What does Mainstream mean?

 Oh jesus. There is enough to say every day to populate ten blog posts. 

In the afternoon we had our first class of Dis Doc, the shorthand that Dr. Breuggemann coined for her class "Narrative and Documentary in Disease, Disability and Illness." We watched the documentary "Vital Signs" in which people with disabilities respond to, among other questions, "what does mainsteamed mean?" 

One respondant says, "It's where all the abnormal people get together with the abnormal people. It's happened with race too - so who is normal? Who are the already mainstreamed people?"

This point came up again in the On African American Rhetoric book today. The authors point out that in African American rhetoric, there exist always the two strains, one advocating integration, the other advocating separatism. Which is not to say that they don't exist in the same people. The authors refer specifically to WEB Dubois, who seemed to oscillate between these standpoints, as implied in this paragraph from "Conservation of the Races," an 1897 essay:

WEB Du Bois

Here, then, is the dilemma, and it is a puzzling one, I admit. No Negro who has given earnest thought to the situation of his people in America has failed, at some time in life, to find himself at these cross-roads; has failed to ask himself at some time: What, after all, am I? Am I an American or am I a Negro? Can I be both? Or is it my duty to cease to be a Negro as soon as possible and be an American? If I strive as a Negro, am I not perpetuating the very cleft that threatens and separates Black and White America? Is not my only possible practical aim the subduction of all that is Negro in me to the American? Does my black blood place upon me any more obligation to assert my nationality than German, or Irish or Italian blood would?

That last question especially seems key to me. Do Germans (or those with German heritage, like me) have a responsibility to wear their German identity visibly and proudly? Certainly not in practice. Do African Americans then? Well, yes, but who puts that expectation on them? 

The authors say, "Du Bois' fluctuations or multiple outlooks suggest, along with genuine existential grappling, varying degrees of optimism/pessimism regarding the prospect of social justice for Blacks within mainstream American society." 

I'm noticing one of the things that I guess I hope graduate school will provide: a larger framework for understanding the things I read and see today. Of course I'm aware that Black people in America today don't agree on the degree or type of integration that would be best for the Black community (and as Eddie Glaude points out, the idea of a monolithic "Black community" is misleading and flawed.) But reading about this history, and tracing the strains of opinion from Sutton Griggs' Imperio and Imperium published in 1899, to Douglass, to Du Bois, to Garvey, to King, to Malcolm X, to Michelle Alexander... is helpful for me to understand the persistence of this grappling. And it is so much more nuanced than just "join 'em" or "ditch 'em". 

Sutton Griggs

The authors are using the jeremiad term to follow the arguments of African American rhetors. 

The term jeremiad comes from the book of Jeremiah in the old testament, in which the prophet refers to the promise the people have made with God, then describes the nature of their declension on this promise, then prophesies the doom that will result from continued failure to fulfill the promise. Black writers and orators have relied on this structure to warn America of the stakes of their failure to live up to their moral ideals as stated in their founding documents. 

Interestingly, Malcolm X departs from the typical jeremiad form of his forebears David Walker and Frederick Douglass when he discounts any supposed morality among White Americans. In 1965, he wrote in "The Bullet or the Ballot": 

So I say, in spreading a gospel such as black nationalism, it is not designed to make the black man re-evaluate the white man–you know him already–but to make the black man re-evaluate himself. Don’t change the white man’s mind — you can’t change his mind, and that whole thing about appealing to the moral conscience of America–America’s conscience is bankrupt. She lost all conscience a long time ago. Uncle Sam has no conscience.

So what can the Jeremiad do if it doesn't rely on our sense of morality? Well, maybe the same thing the old testament did - rely on our fear of annihilation. Indeed, in the same text, Malcolm X points out that "They don't try to eliminate an evil because it's evil, or because it's immoral; they eliminate it only when it threatens their existence." 

This reminds me of a concept developed in critical race theory - the idea that White people will only adopt anti-racist measures when they directly benefit White people. 

