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.