James Baldwin's Schools Now

James Baldwin was born and raised in Harlem, and he attended three New York public schools. Recently while doing some writing on Baldwin I became curious about how Baldwin's schools were doing now, so I looked them up. This kind of research is inspired by one of my writing heroes, Jonathan Kozol, who analyzes symbols like the names of schools to express his vivid outrage about educational injustice.

The short version of my discoveries is this: all of James Baldwin's schools are now "college prep," non-neighborhood high schools. His elementary school is a charter high school, his middle school is a "contract" high school, and his high school is a magnet-ey neighborhood high school. NYCPS prides itself on offering families "options." So, if you want your child to go to high school, move to New York. But plan to pay for private school until high school (about which, in New York, we've heard plenty).

Backstory: A friend of mine wrote me a sweet and incredibly thoughtful note about my post about sisterhood. Because she was writing so much personal stuff about herself, she didn't want to comment publicly on my blog, so I'm going to keep her anonymous here, but she's an awesome woman. One thing she mentioned in her note was something that I had not known about her before: her grandfather was a classmate of Baldwin's at the very storied Dewitt Clinton High School in the Bronx. Celebrity Shortlist: Countee Cullen, James Baldwin, Romare Bearden, Stan Lee, Bob Kane, and Tracy Morgan, as well as dozens of influential people in prestigious mid-century New York professions: fashion (Ralph Lauren), essay-writing (Lionel Trilling), filmmaking (George Cukor).

Basically if you were born in Harlem or the Bronx, but then moved to Greenwich Village when you grew up, then there's a good chance you went to DeWitt Clinton. If producing celebrities is one of the measures of a school, then DeWitt Clinton is one of the greatest college-prep-cum-liberal-arts public schools ever. But, by today's measures, DeWitt Clinton is a "bad" school: New York State got a D on Michelle Rhee's recent and instantly infamous, completely disgusting report card, which makes me want to vomit so much that I refuse to link to it. Suffice to say, it seems pretty clear to me (and to most teachers I know) that Michelle Rhee was not a good teacher.

He is pissed.

OK, so that was the backstory. Here is the real story. Baldwin attended three New York schools, which he often referred to in public only by the P.S. numbers, which have all changed.

In this interview, one of Baldwin's earlier television appearances (on public television, Boston's WGBH), Baldwin names two of his three schools, at first only by number: P.S.24 and P.S.139. When I looked these schools up in the New York City schools database, however, they were no longer the numbers of schools in Harlem, and Baldwin often got their numbers wrong anyway.

For elementary school, Baldwin attended New York P.S. 24 in East Harlem. The school as it was no longer exists, and so I could not find its former name. Thanks to the magic of Google Street View, however, I was able to find out that the school building does still exist (as they often do). The school is now called--wait for it--Harlem Renaissance High School!

Wow. There is so much to say about this, but, to be brief: it does not surprise me, after my decade studying education off- and on- (as a hobby), that James Baldwin's elementary school would have been shuttered, renovated into a charter high school, and named for the Harlem Renaissance, which now goes by many other names in academia.* There is so much irony going on with this school that it makes my head spin. Baldwin would be pleased, but also pissed. Why? Because they couldn't be bothered to name the school after one of the many dozens of brilliant African Americans who actually went there--like Countee Cullen, or like James Baldwin.

In the video interview with Kenneth Clarke cited above, Baldwin notes (with a sardonic grin) the irony that his all-black middle school in Harlem is named after Frederick Douglass. How is Frederick Douglass Junior High doing now? Well, its name has changed, as well as its number. When Baldwin attended, it was P.S. 139, and now it goes more strictly by its name. When Baldwin attended, it was Frederick Douglass Junior High. Now, it is Frederick Douglass Academy High School, Jewel of the Westside, Where Failure is Not an Option. In brief: Baldwin's middle school, named for the most legendary black man in the history of America, "failed" and was reborn as a high school where Failure is Impossible Just Because the School Says So.

Baldwin's high school is probably the most well-known of his three schools. As noted above, the Bronx's DeWitt Clinton boasts a stunning list of notable alumni on this Wikipedia page. DeWitt's own website does not have a list of notable alumni, but DeWitt has an alumni association, a rare thing for a public school in an urban or a rural area, but a definite font of cash for most schools that have one.

So, the only one of Baldwin's three schools that still exists is the one that is the best endowed. Endowments matter. The two richest college prep schools in America--Phillips Exeter and Phillips Academy in Andover--have larger endowments than most colleges. Endowment also comes in the form of cultural capital, or fame. When your school has low test scores, but you have successful alumni, their success redounds to the school, which, in turn, makes the students from the school more successful, and usually in creative or scientific fields. (Stuyvesant, the most famous New York Public High School, has bragging rights to a number of Nobel Prizes.) Basically, if you want to find a famous urban high school, go to a hipster neighborhood and walk around a little bit. In Boston's Jamaica Plain, the old high school has been converted into condos. It's the virtuous circle of capitalism: philanthropy, prestige, and--oh yeah--pulling yourself up by your bootstraps--will make up for deficits like endemic generational poverty, about which this country seems more or less committed to doing nothing. Baldwin would not be pleased.

Now, you may call this a travesty of history, and it is indeed comical. But, as with most histories, it says more about who we as a nation are now than it does about who James Baldwin was when he attended these schools. An institution has a history that inheres in infrastructure--a name, a building--even if the school changes numbers or changes leaders. Think about how easy it is to recognize a school from the outside. School architecture matters, and we can think of any school's architecture as an artifact of our nation's architecture. A school is like a magnet: it can attract or repel wealth. I'm guessing there are people who still give money to DeWitt Clinton, easily the most "successful" of the three former-Baldwin schools, because it is the school of Stan Lee, or James Baldwin, or Charles Rangel, or Tracy Morgan. For comparison, if you live in Chicago, you might want to arrange a visit to the storied Wendell Phillips [Academy] High School, where many of my friends teach (because, disclosure: it is now operated by AUSL).

The Horatio Alger story is older than Horatio Alger, but, like all old stories, we should be careful not to love them just because they are old. This particular fairy tale, known as the American Dream, inspires many Americans to believe in a system that is terribly unequal, particularly if you want to do anything that was historically done by a woman, or a man playing a woman onstage (a "queer" man)--professions like teaching, librarianship, stay-at-home-motherhood, nursing, art-making, writing, acting, directing, designing, or anything involving left-handedness.

If the U.S. wants to fix poverty by fixing schools, they're going to need to look for what teachers call "modifications," but what might otherwise be considered, in contemporary Supreme Court jurisprudence, affirmative action. The first thing would be to invest in the impoverished communities that surround most "failing" schools, such as what Harlem Children's Zone founder Geoffrey Canada calls "Baby College" for at-risk parents and Head Start programs. The second thing, after early childhood spending, would be to provide extra supports for students who learn in different ways. At the Quaker school we called these students "students with learning differences." In CPS most people call them "Sped kids," but the more appropriate way to describe them is "students with disabilities." When I was a kid, we called these students by names that adults don't use in polite conversation anymore, but students use all the time, and names that I refuse on principle to reproduce in this context. But if you ever were called one of these names, called someone one of these names, or watched someone call someone one of these names, then you know what they are. And they all mean pretty much the same thing: either "cool" or "not cool."

Here's the thing, though, and maybe I can be so bold as to guess what James Baldwin might have wanted to see if he were alive today. Maybe the way to fix poverty is to address poverty, rather than attack the profession and the dignity of the teachers and administrators who work with the children of the poor every day of their working lives, and the dignity and work of the families that those schools serve.

Here's a fascinating note to end on. There is one James Baldwin School that shows up in a Google search. It is a private alternative high school in Greenwich Village. They refer to the school as JBS, just like my school, which was named after a transcendentalist naturalist: John Burroughs.



*Most academics who study African American literature now call it the New Negro Renaissance or, for academics who do not wish to distinguish activity by black artists from activity by white artists, just plain modernism. This is mostly because to say that the movement was "centered" in Harlem is inaccurate, as this diagram illustrates nicely--half of the people on this diagram never lived in Harlem, many of them were white, and Washington, D.C., Chicago, Nashville, Atlanta, Detroit, Boston, Seattle, St. Louis, and Cleveland, and later L.A. and Oakland, were also hubs of black intellectual activity. Let's put it this way: basically, in any major American city with an immigrant/migrant population, a strong settlement house movement, or a "university" vibe, there were black intellectuals being born and being raised. 

Guilt, love, and genre fiction: What Asian Mothers, Christianity, and Academia have in common

My favorite teacher of all time was my high school senior year Calculus teacher, Alice Snodgrass.

Today one of my Facebook friends reminded me of one of her sayings, which I use in a paraphrased form all the time: "Don't be sorry, just be better."

So here's a question: When you are complicit (in the system), how do you live with the guilt? When you want to be part of the solution, but you find out that you are still part of the problem, what can you do about it, besides moving to a commune and quitting the game?

You start by recognizing that everyone is already complicit. Even if you are an atheist whose favorite founding father is Marx, you know that we are born that way.