Black Power

The last part of this chapter talks about the debate on the use of the term Black Power in the 60's. It was used first at SNCC speeches. It quickly gained currency and stirred controversy. Leaders like Malcolm X and King had to publicly denounce or embrace the slogan. 

Stokely Carmichael

 The book says that just two days after Stokely Carmichael and Willie Ricks used it at a SNCC event, King was "forced to discuss" the slogan with Carmichael as they walked "through the Mississippi Delta." 

Part of rhetorical power, then, seems to lie in what we are forced to discuss. The Occupy Wall Street movement forced us to discuss the 99%: who it was, why it was, and who was the 1%. 

In class Dr. Robinson said we should think of analyzing rhetorical power as going beyond literary analysis. Literary analysis is looking at the parts of a text and making meaning of them. Rhetorical analysis is adding a step to this: considering the work that a text does on the audience. How is the audience changed by the text? How do they walk away differently? 

Initially, I think the "work" or "effect" could be very hard to define, but very worth discussing in a class. We watched a video this morning in class and considered the "effect" it had on us. I could tell even from our preliminary comments (before class ended) that the woman of color in the class had been affected differently than I had (not surprising). Talking about the difference in the effect of rhetoric is the power of classroom space, and it's the space I want to open up with both White students and students of culture. 

This phrase White students and students of culture. It sounds harsh. But I think it gets at the ways that the idea of "Whiteness" harms White people. What is my culture if I am White? I don't know. I don't know. I have had to subsume my cultural identity (as German, British, and what else??) for the privilege of being "White". I sacrifice my individual identity, it's the price I pay for the White label. 

If I maintained my cultural identity, I'd have to reckon with the harm done to my people by White people. The idea that I belong to Whiteness in the same way that Eastern Europeans, Russians, British people, and others do, would be untenable. There would have to be a reckoning, a reconciliation, with the fact of class division within White communities. 

Whooeee, and as Resmaa Menakem pointed out, we do not want to do that!

A four-member class

 I am very excited to be taking Michelle Robinson's class Teaching African American Rhetorics at Bread Loaf this summer in Ripton, Vermont. 

Michelle Robinson

We just had the first class and I have reflections on our class size and on the first reading, which I have just begun and will use this blog to process. 

Why are there only four students in the class? We are three White women and one Black woman, and Professor Robinson is Black. (She teaches English and has various other projects/duties at Spelman college, the HBCU). 

I walked past other classrooms in the Barn, where many academic classes are held here on the Ripton campus. They were full. Like, 10-15 students in each. What were these classes on? I don't know - Chaucer, British literature of Revolution, the Odyssey. I was initially encouraged to see that there was demand at Bread Loaf for courses with such a clearly anti-racist teaching intent as TAAR. But apparently there actually isn't much. 

I'm grateful they didn't close the course because of low enrollment. The other anti-colonial class I wanted to take this summer, especially after my appointment to a position at Brac University in Dhaka, Bangladesh, was "Fiction of Empire and its Aftermath in South Asia." 

When I emailed about joining this class, the response was that the professor withdrew from teaching it, but I wonder if there just weren't enough interested students. 

Prof. Robinson said today that rhetorical texts are texts that do work. That attempt to make a change in the audience's mentality. This, to me, is basically any text ever, except all my notebooks full of stream of consciousness writing. Although, the attempted change there might be in my own mentality - does that count? Surely. 

In the introduction to On African American Rhetoric, the authors Keith Gilyard and Adam J. Banks say that WEB Dubois believed all art to be rhetorical. He wrote in "Criteria of Negro Art" that "despite the wailing of purists," he rejected the notion of art-for-art's sake and considered all art to be politically instrumental (p. 296). 

He added, "I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy. I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda" (296). 

So, this seems to constitute all art, all writing, from an advertisement to a poem to a book jacket blurb. Maybe not the shopping list. Though I suppose if someone else were to see my shopping list I would make sure it represented the version of me I wanted to project (propaganda) to them. Broccoli, eggs, sweet potatoes, you know, not chips, muffins and frozen dinners ("I COOK.")

