The Life and Death of a Girl in Chicago

"She loved Fig Newtons and lip gloss."

I have been feeling guilty for not writing anything on this blog about the gun death of Hadiya Pendleton, a 15-year-old girl who attended Martin Luther King College Preparatory High School, the selective enrollment high school where my next-door neighbor teaches drama. For the climax of his State of the Union address Tuesday night, President Obama began to describe Hadiya, whose parents were seated next to the First Lady, using the above sentence. He went on to embellish his portrait, but it is an interesting starter to me, because, delivered in Obama's signature matter-of-fact style, it portrays her as just, or merely, a girl.

A girl who, instead of going straight home after school got out early, decided to go hang out in the park with some friends. It is not a big leap of the imagination, when put this way, to believe that Hadiya could have been a student at the school where I taught. We sometimes hold our breath on the days that students get out early, fearing that just these sorts of feuds will have just enough more daylight for the worst to happen.

When the Newtown shooting happened in December, I was certain that it would prove to be the catalyst for real anti-violence reform at the federal level. I was wrong. The real catalyst was not the death of two dozen innocent children; rather, it was the death of a single, defenseless girl.

It matters, too, that Pendleton was just a girl. And she, like so many young women, was such a wonderful girl: she was beloved by everyone around her. Had she been male, the outpouring of grief over her death might have been more easily tempered by questions about what she was doing in that park that afternoon. Equally significant, then, is that the first reform program announced in the wake of Hadiya's death is one from which she would not benefit at all: a $3m investment in the mentoring program known as "Becoming a Man." It does not necessarily need pointing out that Hadiya Pendleton probably had no desire to become a man. This mentoring program, which, like many mentoring and tutoring and after-school programs, has had some success in keeping young men and boys occupied so that they will not be "sucked in" to other, more violent pursuits. It begs the question, then, that "Becoming a Man" might have saved Hadiya, if indirectly, by preventing her killers from becoming involved in a gang. But, as I have written before, programs for teens tend to be very heterosexist in the ways that they insist on strict boundaries between two genders and the behaviors (stereo)typically practiced by those two genders. It deserves pointing out that there are plenty of young women and girls who get up to no good after school, too, and they need things to do after school, too.

Last year, one of my students told me about an argument she had with her father when she wanted to become involved in such afterschool programs as the newspaper and sports teams. Her father didn't want her walking home after dark, which, in these Chicago winters, comes all too quickly. She argued, in response, that he would not make the same interdiction against a male child. And that's almost definitely true. But, considering Hadiya Pendleton or the countless unnamed innocent victims of poorly-targeted gun violence, who can blame him? 

A school that offers every possible sport, that keeps its gym and weight room open, that has a newspaper and a ballroom dance club--that school is preventing violence every day, and, at least at my school, our principal knows it.

Unfortunately, most of these things happen because teachers are willing to donate their time and sponsor these extracurricular activities for no pay. Coaches get paid a small sum, but club sponsors do not. There can be a lot of pressure on teachers to offer activities, because we, too, know what goes on out there if we are not making life interesting enough inside the building.

So you know what? I'll take Becoming a Man. It took the prominent death of an ordinary girl and some journalists pointing out that the park in which Hadiya was shot and killed is just a mile from the President's own Hyde Park-Kenwood mansion. But what a mile! As friends and readers who live in Chicago know, Hyde Park and Bronzeville often appear much farther apart than that, as do Austin and Oak Park, also only a mile apart. It bears pointing out that Harlem and the Upper East Side of New York City are also about a mile apart. A mile is a long way in the big city.

The President's address began to swell into oratory on the note of Pendleton's death. In the style of the man whose name graces Hadiya's school, Obama listed the locales that give a name to other American gun massacres. Newtown. Aurora. Gabby Giffords. There were more, but I sort of lost track, except to notice the places he didn't name, because they are too old, too long gone, to name: Virginia Tech. Northern Illinois University. Fort Hood. The oratory culminated on the refrain, "They deserve a vote." I lost count of how many times the President said it.

But what kind of vote? A vote on what? It will take more than $3 million to memorialize Hadiya Pendleton, the children of Newtown, and the other untold hundreds killed every year in Chicago, and elsewhere.