This is what I got for my mom for Christmas:

I think I realized with some final finality this summer--at age 32--that my mom isn't perfect. It happened when she asked me to read (after I finished my dissertation) Fifty Shades of Grey, so that we could talk about it. She was on her cell phone, and she was on her way to buy the second and third volumes at Sam's Club. Holy moly. Though I have uh pee-ach(e)-dee, I am not one to judge people's taste in reading, as my friends and family members know. But this news, to put it mildly, shocked my fucking--um, socks--off. MY MOM READ FIFTY SHADES OF GREY. My mom, who taught me how to be a feminist, who encouraged me to pretend I didn't have a body until....always....read a novel that is glorified soft-core pornography! I am rarely stunned into silence, but...holy crap.

Now, trust when I say that this discovery didn't make me lose any respect for my mother whatsoever. She is still my first heroine. But when she told me that she not only loved this novel, but also could not put it down and needed to read the sequels as soon as possible, I was like, "wait, who are you and what did you do with my modest Thai mom who wants to talk about sex like she wants a hot poker in her ear?" She told me that she didn't like the sex parts. My mom is probably the only person who read Fifty Shades of Grey for the story. That's why she wanted me to read it. She wanted to hear what I thought. She was having my dad read it too, but she didn't trust his opinion as much on matters of....what?

In my humble opinion, my mom wanted us to talk to each other about this book as feminists. She wanted to know if I thought that the heroine was really a hero or not. Well, it may surprise you to learn that I do think she's a hero at the end of the first novel, because she leaves the fucker. I know she's going to go back, but that's why I stopped after the first one. I wasn't crazy about the book (even though I couldn't put it down). What I didn't like was how unrealistic it was. I mean, really. A girl from Portland saying things like "chap" and "have a chat"? Helicopter rides from Portland to Seattle in half an hour? Didn't P.L. James do her homework?

She did, of a sort. The novel kind of makes the argument that Tess of the d'Urbervilles has a happy ending.

Now, I don't know how the Fifty Shades trilogy ends, because, as I have already said, I didn't make it past the first one. I found one blogger who was writing chapter-by-chapter summaries-with-feminist-criticism of the second book, but she stopped because she got a job. The Sparknotes aren't out yet.

Aside: oh yeah, I am totally an advocate of using Sparknotes. I especially give them to English Language Learners to read alongside the actual book. I also try to discourage my honors students from using them. I tell them that many Sparknotes were written by good friends of mine, and that their interpretations are biased. (If you are reading, author, please tell me that a non-Yale student would have even noticed, let alone waxed poetical, about the allusions to Chaucer and T.S. Eliot at the beginning of Grendel, and I will give you $5 the next time I see you. Smile.) If my students copy the Sparknotes, I always catch them. I can't catch every kind of cheating--no teacher can--but it's usually pretty obvious, when an AP Literature student starts using words like "subjectivity," that they didn't come up with that themselves. My students used to accuse me of being prejudiced when I caught them plagiarizing, but then I did the somewhat cruel thing of reading one of the more egregious plagiarizers out loud, just to demonstrate how obvious it was. Fortunately, the guilty student was not in class that day, because everyone else died laughing.

My first year in grad school, I learned about a legendary game played by English PhDs called "Humiliation." Here's how it works: you take turns naming a canonical book that you have never read, trying to up the ante until someone "wins." So, if I were playing this game, I would first say that I've never read Tess of the d'Urbervilles. Then I would say another one that I find too embarrassing at the moment to confess. My ace in the hole used to be Native Son (I finally read it in order to write a seminar paper, which is often how we get those embarrassments out of the way). Now, my winner is that I haven't read all ten of August Wilson's cycle plays. I won't tell you which one(s?) I haven't read. You can try to guess.

But wait! What's so humiliating about this game anyway? There is no canon anymore, so I thought that there was no required reading. Whenever I tell high school English teachers that there is no required reading, they don't believe me. They're partly right--I mean, there is one author listed by name in the Common Core State Standards. I bet you can guess which one. But what were the canon wars for, if not to end this game of humiliation? What's fascinating is how the canons have changed--in private and affluent public high schools everyone reads Their Eyes Were Watching God. In urban and rural public high schools, everyone still reads The Scarlet Letter.* When these kids get to college, will they be able to humiliate each other by playing the dozens about what they have and haven't read?

If you ask me, my mom was both embarrassed and proud to have read this trilogy. I know because, at our family reunion in August, when I was reading it, we found out that my sister-in-law's reading group, all female professionals, also read this book, and many of them loved it. And my mom told all of my aunts to read it and told them how much she had enjoyed it, even though she knew better than to enjoy it. My mom, like me, likes to flaunt her guilty pleasures, because we are the first hipsters (kidding). My mom and I are both crazy about Tetris. She is unabashed in her love of Rachel Maddow. She owns about as many shoes as Imelda Marcos, whom she does not admire, unlike Michelle Rhee.** (Mom thinks Imelda is a Bad Woman, but she told me when I was a kid that she didn't have any shoes as a child, so she's making up for it now.) The worst part about becoming your mother is when you start buying shoes like crazy.

Many well-educated people hate hypocrisy and take umbrage as if it was their job, and as if they are not themselves hypocrites. But, as any teen will point out to you, all adults are hypocrites. Walt Whitman wasn't the first to say it, but he said it well: "Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes." If he wasn't so famous, I would call him an egotistical jerk. But poets have a better chance than politicians of contradicting themselves without getting in trouble. Better, but not great, especially since their reputations are forever.

Second aside: When I taught Whitman at the Quaker school, one of my students refused to read any more after he found out that Whitman was queer. "I can't identify with this," he said. He, like many homophobic boys, just wanted to make sure we all knew that he wasn't gay, in case we were wondering... Anyway, I did win over many of the other students with the poem "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," which is my favorite Whitman poem. Quite a few students at the school (about 10%) were there on scholarships that send "urban" students to boarding schools. So I taught many kids from Philadelphia proper, New Jersey, and New York, including Brooklyn and Queens. The ones from Brooklyn and Queens eventually taught me how to take the train to New York to visit my friends. But Whitman was early days in my time at Westtown. One of the Brooklyn students, a very talented baseball player who aspired to the MLB, helped me draw a picture of New York Harbor so that the students could see what Whitman was talking about. This was Back in the Day, 2002, so it wasn't as if I could just pull up a photo on my trusty computer and project it on the smartboard. Even at the prep school, we had only one smartboard. It was brand spankin' new, and it didn't work half the time. I learned very early on what many teachers know: always have a backup plan in case your technology craps out on you.

Anyway, it is now pretty well understood that Walt Whitman was not an egotistical jerk. He was, however, misunderstood in his time, and then a later poet tried to appropriate him to his "side" of things. (This is, by the way, my favorite Ginsburg poem. I'm just not such a big fan of long poems if they aren't by Homer or Milton--and since I didn't mention the Ramayana, that makes me a race traitor, I guess.) What Whitman knew is that everyone, not just every man, not just every American, contradicts herself. As I said in a previous post, I am guilty: I love to eat beef and bacon. I love coffee, wine, and beer. I buy most of my clothes at Target. Do I know I'm a guilty consumer, complicit in capitalism? Yes. Do I try to pretend I'm not guilty? Of course! I drive a Prius!

Further confessions: I don't only eat grass-fed organic beef, either. It doesn't taste as good as the fatty agri-business stuff. I loved, with an ironic eye for the sexist bits, all of the pomp at my graduation. And I enjoyed my wedding, which, though conducted by an Ethical Humanist, still bore some of the scars of patriarchy. And I wear a wedding band, even though I know I am not a slave to my husband, and I also have many gay friends who cannot legally marry in the United States, and I hate that. And I have had family members and students work at Target, but I certainly wouldn't want to work in a sweatshop in China. My grandparents left China for a reason. As my mom always says, life is better in the U.S. than anywhere else she has lived.

We all have to pick our battles. As I have written before, for a long time, feminism was a battle I decided to retreat from for awhile, whilst I fought others. When I was growing up, I was a pretty patriotic little girl for someone who experienced prejudice (the positive kind, model minority and all that) and hated injustice. It was because my grandfather loved presidential history, and because I was born and raised in the city that launched Lewis and Clark and has not one, but two museums named after Jefferson, and I believed, at the time, like the President always says, that my story wasn't possible anywhere else. But, of course, it was. We've all seen Miss Saigon, right? (Kidding! But my mom does like to tell people that my dad is a G.I. He's a (retired) gastroenterologist.) It wasn't until I grew up a little more and got a little wiser that I learned to hate America. Boy, did I feel stupid when I found out that Jefferson had owned slaves. I hated America, but I still got in a fight with my entire U.S. History class about how important it was to vote. (I'm still working on knowing when to keep my mouth shut.)

I didn't get to be a better activist until I got to the Quaker school. And then, in grad school, I became everybody's favorite armchair activist. That's a joke: I am in fact acquainted with many an activist and teachers "on the ground" who think themselves superior to us academics, we who sip coffee in the ivory tower and fritter away our days on our laptops, Tweeting about the world's problems instead of actually doing something. I like to point out that there were three men invited to speak to the psychologist Kenneth Clarke on the subject of "The Negro and the American Promise" on television in 1963, just after several of them had met with Robert Kennedy to discuss his response to the violence in Alabama and Mississippi. The three men were all in their late thirties, two of them had been born in the North and one in the South, and they represented three different "perspectives" on the contemporary debate. Have you guessed yet who they were? They were all known nationally by their first names: Martin, Malcolm, and...Jimmy. Did you guess? It's unfortunate that my hero James Baldwin, in an otherwise engrossing, powerful, signature performance, was so insistent that the treatment of African Americans was a form of castration. I lost a little bit of respect for him when I first saw that clip. (But, in his defense, he was aware that he only hated women subconsciously...) By the end of my first year in grad school, I knew how to say all the most politically correct things. But I still felt more like part of the problem than part of the solution. I also felt bad for not being a vegetarian. There's always something to feel bad about, isn't there?

