to step into my role while creating their own accountability and responsibility.  It asks them to think rather than simply having thoughts.  There is a great talk by former Yale Professor William Deresiewicz for a lecture at West Point that speaks to this:

I need time to think about it, too, to make mistakes and recognize them, to make false starts and correct them, to outlast my impulses, to defeat my desire and declare the job done and move on to the next thing. (Solitude and Leadership)

If you can create a context, a listening for that you may tailor the lessons to your own needs in consultation with the professor, what you find is at first students do not believe it. They rarely remember this is an option. Then as the semester progresses and the gain confidence in relationship to my style and performance as a professor, they have an inkling that it might be possible.

In the last weeks of class, I remind them that they must do complete work with integrity (wholeness not rightness) and complete 100% of their homework AND that there is 100% of the game left. This kicks them into overdrive mode and into the need for requesting a counter-offer.

And that is when student-as-adult begins to show up for themselves. They have to see it as a real need and possibility and then things start popping.

I’ll let you know how it goes this week but I am already seeing them start to thrive from their own need and drive rather than trying to simply meet my expectations.