Yesterday I was listening, as I always do, to Chicago Public Radio, and I heard two pieces that, to me, say more than I can ever try to about the life and death of a girl, or any child, in the city of Chicago. So here they are. 

The first is the story of the violence interrupter Ameena Matthews. Matthews grew up in Chicago and is the daughter of Black P Stones founder Jeff Fort. Matthews is so poised and full of grace about her past life as a gang member that she leaves me speechless.

The second is the story of the recent gun death of another Chicago teen, this time on the west side. Unlike the case of Hadiya Pendleton (whose tragic proportions I by no means want to diminish), this murder will probably go unsolved.

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. 

Money Matters: Solorio Teachers Have Raised over $10,000

Sorry for the radio silence, readers! I have been in the process of absorbing some very big news, on which more in a few days or so. In the mean time, here's a post I wrote about the fact that teachers from Solorio have raised over $10,000 since Solorio opened its doors in the fall of 2010. That's pretty amazing. It also shows that "miracle schools" don't perform miracles without tens of thousands of dollars of extra money--literally.

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Many people have bought the education reform line that money doesn't make a difference in educational outcomes. But, if you are a classroom teacher or a leftist, you find this argument highly suspicious on its face. Money always matters. I'm proud of Solorio this year, because, even in its short existence, people who teach at Solorio have raised over $10,000 for students through Donors Choose alone. They have also won outside grants for art and public art projects, and sold lots and lots of baked goods, to the tune of probably double that. Add to that the largesse of AUSL, and the newest green building in all of CPS, and it's not hard to fathom why Solorio would be on everyone's "schools to watch" list.

My school boasts a wonderful staff of about 70 people who are mostly young, smart, and nice. Everyone tries to get along with everyone else. We have a lot of meetings. I like working there because it reminds me of another school I worked in like that--a Quaker school, where every decision had to be made by a committee.

I was on 4 committees at Westtown, not counting my two departmental affiliations (English and Theater) or the full faculty meetings, which were scheduled for 90 minutes after dinner every Wednesday. I probably spent 10 hours a week in meetings, 30 hours a week teaching, and 20-30 hours a week prepping for class and caring for students. I loved it, because I love meetings and I love students.

A lot of teachers will tell you that teaching in a high school often feels like being sent back to high school, and they're right. If you were an outcast in high school, you can become a quirky misfit on a high school staff pretty easily, especially if you're friendly and like to volunteer to do dirty jobs nobody else wants to do. In other words, schools are political environments for everyone: all of the adults and all of the children are citizens of the empire, and everyone is a member of a smaller polis ("clique" or "crew" or "bromance") outside the Capitol, which is The Main Office.

You will know you have entered the Hunger Games in a high school building when you realize that what you are wearing matters way more than you thought it would when you put it on that morning. It is very risky to wear bright colors or use the words "folks" or "people" at any urban high school. It is also very risky to use a vast array of other loaded words if you are in a school with a lot of turbulence. The turbulence is just waiting to erupt into violence at any moment. You know you are in such a school when: the school has metal detectors, armed security, a dress code, or a uniform policy that excludes any kind of self-expression through fashion (piercings, nails, earrings are forbidden, shoes must be black or brown with no markings whatsoever).

When a charter school claims to "produce" better students at a more "efficient" rate than its comparable neighborhood school, you have to ask these questions: how much money is spent per student in real dollars? And where does the money come from? Words like "produce" and "efficient" and anything that treats a school like a factory should be treated with caution.

People who feel like they are "other" know this. "The Other" is a word from postcolonialism that is an English adaptation of the word "subaltern," used influentially by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci in the 1930s. Gramsci loved populism and hated Mussolini, whose government put him in prison. Reading Gramsci helped me understand why it might be OK to write an Italian romantic comedy about the Holocaust, which the younger me (The Old Me) would never have thought was OK.

Subaltern people are any people who identify themselves as being "mis-fits" in high school: nerds, LGBTQQ, people with physical, mood, and intellectual disabilities, women, people of color, people with a threatening, "weird" faith--basically, those who get bullied and those who do the bullying. Does that sound like the "bad people" list of anyone you know? Probably not anyone you know personally, because if you're reading my blog, and you've read this far, you probably think it's OK to be Politically Correct, at least when you're not trying to be ironic.