People often ask me how I ended up marrying a Cubs fan. I felt bad for getting married, but I was in love, even though I know that's a social construction. And I was able to easily overlook the Cubs fandom because the Cubs are so pathetic. I've always had a thing for underdogs, you see. But I usually come back at these people by saying, "You think that's crazy? My mother-in-law is a pastor, and her mother loves the Tea Party!"

But do we all love each other? We sure do. And we respect each other's differences, too. And we are even  able to talk about politics civilly at the holiday dinner table. I get frustrated sometimes, and so do they. But they have taught me a lot, and I admire both my mother-in-law and my grandmother-in-law for their feminism, even though they're not both pro-choice. We're all guilty in one way or another. On Christmas afternoon I teased my grandma-in-law (I just call her Grandma, since she's the only one I've got) that Cornel West is always arguing that Jesus was the first Marxist. She doesn't like that. And I don't like some of her politics, either. And neither of us believes in saints and sinners (at least, not to my knowledge): she's a Methodist, and I'm an atheist. But let she who is without sin cast the first stone.


*"Everyone" is written here with some irony. Not everyone reads anything, and no one can read everything. I had to suffer my own version of humiliation when I discovered that, for literature written in English, the most important thing for me to read, besides Shakespeare, was the book, the one that I had never before felt any need to read at all. I had, in fact, been taught in my raisin' to find the Good Book highly suspect. But you can't help what influences people, and you can only partly help what influences you yourself: you can't choose your family, not even when you choose your partner. I think I would read James Baldwin very differently if I hadn't married into a Christian family and taught quite a few Pentecostals over the years.

**It should be understood that my mom loves Michelle Rhee, not that Rhee loves Imelda Marcos. I don't know Rhee well enough to know how she feels about Imelda Marcos, but I can guess....that she LOVES her. Marcos is, after all, both a shameless opportunist and a very well-dressed Asian. My mom loves Michelle Rhee because she is a successful Asian American woman who appears to care about children. I am always trying to correct my mom's misperception, but that is another post altogether.

Everybody's Scarecrow, or, How to Make a Grand Theory of Everything

I'm a teacher, so I sometimes like to give multiple choice tests, because they're much easier to grade, and I'm a busy gal. I know what they do and don't measure, and I like to think I'm pretty good at writing them.

So here's a test for you:

1. Who is to blame for the shooting in Newtown, Connecticut?

A. The NRA

B. one lone gunman

C. the lone gunman's mother

D. none of the above

2. Who is to blame for this country's lousy gun control?

A. Barack Obama

B. Charlton Heston

C. gun toters

D. the 2nd Amendment

3. Who has the best explanation for the tragedy?

A. the academic

B. the preacher

C. the teacher

D. the president

4. Who is Dorothy going to miss the most when she leaves Oz?

A. Glenda the Good Witch

B. The Tin Man

C. The Cowardly Lion

D. Mr. Scarecrow

OK, here are the answers: 1. D, 2. all of the above and then some, 3. none of the above, and 4. D.

How did you do? To meet standards, I think you should have gotten at least 1. and 4. correct, so a 50% or above. Wait, what did you say? 2 and 3 had typos? Those weren't options? You disagree? Too bad. It's a multiple choice test. One of the answers has to be correct. Did you say the test was unfair? Wait, you've never seen the Wizard of Oz? What's wrong with you? If you didn't pass my test, you should have studied harder.

************************************************************************

That was fun. Now let's talk about saints and sinners, and being Against Everything.

I remember very clearly the first time I learned the term academic people use for oversimplifying someone's argument: straw man. I wrote my B.A. thesis (called a "senior essay" at my undergraduate institution) on Gwendolyn Brooks's series of anti-war sonnets at the end of her first book of poetry, A Street in Bronzeville. In an early draft of my essay, one of my friends and advisors, the Romanticist Chris (R.) Miller, told me that I was using Wordsworth as a "straw man" by suggesting that Wordsworth was a hypocrite when he claimed to be one of "the people" in his poetry. Chris explained to me that Wordsworth was by no means a rich man. I was wrong about Wordsworth. And I was getting Wordsworth wrong in the service of my argument, which was that Brooks was just as good a poet, that her poetry was just as smart, just as beautiful, and perhaps even cleverer than Wordsworth's.

The the term "straw man" may have originated with Frank Baum's Scarecrow in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, published in 1900, and adapted into the first technicolor film, starring Judy Garland, in 1939. We sometimes forget that Baum's novel--and the movie--was an allegory, which, to remind everyone, is one of the oldest forms of narrative, a kind of story where there is a systematic relationship between the characters in the story and the ideas or people they represent in the real world. I don't remember (if I ever knew) which figure in Baum's Gilded Age the Scarecrow represented.* But, aside from representing a single human being, the Scarecrow represented the danger of an ignorant man. He doesn't have a brain. He points his finger. He's afraid of everything, and he, just like the Tin Man and the Cowardly Lion (who I always remember is William Jennings Bryan) is always getting Dorothy into trouble.

In academia, accusing a writer of using a "straw man" is our way of saying that the writer is oversimplifying someone else's argument in order to use that person as a scapegoat. It is reducing another author to a talking "man" without a brain (or organs), in order to win the argument.

In academia, we do a lot of scapegoating. And now, having had the experience more than once in my life of being misunderstood and blamed for things that were out of my control, I have a lot of sympathy for the Scarecrow, who was always one of my favorite of the characters in the movie, because he's the most lovable. He makes mistakes, just like everyone, but he also gets unstuffed, and burned, and he just wants everyone to get along. He doesn't have a brain, but he does have a heart (even though when they open up his shirt, all they see is straw), and he does have courage. Of all the "good guys" in that movie, I thought that Dorothy was annoying, and Toto was a troublemaker, and the Tin Man was scary, and the Cowardly Lion was also annoying. And as I grew older, I also found Glenda annoying, even though she was my favorite when I was a little girl. But I have always admired people with heart and courage more than smart people. Maybe that's because I was raised to believe that smart people are the best people.

It became clear to me, as I grew even older, that Baum intended for us to find everyone in the novel annoying, to find the whole story annoying and stupid, and he succeeded, at least, in getting everyone's attention. Many of the novel and movie's best lines have become the best dead metaphors in the American idiom. "We're not in Kansas anymore." "If I only had a brain," (maybe we could get back home to Kansas). "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain." All of these metaphors are references to ideology: the way dogma tricks us, manipulates us, scares us, causes us to point fingers at others, to roar loudly so that they won't know we're scared.

James Baldwin is now himself being treated as a straw man by many academics, who call him a "liberal" (which is a bad thing, because it means he wasn't a radical). These same academics point out how the Civil Rights Movement, which, in some corners of academia and the rest of the world, we prefer to call the "black freedom struggle," actually "just" reinforced the "liberal Cold War Consensus." In other words, you thought that Baldwin was a good guy. But in fact, he was a bad guy. He wasn't really a radical. 

It's interesting to watch these academics try to dance around one of our saints, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I don't yet know of an academic who has dared to denigrate King. But they do say that King "wasn't radical enough" in his early years, and then they insist that he "became more radical" in his later years. This seems, at least to me, to get King wrong. Lately I've seen lots of my teacher friends posting King quotations on Facebook, and I always pay attention to the dates. King spoke out against "right to work" in 1961, in his "not a radical" days. He also spoke out against American ideology in the early 60s, before the March on Washington. Behind the scenes, he convinced A. Philip Randolph, the President of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and the founder of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (in 1941), that the 1963 March would get more support if it was billed as a Civil Rights battle, rather than a labor battle. King was a pretty smart guy. In fact, he was a saint.

There were, of course, people outside of academia who denigrated King, both when Congress was considering making his birthday a national holiday, back in the 80s, and when Congress considered authorizing funding for a memorial to King on the National Mall. Some congressmen said he was too much of a radical. He opposed the Vietnam War! He fomented labor riots! Also, he was a sexist! We have FBI tapes that prove that he made sexist and racist jokes in private! King was no saint. He was a sinner. 

In academia, we love to hate Catholicism and Puritanism, because these religious dogmas act as if there are only good guys and bad guys in the world. Saints and sinners. We, in academia, recognize that Most People Are Complicated. Dogmas only make us hate ourselves. 

At least, we always believed that, until this one guy came along and changed everything. His name was Jacques. He was really smart. He created a powerful following. And he gave us something new to believe in: nothing. 

James Baldwin knew that believing in nothing was dangerous. He saw Bigger Thomas, who believed in nothing, and he knew that believing in nothing was a form of psychosis. Baldwin got in trouble, all the time, for putting himself out there and believing in things. For arguing that everybody needs something to believe in. For calling for peace and understanding. For changing his mind a few times.