Toni Cade Bambara

The introduction dwells on the experience of Sylvia, the protagonist in Toni Cade Bambara's short story, "The Lesson." Sylvia goes to FAO Schwartz under the supervision of a teacher, Mrs. Moore, who is keen to demonstrate to her young charges the economic landscape of New York. They live in Harlem, and Sylvia is disgusted and angered by the price of the toy sailboat in the window. She angrily asks the teacher why they have come. 

Miss Moore, who is Black, seems aware that her job as educator of these young African American students is to facilitate and epistemic break. 

OK, epistemic break. The text talks about how for Michel Foucault (who was a 20th century French philosopher, though I would have guessed he was way older than that) epistemes are "concepts that counted as legitimate knowledge, and they were circulated and reproduced by means of related and regulated discursive practices." 

So, racism is made up of many epistemes that are reproduced and passed down -- until parents and teachers and friends and Black women help us break them! 

Anyway, growing up Black in America, Sylvia's self-understanding is dominated by the narrative that she "spurs and justifies" her ignorance. Think about what that means. She is growing up in a world that spurs - ie encourages, her to be ignorant of the disparities around her, of the machines and structures that ensure that she will likely (without the intervention of Miss Moore) ever see that sailboat downtown, let alone be able to purchase it. 

Her world also justifies her ignorance. What could this mean? That she understands that her ignorance is explained by the poverty of her neighborhood. She has no real expectations, no need for knowledge for she has no ambitions. This she sees when she looks around her neighborhood, which of course is not culturally bereft, but financially poor. 

So, Miss Moore's job is to take her and her classmates downtown to see how the other half lives, to start to be able to perceive at least the fruits of this racial capitalist machine, even if they don't understand how that machine works. 

The initial impact is to make Sylvia angry. And the outlet for that anger is Miss Moore. Sylvia says, "So we headed down the street and she's boring us silly about what things cost and what our parents make and how much goes for rent and how money ain't divided up right in this country."

Here's the key: But Miss Moore, in the manner of great educator Paulo Freire (1970), comprehends that the teacher-dominant, overly narrative approach is inefficient and relatively ineffective. The children need not another sermon from an adult. They need field experience. Sylvia, for example, whose name literally means "lost in the woods," her forest being not so much Harlem but her state of mind, has to be led physically to greater awareness."

This is not fun for the teacher - doesn't mean the teacher is the best friend of the students. This is the position that Ms. F, at my last school, took on. She was not the students' best friend, but served and escorted them to truths about their existence in America which would constitute epistemic breaks with the narratives they had been raised with in refugee camps. Or among families in this country of White bodies, or bodies of culture (terms borrowed from Resmaa Menakem). 

Today Dr. Robinson said that teaching should be uncomfortable. That as soon as teaching is not uncomfortable, you're probably not doing much for that community of learners. 

Two other ideas that struck me from the introduction: 

1. Bambara's revisions of dominant narratives. In one example, she retells the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears as "The Golden Bandit" "to remind people to scrutinize official versions and authorized tales". She reveals Goldilocks as a "burglar-chile-vandal-thief" who will not confess to her exploits or take responsibility for them, choosing instead to frame the bears.

Critically, the way Bambara engages an audience about this retelling is entirely through questions about it. Both about the story, and about the story's implications for navigating "official versions" and authorized texts in today's world of media and fake news.

Amiri Baraka

2. Amiri Baraka's idea of "changing same," which he uses to describe how rhetorical responses among the African American community change to match the changing forms of oppression -- what stays the same is the presence and reality of oppression. Blues music, he says, developed and adapts in response to the nature of oppression. Black Twitter, the editors of this book suggest, is a recent example of changing rhetorical responses to a changing landscape of oppression. 

I'm eager to learn from these and more titans (this is the first time I've heard of Bambara) with my classmates and Dr. Robinson.