In his preface to the play Blues for Mister Charlie, Baldwin explained why he had written a play in which the protagonist, at least in his imagination, is the white man. (Like many plays, the protagonist and the antagonist are sometimes interchangeable.) In Blues for Mister Charlie, a white man, Lyle Britten, murders a black man, Richard Henry. Baldwin explained in his preface that he had written the play in order to try to understand and even to love the murderous white man:

But if it is true, and I believe it is, that all men are brothers, then we have the duty to try to understand this wretched man; and while we probably cannot hope to liberate him, begin working toward the liberation of his children. For we, the American people, have created him, he is our servant; it is we who put the cattle-prodder in his hands, and we are responsible for the crimes that he commits. It is we who have locked him in the prison of his color.

Wait a second. Whatchu talkin' bout, James? Who is in prison? Who is "our servant"? Who needs to be liberated? Who is we? Who is he? It is the poor white man, not the black man, who his enslaved. He's a slave because he believes in America, in the America that puts him on top, and black people on the bottom. He's a fool because he doesn't realize how much the America he loves actually holds him down, and feeds him the lie of race to keep him quiet.

In the talk about Newtown, I see my friends and loved ones arguing on Facebook about who is to blame. Is the gun lobby to blame? Yes. Is American masculine discourse to blame? Yes. Is the mom to blame? Yes. Is the stigmatization of mental health to blame? Yes. Is the wretched young man to blame? You betcha. 

Are we going to keep playing "the blame game," or are we going to do something about it by trying to understand what happened?

Baldwin dedicated Blues for Mister Charlie to his friend Medgar Evers, an NAACP secretary in Mississippi who was shot in the back on his own front lawn, in front of his family. He also dedicated the play to four "little" girls: Denise McNair, 11 years old, and Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, and Carole Robertson, all 14 years old. The four girls were murdered in a terrorist bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, on  September 15, 1963.

Many American high school students learn of the 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing, and I first learned of it when I read Dudley Randall's magnificent poem, "Ballad of Birmingham," as a 7th grader. But a lot of people teach that poem, or the church bombing, out of context. A lot of people don't realize that the bombing happened just weeks after King delivered his "I have a Dream" speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, or they don't know that King gave the eulogy at the funeral for 3 of the girls, not all four. They don't know that King promised the bereaved congregation that the deaths of the girls was part of a larger struggle that we could not yet see or understand. He promised the congregation that the girls were in heaven. He promised the congregation that their deaths, which appeared to be so senseless, would make sense in the long run. Lastly, he promised, that their deaths would not be in vain.

That last line is a quotation, without the quotation marks. So was it plagiarism? King was quoting Abraham Lincoln, for some people, the country's Patron Saint, my grandfather's hero and therefore one of my very first heroes, a man whose stature in American history has grown so large that we have carefully examined and forgiven him his inconsistencies. We have decided that he was, on balance, a Great Man. He was a hypocrite, and he was sometimes selfish, and he sometimes weighed certain risks versus certain benefits and made "calculated" choices instead of "moral" ones. He was a white supremacist but he ended slavery. He ended slavery, but only to save a country that is and has always been sick. And at a crucial moment in the country's history of illness and weakness, he stood on a battlefield soaked in blood and promised that the deaths of all those thousands of young men would mean something, in the end. Was he being manipulative or sincere? Was he cold and calculating or warm and caring? Was he crazy or brilliant? That's what hundreds of historians writing thousands of words have been trying to figure out ever since the words came out of his mouth. But we might already know, instinctively, that the answers to all those question are the same as the answer my mom almost always gives when you give her a choice: No. Yes. Um. In other words: both/and.

One of my favorite critics to love and hate is Walter Benn Michaels. His break-out essay, the one that made his name as a critic, was called "Against Theory." In that essay, he and Steven Knapp use "theory," meaning deconstruction, against itself. The argument of deconstruction is that nothing means what we intend it to mean--in fact, there is no such thing as intending to mean something. There is no such thing as intention. There is only language, and language is like an evil robot that has betrayed its master: it refuses to do what you want it to do. It is out of your control. There is no such thing as control; there is only the illusion of control, and we live in a world of chaos. Michaels and Knapp argued that, in fact, if Saint Derrida's original argument were carried out to its final conclusion (final solution?), we would know that, in fact, humans must have intention in order for language to exist at all. Otherwise, they say, language wouldn't even be language. It would just be marks on a page. It's a brilliant essay. Even though it's Against Everything, it is like Pandora's Box: it contains a tiny little sliver of hope, and it gave me hope when I first read it.

I took a class with Walter my very first term in graduate school, which was a seminar offered jointly by UIC, where Walter teaches, and U of C, where I went for grad school. The class was co-taught by my dissertation committee co-chair, Ken Warren. It was huge, for a seminar--it had about 35 or 40 people in it. And it often seemed like the only person who ever talked in that seminar was Walter. He, the professor, was "that guy." I, normally quite the talker, only spoke once, when I had to read aloud an 8-page essay, the one requirement for the class aside from a seminar paper. I was terrified. Every time someone in that class tried to speak, it seemed to me, their idea would get ripped apart by Walter. That's how he teaches. My course advisor at the time, who had been a student of Walter's, encouraged me to take the class and to "get in the mix." But I was, at the time, way too scared. Would it be an overstatement to call Walter Benn Michaels's intellect sublime, when used as a weapon? It certainly scared the bejesus out of me.

The eight or nine people from U of C who took the class all became close friends of mine through the hazing experience that was that class. And the rest of them all had their own frustrations with that class. One of them hated that Walter turned every beautiful work of art into a racist text. One of them hated how Walter took her paper on Their Eyes Were Watching God and told her that she was wrong to defend Saint Zora, then proceeded to use all of her evidence against her. She turned that paper into her dissertation. When Walter did the same thing to me, it hurt my feelings, but I wrote a way better paper on a different novel--George Schuyler's satirical novel Black No More--for my seminar paper, and since Ken was the one to grade it, I got very helpful feedback and learned a lot. (Schuyler, by the way, was a prophet, but is considered a sinner, because he remained a Republican, though a Socialist, and then became very conservative in his old age. He even wrote a memoir titled Black Conservative. He was a reactionary.)

So was that the hate part or the love part? Both. I have noticed, in my travels, that Walter is incredibly misunderstood by even some of the smartest academics. They think he is "conservative" when he is really radical. They think that he wants to abolish the humanities, when really he has only suggested abolishing private education. They think that he hates Jews, when he himself is a (secular) Jew. They think that he is against anti-racism, when really he is against multiculturalism. He has, in some sense, suffered or achieved the fate of every great thinker: he has become everybody's straw man. And we could read this, in the words of Malcolm X, as Walter's chickens having come home to roost. When you try to make a Grand Theory of Everything, you get too big for your britches, you give the Cyclops your home address, the gods will smite you. When Walter fought Derrida, he was David. Now he's Goliath, and people throw rocks at him.

Sometimes I feel sorry for him, but then I check myself, because I'm guessing he doesn't feel too sorry for himself. He makes a great living and he loves his job. Is he happy? Most academics, like most radicals, are unhappy. I don't know Walter--I barely spoke to him at all when I was his student, and I haven't spoken to him since except to attend some of his talks and watch him eviscerate everyone who tries to disagree with him, which I find obnoxious but also very entertaining. My guess is that Walter also finds it entertaining that everyone misunderstands him, because he can recognize why they misunderstand him. When James Baldwin felt misunderstood, he became angry and vitriolic as well as pained and raw. When Langston Hughes felt misunderstood, he made jokes. He, one of the first great critics of the blues, called the blues "laughing to keep from crying." Sometimes it feels like all you can do is weep. But that's when you have to laugh, just so you can keep going.

*My husband, who Knows These Things, reminded me that the scarecrow in the 1939 film represented the Dust Bowl Farmer. I shoulda known that. I'm a historian of the 30s!

Newtown: A five minute morality play, in the style of Suzan-Lori Parks

Setting: A Hospital Emergency Room. Time: Today.

Triage nurse: doctor, there's been a massive terrorist attack over at the school.

Doctor: how many can we expect?

Nurse: Millions.

Doctor: Was it a biological attack?

Nurse: Yes. They used ideology that induced mass American Psychosis.

Doctor: Wait, ideology is not biology. And what is American Psychosis?

Psychiatrist (pushing glasses up nose): Actually, it is a very common illness. Symptoms include terror, self-righteousness, hypocrisy, inconsistent thoughts, intense anger, intense sadness, heart failure, and death.

Doctor: How is it possible that I've never heard of this condition before? I refuse to believe it exists.

Psychiatrist (in German accent): Your belief has no impact on wheser or not eet exeests.

Doctor: Well, what's your evidence? You see, I'm a doctor. I need evidence.

Psychiatrist: I, too, am a doctor. And you'll see ze evidence when ze patients arrrrrrive. I predict zey vill be members of ze NRA, ze President of ze United States, several senators, some prrrriests and prrrrreachers, some intellectuals, and talking heads of all sorts. Plus many, many children. But ze children will be DOA.

Nurse (in tears): Lord help us.

Theorist (vague European accent, a combination of French and German): He's not going to. Zere eeez no God. Religion eezs ze opiate of ze masses. God eeeez dead. Long live Michel Foucault.

Doctor: Well, how do we treat it?

Psychiatrist: We'll need to consult with several specialists. Doctors, preachers, intellectuals, and artists.

Doctor: What about the President?

James Baldwin (crying): Fuck the president. Fuck this country. Fuck the fucking white supremacist NRA. Fuck Christianity. I love America.

Doctor: Who let that crazy black man in here?

Nurse: it looks like our first patient has arrived.

Why I Write: Baldwin, Orwell, Didion

The title of this essay is an allusion to two of my heroes who wrote essays of the same name--George Orwell and Joan Didion. (Didion also wrote an essay called "Notes of a Native Daughter"--a response to Baldwin's "Notes of a Native Son."

There is this song that have been listening to on repeat throughout this fall to keep myself going. The lyric is: "Dr. King, I think often of you, and the love that you learned from Jesus." It's by Mason Jennings, and it's called "Dr. King." It's a beautiful song, and the message means a lot to me.

Many of my friends and colleagues will see this as an oversimplification of King. But it's an oversimplification that I think is worth remembering, and I try to remember it every day. There is King hagiography and King denigration, and he was a complicated and egotistical man. But King's ministry was a ministry of love.

I am not a Christian. But lately I have been thinking a lot (shout out to my mother-in-law!) about the gospel of love. Baldwin knew that King believed in love and sacrifice, which is why he respected King. But Baldwin wished that King would include more rage in his ministry. Baldwin was, himself, a lapsed Pentecostalist youth minister--he knew a lot about Christian love, Christian hate, and Christian rage. Also he knew that these three things--love, hate, and rage--could exist in one man: his father, and himself.

My friend "Jim" wrote me this note today:

I had an awfully self-helpy thought about "selling oneself" this morning -- at least, it helped myself: it occurred to me that a better formulation than selling, with its connotations of commerce, commodification, prostitution, etc., might be giving an audience or readership permission to find you complex, pleasurable, etc. Audiences are made up of all kinds of people with all sorts of defenses about the prospect of allowing you the quasi-intimacy that reading creates. A writer's job is to contextualize herself in such a way as to make that possible. I realize as I write that sounds weirdly erotic, which is not quite what I mean. Because adapting one's work to a trend, having reputation or pedigree, etc., are all ways of building trust -- and it's very hard to reach people without that. Rambling. But what do you think?

Jim, who is English, always beats himself up for Rambling. He even had a blog once upon a time that made a punny joke about this and what the British call "Rambling," which means walking long distances for fun. But anyway, his point here is a good one--which is that you need to remember your audience, and that the relationship between teacher and student, writer and audience, is a love-hate relationship.

Baldwin knew a lot about psychology, about which I will be posting later this week. But for today, I wanted to answer this question: Why do I write? Why am I writing this way right now?

Didion said: "I. I. I. [...] I write to know what I am thinking." Yes. Writing, teaching, being an academic: these are endeavors in which the human has to balance between feeling selfish (egotistical) and selfless (a martyr). Nobody likes someone who acts like a martyr when they're not literally dying for a cause. And nobody likes an narcissist, either. The humanist professions--writing, teaching, academia--attract people who wrestle with this duality. But we're kidding ourselves if we think that we write only for the sake of our audiences. The problem that Jim is talking about above is the problem of recognizing your audience. Do you write for yourself (narcissist) or for your audience (martyr)?

The answer, of course, is both/and. Martin Luther King may have been quite egotistical. There is certainly evidence to support this. But even people with narcissistic tendencies actually do most of what they do out of a sense of mission. (All ad hominem attacks on Obama aside, no one would run for President of the United States and then keep doing that job unless they actually cared about changing the world. Well, maybe one guy....who ran to please his father. But enough psychoanalysis of the presidents.)

King's mission was not one of self-aggrandizement. Movements need leaders. He knew that. He tried to balance of self-aggrandizement with self-sacrifice. And, since he was murdered at 39, and lived his entire short career of celebrity under the threat of imminent death, I should say that the balance was on the side of sacrifice for him. So it kind of annoys me when people dishonor his memory by talking about what he said in private company, which we only know about thanks to the U.S. government SPYING ON HIM. No one is all good. But he was, on balance, one of the better ones.

Orwell said that he wrote for four reasons: (1) sheer egoism; (2) aesthetic enthusiasm; (3) historical impulse; and (4) political purpose. Yes, yes, yes, and yes! Do you, dear reader, see why I love and worship these writers?

So what am I writing about now? And has it changed? My husband pointed out to me that I appear to have taken a slight turn from my previous postings. I can understand his point of view. I rarely used to talk about Foucault in my previous writing on this blog. But, at the same time, I think it is consistent with what I've always tried to do on this blog, which is to create dialogue where I could not find it in my working life.

Dialogue, cooperation, collaboration--I sound like Mr. President! But the man has a good point. We live in a  world right now that is so with-us-or-against-us that we have shut our ears to ideas. A good idea is a good idea, whether it comes from your friend or your enemy.

I don't want anyone who has read this blog before the last week to think that I have stopped writing for you. I don't entirely know who you are, but you are still my audience. Many more of my academic friends have started reading since I posted "A Defense of English." What I have noticed, and I will keep repeating it until it gets heard, is that the dialogue between English Literature departments and English Education departments is pretty impoverished, except at the few universities where these two types of specialists co-exist in one department.

To put this point another way, what I posted about Orwell was somewhat taboo for me, as an academic writer, to put out there, on a couple of levels. As a junior, junior, junior, "jobless," just-about-to-be-minted PhD, it is presumptuous of me to write about Orwell. Orwell, as an author, falls outside of my field of specialization--American and African American literature and drama. And I'm by no means an Orwell specialist; I've just read a lot of his books. I haven't read all of the criticism that's already out there about Orwell. I haven't paid attention to that conversation. So who am I to write about him? Well, I have taught a lot of Orwell to high school students--Animal Farm and 1984; Homage to Catalonia and "Shooting an Elephant" and "Politics and the English Language" and "Such, Such..." and the essay he wrote on the Spanish Civil War. So I've read him pretty carefully; and I've tried to assemble a picture of him that makes him make more sense to other people, younger people. Non-experts.

That's what teachers and critics of literature do: we try to give people a bigger picture.

On a second level, I'm way too googly-eyed about Orwell for this writing to be considered "academic." In the academy, we don't love the authors we write about. If anything, taking a position that shows that we love the author is likely to be challenged--"Why do you defend this person's thinking so much?" "I can understand why you might want to, but it's causing you to be blind to this persons flaws." In academia, we are all about pointing out people's---er, wait, arguments'--flaws.

Critics often feel sad about themselves because they feel so unwanted and unneeded by society. But society needs critics. Critics help us read better. And that's what we need to do. Orwell knew that. He saw--firsthand--all of the madness of modernity, and he wrote about it for multiple audiences. For adults and for children. For intellectuals and for ordinary people. And he wrote in a way that most people could understand, because he prized clarity above many other things (more on that in a future post).

Baldwin believed in love. I want to write like him because he believed in pouring his love and his rage into his writing, which is what I've tried to do on this blog, more than once. Most people now call Baldwin a "liberal" (in a bad way) for believing in love. But he did, and he wasn't wrong to. He was an ex-Christian and he understood the teachings of Jesus better than the people who write about him now. He understood King because he understood Jesus. He believed in love, and was sorely disappointed, because he had believed in Jesus and then watched many of his closest friends die as a direct result of American racism.

I think, in academia, it's time we had a little bit more love, and a little bit less hate from the haters. Paranoid reading is annoying and boring. There are only so many times that you can point out that an author from the past was duped. Hindsight and all that. It is presentist and unfair to judge King's gender politics by today's standards, or Harper Lee's race politics, for the same reason, or Baldwin's politics, period. Most people in this world who aren't psychotic narcissists (like Hitler and Stalin and Castro) have good intentions. In teaching, we call this giving the benefit of the doubt, or assuming positive intent. Baldwin was a liberal because he knew that being one would give him a platform. And he wanted to be heard. That's why he wrote. That's why I write.

Words, Words, Words: George Orwell and the Theorists (Part 1 of many)

My Orwell post turned into a 7-page essay when I wasn't looking. So here's part 1: the Prologue.

A young Indiana Jones, played by a young River Phoenix (RIP), once said, “Is everyone lost but me?”

This was ironic, of course. Indiana was the one who was lost. But Indiana Jones, though a narcissist, is often right when lots of people around him are wrong, especially those pesky Nazis. There is a certain kind of person—we can call him a narcissist, or a smarty pants, or a schizophrenic, or a prophet—who often looks around and thinks that nobody sees what he sees.

I am learning a hell of a lot from watching Homeland (just two episodes left in Season 1, so no spoilers, please!). I connect with the show a lot, and with a lot of the characters, partly because of how it uses flashbacks to explain people (which Baldwin did, too—but I’m saving that for my Baldwin post). I'm in a mind-set right now to talk about how my past helps me understand my present. That's what Baldwin knew too, and what Homeland gets right: people are people, and all people, whether they are POWs, or terrorists, or CIA directors, or presidents, or mood-disordered, have baggage.

Hindsight is a blessing and a curse: I can see very clearly the chain of mistakes and misunderstandings that got me to this surprisingly confused place I am in (If you've been reading between the lines, or you know me personally, you know that I am in a confused place. My body and soul are fairly damaged, but I am healing, partly through the soul-searching writing that I do here, in front of lo you dozens of friends and loved ones. (Aside: Blogger stats are kinda crazy scary Foucauldian surveillance kinda stuff. Who is reading in Sweden!? Turn off those cookies!))

Baldwin thought that racism was a failure of interpersonal understanding. The deaths of Trayvon Martin, Emmett Till, and so many other martyrs, then and now, bear him out on that score. But that post is coming up...later.

Dualism--that is our problem. Binary opposition. Black and white. Good guys and bad guys. Enemies and friends. If you're reading this blog, then you probably already know it, just as the makers of Homeland, who seem to have read/watched The Manchurian Candidate 1,000 times, know it: we have been living in a second Cold War since 9/11. Or, put another way, pace Fukuyama, the Cold War never died, it just changed shape.

"Theorists," that motley collection of modern philosopher-kings everyone in humanist academia thinks are really important, but hard to understand, and everyone outside humanist academia thinks are useless, and bad writers, have understood the deadly danger of extremism for a really long time, not least because many of them were persecuted, imprisoned, and killed by various European regimes. So why haven't reason and insight won out, lo these many years since the "rises" and "falls" of totalitarianism, empire, and injustice--in other words, modernity? 

If you ask me? The problem is the writing. Many of the most brilliant literary and cultural theorists (and why are they called that instead of philosophers?) never wrote clearly enough for a non-expert to understand them. Or else they write with so much baggage, so much required background knowledge, so many freakin' footnotes and hyperlinks, that these writers take a massive effort--years of specialized training and expertise--to understand. My family members are very educated people, but even they can't get through my dissertation, any more than I could read one of their articles. Specialization is the enemy of knowledge, if you ask me. Most people don't have the time, as in SIX FULL-TIME YEARS, just for a start, to begin to understand a body of knowledge where a 10-page article can take multiple slow readings and many more hours of discussion just to get the main idea, as we call it in K-12, pace ACT (and not for the last time). 

(Here's where I thank all of my friends who took LIT300 with me senior year, many of whom are now working artists, and my friend Nick, who is now an academic librarian, and my grad school friends, especially the one I fake-named Jim, for the many reading groups: in pairs, in threes, by the dozen. You all made theory way less scary.)

Judith Butler, who helped us realize that gender is a social construction, argued, in the New York Times, that she is not a "bad writer." Complicated ideas require complicated writing. But it seems like fewer and fewer people--certainly fewer than in the heyday of the Great American magazine intellectuals--are learning how to read complicated writing and long, complex arguments. And we're doing that less and less (see my post "A Defense of English"). 

The Humanities are dying, people! And, honestly, who has the time to even worry about it? My blog posts are way too long-winded for many readers, I'm guessing, and my dissertation is 60,000 effing words of boring, alienating jargon. Spit it out, Barton! they tell me. Even my advisors tell me that. Find the nugget. What's the claim? Give it a good title. (And then give it one-or-several subtitles--when I look at the shelves of bound dissertations in the English department at U of C, it's pretty hilarious to see how short the titles used to be. The title of my dissertation is "Staging Liberation: Race, Representation, and Forms of American Theatre, 1934-1965." And most science dissertations just say what-it-is right there in the title: "A gene therapy approach for the treatment of retinal degeneration," by my cousin, Dr. Brian J. Spencer, for example.) It's a sad fact that nobody reads Ph.D. dissertations. All that knowledge, undiscovered, gathering dust until someone else says it better or just gets noticed. Scientists, at least, have a much better chance of actually building upon their discoveries, instead of just repeating them. The humanities could learn a lot from how other academic fields do the publications thing, imho.

Sigh. I don't know, old fogies and change-agents have this way of exaggerating when they say that the newest generation is dumber than the generation before. We progress, we regress. But I am worried, to say the least, about how oversimple and how reactionary the conversations have gotten, how attached we've become to quick fixes and simple solutions to complex problems.

Many of the great Marxist and post-Marxist thinkers thought it was the job of intellectuals to explain, to clarify, to help everyone else understand. "Everyone else" goes by many names, but they are always the group without power: "the proletariat" to Marx, "the folk"* to Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, W.E.B. DuBois, and many other black intellectuals, "the subaltern" to Gramsci and the postcolonialists, "the people"* to Kenneth Burke and a buncha other folks, "the rest" to Jacques Ranciere (for which he credits Plato...I think). But the intellectuals have always struggled, way more than the artists, to figure out how to expose the machinery to ordinary people going about their everyday lives. How can we "wake them up," how can we "sweep aside the curtain" (Baum) or "lift the veil" (DuBois)?

And the intellectuals also feel really anxious (and, yes, paranoid) about it, because intellectuals are usually people with power, not people without it, so it feels paternalistic. Ralph Ellison noted in Invisible Man that the statue of Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee called "Lifting the Veil" often looked, to him, like The Founder was pushing the veil down, pulling the wool over the young man's eyes. Ideology can't be escaped. Without something to believe in, we are lost. That's why, when Derrida started what became known as "The Structuralist Controversy" and then "The Turn to Theory," which took hold at Yale (in the belly of the beast!), he sounded a little bit terrified, and a lot playful. Derrida's is that kind of joking where everyone is terrified: if you take away the center, all you have is emptiness.** Deconstruction is not a productive, optimistic form of analysis. Derrida knew this, and so he tried to make light, while keeping it serious. He loved a good pun as much as the next guy (Who is the next guy? Depends on whom you ask--but here's a hint: it's another theorist with another double-entendre). But Derrida is an incredibly challenging read. His name is synonymous with "hard to understand." And he liked being hard to understand. If one thing is clear, it's that someone who could invent a word like "ontic-ontology" did not care how much work it would take for him to be understood. Clarity, to many theorists, means oversimplification, and oversimplification is always dangerous, often deadly.

Puns, and figures of speech in general, are a good way to capture complicated ideas in fewer words. And in our field, we have lots of them, often in English, French, and German cognates: differance, presence, signifyin(g), misprision, interpellation, alienation/estrangement/defamiliarization, discipline/punishment/police/vigilance/surveillance, immanence, performativity, representation, the well-wrought urn, Critical Inquiry, the title of the U of C-sponsored English journal. We have a lot of jargon. We like misspelling words, adding hyphens and parentheses to make the puns and dualisms clearer. The End(s) of American Studies. (Con)testing blahdey blah. (Re)presentations, the title of another important poststructuralist English journal. I was tempted to use "Liber(aliz)ation" in the title of the diss, but I refrained, hoping it would be understood. 

All this is to say, English is fun! Playing with words is fun. Because theorists, and literary critics, and poets, and that crazy guy who wore black all the time, and the famous guy who invented that guy, whose name is theonly author's name mentioned in the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts, knew what all those humanism-destroying, STEM-loving, vocational-and-professional-school-remaking (de)formers*** don't get: Words matter. Stories matter.

Orwell knew that. So more on that tomorrow.

*One reason that these two terms in particular--the folk and the people--make many academics squirmy is that they were used by the biggest bad guy: Hitler. Nazism started out as a political party called National Socialism, and Volkswagens started being built....Populism can go bad really easily, and not just in Germany: also in Cambodia. Also in the rest of Southeast Asia. Also in the USSR. Also in China.....Also in the U.S. (See What's the Matter with Kansas?, etc, etc, etc)

**Teachers rarely credit each other, because teachers are able to share ideas without wanting or needing to cite each other. (My students often accuse me of plagiarism when they see another teacher's name on one of my handouts, though.) When I taught Deconstruction, I always used the Stevens poem, and Paul Fry was the teacher who showed me that first. His lectures for LIT300 (which is now ENG300--how times change!--were a model for me in how to make theory clearer to people, so thank you, Professor Fry.

*** This is sort of a silly pun, if you ask me. Reform can be bad. Change can be bad. The problem is that everyone right now thinks that change must be good. But "progressive" and "conservative" or "left" and "right" don't even begin to get at the problem. The problem is "common sense," which is another word for ideology, or what Gramsci called hegemony. Gramsci equated common sense with hegemony from a prison cell in the '30s. But Gramsci's Prison Notebooks weren't published until the '50s, and they weren't translated into English until the '70s, right about when Derrida and DeMan and all those guys were stirring up all that shit at Yale. Cause and effect relationships are a funny thing to try to tease out, pace the ACT. But that's why I love writing history. Because it's fun.

Connections: Wallflowers, Getting Noticed, and the Myth of Meritocracy

As a trained academic, I see connections everywhere. My problem, as a writer, is that I often have trouble explaining these connections to people, and instead I tell stories. (BACK IN THE DAY, Virginia Woolf pointed out that this kind of inductive approach is a particularly female way of thinking and writing, and that our society favors what she then-called "masculine" ways of writing. But NOWADAYS, we're "not allowed" to say that there are female and male ways of writing. More on that in a future post.)

Sometimes we call people who "see connections everywhere" paranoid, especially if they don't believe in God. And Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick, may she rest in peace, wrote about this in a brilliant essay that later became a book, and that book was the first thing I read in graduate school. Here's a review of the book that provides a pretty good summary. The chapter that grew out of the essay (that's how academics roll, by the way) was called "Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, Or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You." (Thanks to Amy, I've been thinking a lot about which writers inspire me, and I should add Sedgwick to the list.)

Sedgwick essentially argues that academia is broken because everyone who writes for academic audiences is so terrified and territorial--so anxious about how people will respond to their work, or about making sure that they say it first--that they're stuck in a feedback loop of paranoia. When I was in my PhD colloquium, I, as a very competitive person who hates competition, really responded to this idea. Can't we all just get along? I wondered. Why can't we agree and disagree respectfully? What ever happened to listening?

Sedgwick called it. The book was published in 2002. But ask any junior faculty or anyone trying to get a job if anything has changed. The rat race continues, and it is kill or be killed out there. For every job in an English department, as many as 500 people apply for it. English academics were living in a recession way before 2008. They've been living in a recession since the 90s, or maybe even before that (this is where I apologize for not knowing everything about a topic before presuming to write about it. That's paranoid writing.)

My PhD colloquium professor was Frances Ferguson.* Another essay she showed us, by the superstar-famous-deconstructionist-theorist Paul DeMan, is called "Blindness and Insight," from the book of the same name. DeMan taught at Yale, and I have been noticing lately how much the Yale English Department influenced my thinking (but not in the ways for which the Yale English Department is notorious in academic circles). Let me just say, for those who are familiar with these writers, that I was assigned to read "Tradition and the Individual Talent" by T.S. Eliot at least 5 times, and I took a class with Harold Bloom. And I had a lot of really amazing conversations with a grad student who taught me twice about Eliot and Bloom. I odn't know what ever happened to that grad student. DeMan was writing in dialogue with both of these men, and his argument, if I may attempt to summarize, is that, in the production of knowledge, you have to essentially take on an attitude of blindness in order to have an insight. In other words,  you have to ignore your predecessors in order to have a good idea.

I told Frances at the time that I really liked the way that this essay treated academic knowledge in the same way as scientific discoveries. The knowledge is out there, and, in some ways, the point is to find it, not to take credit for finding it. (My scientist- and medical-academic friends and family members will attest that this is a very Polyannaish characterization of scientific research.) Everyone wants credit. It's human to want credit. That's what Sedgwick argues--if we paid a little bit more attention to ourselves as feeling human beings (this also goes by the name of psychology or "affect studies"), we might actually become more generous and less paranoid as readers, as writers, and as critics.

Footnote* about Frances Ferguson: In academia, you're supposed to give credit to everyone who gave you your ideas. Frances Ferguson is a celebrity in academic circles, and I am fortunate because of my schooling to have worked with a lot of people who are celebrities-in-academic-circles. Outside academia, a lot of people view mentioning these people by name as "name-dropping." And even within academia, you're not supposed to name-drop until you get more established, because it is viewed as trying too hard, or as relying on your connections instead of on your merit.

So that was a long introduction to this post, which is about why we still believe in merit when really a great deal of getting ahead in this country happens through connections. A very good friend of mine from my PhD cohort (we call them that because we all start at the same time, but finish at different times) and I have been talking about my previous post about my not-my-brother-in-law Tim Kreider. My friend--let's just call him Jim--and I both had this feeling when we were in our early 20s (we were born a month apart) that if we wanted to be writers, we would have to try to sell ourselves, and that is not in our natures. We are wallflowers.

I read The Perks of Being a Wallflower for the first time this summer. If that book had come out just one year earlier, it could have made a big difference to me when I was 18. In that book, the main character is a freshman in high school and a wallflower--someone who is secretly awesome, but goes about his business being weird and different, until some seniors notice him and take him under their collective wings.

That sort of thing happened to me when I was in high school. I was a bit of an outcast, a little bit weird, a mis-fit, and the theater teachers and some other teachers were super kind to me. Of course, then I got called a teacher's pet. I am always trying to tell my students that the kids that they call teacher's pets, or whatever they call them now (in grad school we called the person who talks too much in seminars "that guy") are secretly insecure and lonely.

There is this great essay by David Bromwich (who was at Yale when I was there, but with whom I never took a class) called "American Psychosis." It talks about how American mis-fits (like Flannery O'Connor's serial killer "The Misfit" in "A Good Man is Hard to Find") are the dopplegangers of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. The flip side of self-reliance is feeling like an outcast.

I love the part of the essay that analyzes the O'Connor short story. I really want to go back and reread the part about the Transcendentalists, because at the time I'm pretty sure I didn't get it. I read it in a reading group on Transcendentalism that I formed with Jim and a bunch of other Americanists. Jim and I were people who talked a lot in seminars, and we always worried, confidentially with each other and our mutual love, my best friend and his wife, about being "that guy."

Jim and I are both paranoid about trying to get noticed. We have ideas, but we want people to notice our ideas without the indignity of having to "sell ourselves." And this is the real American Psychosis, if you ask me. We get sold this idea that if you just work hard enough, you'll get noticed and appreciated. But you shouldn't ever look like you're trying. It's just like my parents always told me: you're pretty, but don't flaunt it. Eventually someone will ask you to dance. But waiting for someone to notice you is a sad game. American literature is littered with the corpses of people who tried, in their own ways, to get noticed--Quentin Compson, Lily Bart, Jay Gatsby, Bigger Thomas, Willie Loman, Walter Lee Younger. Every single one of those men (and did you notice that they're mostly men?) went a little bit crazy because they were so angry at not getting noticed, not getting the girl. As Willie Loman said, right before he died, "Attention must be paid!" Then there are the ones who decided that it was better to disappear than to risk getting noticed: Edna Pontellier, Isabel Archer, Antonia, The Ex-Colored Man, [the] Invisible Man, Helga Crane, Janie Crawford, Lutie Johnson, Annie Johnson in Imitation of Life, Norman Maine in A Star is Born, everyone in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. (Did you notice that they're mostly women and people of color (and one actor)?)

"Getting noticed" is just not how it really works in academia. In academia, if you want to get noticed, you have to somehow work your way to the top of that stack of 500 resumes. And the easiest way to do it--by far--is to have connections. I know from my friends in the arts that it's very much the same way in pretty much every art field. I often sit back and marvel at how many people I knew personally in college are now working artists. And, to me, it's not a coincidence that we all went to Yale, and built up our networks there. It's considered mean or unfair to say that people made it to where they are because they're well-connected. But the point I'm trying to make is that for every brilliant, talented celebrity, there are at least ten equally brilliant, equally talented people toiling away in anonymity.

Sociologists and educators call connectedness "social capital." They recognize that a big way that people get ahead in life is by having connections, and this is not something that shows up in poverty statistics. People living in poverty have no connections. And, often, unfortunately, their teachers also don't have connections. I've tried to share my connections with my students, but I feel awkward and sad about it because it sometimes feels like bragging. I know famous people. When I showed my students my friend Scout Tufankjian's book, a couple of weeks after I had introduced them to my two best friends from college, both working writers, they asked me what I was doing at their school. With all these famous friends, why are you just a teacher?

I have been teaching my students--the honors juniors--about social capital. I have offered to introduce them to all of my friends who are now working in the fields that they want to work in. Because that is how it happens. My students still believe in the myth of merit, and I think, in some ways, so do a lot of my grad school friends, and my family.

One problem we have in academia is that we keep fighting over what is the one right way to organize all of these connections. Marxism? Deconstruction? Affect? God? Magic? Lauren B. gets it right, because she has been telling me for years that people are complicated. There is no one way to explain a person. And a person, and her story, are sometimes a good way to try to explain how things work. I'm working on a piece right now about James Baldwin and Joan Didion and using oneself as a case study. (I'm calling it WWJB/JDD?) When I tell people my story, and my family's story, they say "wow, you have an impressive family. You all must have worked very hard." We did all work very, very hard. But we also had a lot of help.

The myth of American meritocracy is that a kid on the South Side of Chicago and someone like me start out in the same place, that we both have a shot at going to Yale, and hard work is the difference between us. (I love Paul Tough's work because of how he tries to shatter this myth.) And that's just a lie, as I've noted here and here. It's true that there are people who pull themselves up by their bootstraps. My grandfather, born in the Bronx, did. My mother, born in the boondocks of Thailand, did, too. But we were talking over Thanksgiving about how even they had help--my grandpa's mother taught him the value of a good education. My mom's oldest sister helped her through junior college and medical school. Many, many families on the south and west sides of Chicago don't have access to this kind of capital: the knowledge that education really does matter, the means to give their children a better life. That is why the era of No Child Left Behind is so cruel. We pretend--and my students believe--that hard work and dedication and perseverance will get them somewhere. But, without connections, without somehow getting lucky, or getting noticed, all that hard work is statistically likely to land them in a two-year college, at best. Social capital is built over generations. The cruelest ideology in education is the phrase "beating the odds." Why can't we work on changing the odds instead of asking teachers and children to try to play and win a game that is rigged against them?




*Footnote about footnotes: I love writing footnotes, as anyone who has read my academic writing will attest, and I love hyperlinks, as anyone who reads this blog knows, and I use parentheses a lot. It's because I always want to connect something else to what I'm talking about. There's an essay in this about gothic fiction, historicism, and nested narratives. But I digress. My husband is always trying to remind me to "get back to the original story."

"So What Are You Going to Do With That?" An open fan letter to my brother-by-another-mother(-in-law), Tim Kreider

Here's a little dorky academic joke:
Q: How do secular humanists explain cosmic coincidences?
A: They tell the story. (Art imitates life, you know.)

The writer/cartoonist Tim Kreider is my sister-in-law's brother. My brother's (Todd, who I have written about on this blog) brother-in-law. And Todd is my half-brother (different moms), and Tim and my sister-in-law are adopted* (different moms), so by my calculations, we're just one shy of six degrees of mother between us (my niece and nephew live in an episode of Modern Family trying to keep all their aunts, uncles, and grandparents straight). But when I was younger, I looked up to Tim a lot. (And I'm not sure he ever knew that, hence the "fan mail" title.) I've been thinking about him a lot lately, as I ponder, yet again, the question at the top of this post. I have a B.A., an M.A., and a Ph.D. in English, and an M.A.T. in Secondary Education. What am I going to do with all that?

*So, by way of a story, here's the coincidence: Tim wrote beautifully about his experience meeting his birth mother and birth sisters in his book We Learn Nothing. It was really weird for me to read that essay, because it's about his sisters, one of whom is my sister, my sister-in-law, my first real sister in a lot of ways (4 boys, one girl, one girl-cousin-sister-cum-au-pair), and I also know his adoptive mom, their mom. And I was literally just thinking about his book and that essay this morning, because I was worrying about writing about my family in this public way--Thai-American midwesterners are not dirty-laundry-airing people, and the essays in Tim's book are quite personal. And so I was thinking about how to write more like Tim, to sound detached and personal at the same time. And then boom! This article lands in my inbox, sent to me by a good friend who has been helping me with all this soul-searching (see previous 10 posts or so). My friend (I have taken to calling him "advice man") thought that Tim's article might model the kind of writing and research that I might want to do, now that I am oh-so-credentialed.

I feel like I got whacked in the head and woke up in August 2000, at my nephew's first birthday party. I was just recounting this memory to my brother this past August, now that my nephew is an honest-to-god YOUNG MAN. In honor of my nephew's first birthday, I had pooled the resources of my other three brothers and purchased, for our nephew, the first 4 Harry Potter books in hardcover (those were the four that were out). I had spent spring break of my sophomore year in college reading the first three Harry Potters, and the fourth one had just come out. I found out about Harry Potter before all of my friends because I had brothers that were still in high school. It's so odd for me to think back on those days and how, even then, I was baffled by the way that reading cultures differ in high school and college. My friends were all into Rushdie and Pynchon and Kundera, and here I was reading kids books. (Not coincidentally, that's what Tim's article is about, too.)

So, birthday party. I can't remember the theme--my sister-in-law throws a killer themed kids' birthday party--maybe either Bob the Builder or Blues Clues. (My niece's love of Dora the Explorer has come in super handy teaching in a mostly Mexican American school. When we look at the world map, I often sing the map song, which is, by the by, the cruelest, most repetitive ear worm in the history of man. Take that hyperlink at your own risk.)

In college I always felt shy and awkward around my brother and sister-in-law's friends at these things because of the age difference. Todd is 9 years older than I am, and I met most of their good friends for the first time at their wedding, when I was an awkward 13-year-old in a floral pantsuit, watching my ladies-men-cousins and my older brother, who got to be a groomsman, hit on the bridesmaids. I'm not kidding. A floral pantsuit. It's no small wonder that I spent most of the wedding hiding behind a video camera and/or stuffing my face with desserts. My brother still teases me about how I ate all the desserts. I have no recollection of this, so I can neither confirm nor deny its factuality. There is supposedly photographic evidence, but I have never seen said evidence.

So they had already unwrapped the 4 Harry Potters, which, on four college-/high-school-student incomes, had felt expensive, and I was pleased, because all of these actual adults seemed to think it was a cool present. And then Tim walks in with this crusty banker's box FULL of used children's books--a lot of them first editions--and all the really great ones. I was so chagrined. It felt like some episode of Sex in the City where one of the girls gives the other an antique baby rattle from Tiffany's, and the other one gives a six-pack of Gerber onesies. Or like a birthday party in Logan Square now, where one person gives the birthday girl a set of saucers from Crate and Barrel, and another gives her a hand-knitted apron with an ironic animal screen-printed on the front. You get the idea. Tim had out-hipstered me avant la lettre.

But let me be clear, there's no resentment here. I think at the time I expressed my embarrassment to their mother, my brother's mother-in-law, and she, always knowing the right thing to say, announced to everyone that, between Uncle Tim and Aunt Lit (my name in my family), our nephew would grow up a reader. And it's true--both my nephew and my niece are terrific readers. It's been fun, as a high school teacher of "struggling readers," to share books with them, and have them share some of theirs with me. Not to brag, but I have gained a lot of cred with them as the aunt who introduced them to both Harry Potter and The Hunger Games. I've been trying, now, to get our nephew to read Lord of the Rings, or A Wrinkle in Time, or Ender's Game. But I also know that it's pretty tough to get my own students to read these children's classics. I actually asked my nephew when I last saw him what had happened to all those books that his Uncle Tim had given him, and he said that he still had them, and I told him he should start reading them now, because they're all so, so good. I haven't heard from him lately about what he's been reading, but I hope he's given one of those a shot--he told me he'd tried Lord of the Rings a few times but had found it kinda boring.

At that birthday party, I so wished I was as cool as Tim. I was entering my junior year in college, and I had been thinking a lot about what I was going to do with my degree in English. In my extended family on both sides, there are a lot of professionals, but not very many humanists. In fact, there are just four English majors: my cousin Alisa Tang (also a writer), my brother Todd (double English and Chemistry, now an MD), Tim, and me. We all grew up with that immigrant ethos--my dad's parents were both first-generation Italian-American, so the question that is the title of this post was asked of us. A whole effing lot. (My cousin Alisa once complained to me that everyone expected her to "just" become a teacher, which, at the time, was what I wanted to do, so I was pretty chagrined, again. Abashedness, mine, comes up a lot in this story.) My parents did not want me to major in English. When I told them as a freshman that I had decided to be an English major, they told me that they thought it was impractical. My father actually said he thought it was a waste of my analytical, scientific mind. (He'll probably deny this now.) At the time, my brother and my sister-in-law and my cousin Alisa, all older, all tried to be encouraging. And my brother and sister-in-law pointed to Tim, who was, at the time, working as a professional writer and cartoonist, but he hadn't "made it" yet. Now, with his book out and a blog on the New York Times website, I think he has, and I'm super proud to know him. I hope the book is a Times Notable Book. I think it deserves it. If he does win it, you heard it here first!

When I was a freshman in college in 1998, I wanted to be Tim when I grew up. By the time my nephew turned 1, I didn't want to be Tim anymore, because I didn't think I could be him. I got to college wanting to become a writer, but I got really discouraged, really fast. First, I quickly discovered that no one wanted to hear me write about myself (shout-out to Abigail), second, that I couldn't be Joan Didion in my wildest dreams because I just wasn't stick-to-itive enough about my writing habits (this is, Abigail, my personal anecdote of how high school and college kill the love of writing), and third, that I was actually much better at writing literary criticism anyway. So, by the time my nephew turned 1 in 2000, I had made a different plan, one that would fit my parents' ambitions and fears for me: I would teach high school for a couple of years, and then I would go get my doctorate in English. This, I thought, would impress my parents. I would still be a doctor, just a different kind! (Aside, because I love to digress like gothic novelists love to digress: My senior year, when I took the GRE, I mentioned casually to my dad that I might take the LSAT just for the heck of it. I sort of tanked the verbal section of my GRE (which shocked everyone), but I did really well on the analytical part, so I thought it might be a good idea to have a high LSAT score in my back pocket, just in case I couldn't get in to any English PhD programs. My dad brought this up with me again about a month after I mentioned it and asked me if I'd thought any more about law school. He's the most tiger mommest dad ever, and he's not even Asian.)

My aunt, who is a retired teacher (one of only two other educators in my family besides my husband), asked me this summer if I was going to make my students call me Dr. Barton. I told her no, but I was going to make everyone in my family--all six of them are MDs--call me that. I graduate next week. My husband and I have already joked about the Instagram photo of me, in my cap and gown, surrounded by the MDs. The caption will read "black sheep."

And I'm still not quite sure what I want to be when I grow up. But I've started to think that I might still, after all these years, want to be Tim, especially now that he's a bona fide public intellectual/renaissance man. He really is an outstanding writer. I was just telling my sister-in-law on the phone the other day how much his writing  reminds me of all the great mid-century essayists I love.

Back then, I wanted to become a renaissance woman, but we all know there's no such thing. I was scared of not getting a "real job." Tim was the only adult I knew well who didn't have a "real job." And I had already decided not to do many things I thought I might like--writer, lighting designer, stage manager--because I thought I wasn't going to be good enough to make it, and I was scared to go into the world without a steady income, without health insurance, without a degree that would impress my parents. Ten or fifteen years scratching out a living on an uncertain path seemed like a long time and a big risk to try to become successful for them. And it has only been in the last three or four years that I realized that I'm supposed to become successful for me. So I'm working on that now. Stay tuned.