Basically, I'm talking about the same people who are always cool: hipsters, the youth, teachers, and fashionistas. These are people who have learned, either by nature or culture, to find the language of the market highly suspicious. They are the same people as those who also want to try to fit in without looking like they're trying. Teenagers are the most brutal audience there is. If you honed your wit as a social outcast in Chicago, like Tina Fey or Steven Colbert or Gwendolyn Brooks, then your wit can cut like a knife, or tear your flesh (which most people will recognize as the etymology of the word "sarcasm").

We all know or suspect that anything that claims to be "new and improved" or "cool" is actually old and cheaper than it used to be. When I first met Solorio's students, I told them that my favorite store was Target and they could smell the dork on me like I had just bathed in the dollar bins.

Aside: When you let the students ask you questions about yourself, there's a standard list. Top of the list are where you buy your car and clothes. If you're dressed nice that day, they're impressed. If you're not dressed nice and you don't drive a cool car, you reek of loserdom. The best thing about kids these days is that the majority of them are much nicer to adults than my peers were to me when I was young. But the bad news is that all that kindness and courtesy usually masks an ugly underbelly of bullying and deceit and mean girl drama. The way a society treats its children is a sign of the times. When society treats children like objects instead of people, you know times are tough.

In high school, fashion that is cheap rules the day: short or otherwise low-maintenance hairstyles; glasses, facial hair, painted fingernails, and tattoos; and good taste in popular culture are the badges of cool. (I know what you're thinking: those things cost money! Well, they do and they don't. They cost money for some people, and they cost a lot less money for other people. If you've ever wondered why, Google Chicago Sociology or Worlds Columbian Exposition, or read the Sparknotes of The Jungle, or visit a Target.)*

What makes me sad? Educators started using the same value-laden language as the market to describe the kids. Too many educators have so bought into the narrative of modernity that they actually believe the hype. They believe that adults are naturally smarter than young people, that men are naturally smarter than women, that realistic fiction is naturally better than romantic or fantasy fiction. These are all of the cultural lies of modernity: late modernism, which some people choose to call "postmodernism," taught people of my generation to hate the old and love the new. But you only have to visit a high school for a day to be reminded that the old is always new again to a teen.

Brothers and Sisters, Sisters and Brothers: the Autobiography of an Ex-Only Girl

Dear reader,

I am an only girl. Or, at least, I was once an only girl. Just like the Ex-Colored Man in James Weldon Johnson's novel, I'm not sure what it means to be an only girl, or when and whether I get to decide to stop being an only girl. But I've been thinking about it a little bit lately. I started to write a review of my year, just like all the education bloggers did, but it was so depressing that I decided to focus on one of the highlights instead, so here's one: In 2012, I became a sister.

My first delegates' meeting for the Chicago Teachers' Union was not an especially eventful or exciting one--those would come later--but it was much more thrilling than I could have hoped for. I arrived late, so I missed the part where I, as a new delegate, would be "recognized," but, as I slinked into the meeting already in progress, I was first overwhelmed by the sheer number of delegates. It seemed way more than one per school, I thought, and I was soon to learn that there are, indeed, multiple delegates per school--as many as one for every fifty or so teachers in a school building. What a proportion of representation! If only we could be so lucky in every aspect of our representative government.

At House of Delegates meetings, the officers always speak in reverse rank order. I missed the report of Michael Brunson, the recording secretary, and came in to the middle of financial secretary Kristine Mayle's report. I had met and already knew that I liked Kristine, but I was surprised at her sober tone on the stage. Then came the Vice-President: Jesse Sharkey. I had also met Jesse and I had already been tickled by how he called us teachers "trade unionists." Trade unionists! I guess that is, technically, what we are, but it of course feels like a throwback to a long-gone era, one I've become certain that Sharkey, a history teacher, knows plenty about, and one that I also know plenty about, having written a dissertation on it.

Sharkey has a fiery, extremist style of oratory that reminds me of the best moments of Huey Long, and his knowledge of the long and--apparently, very much still living--history of trade unionism was tremendously impressive and exciting to me. Had I, as a Chicago Public School teacher, really become a part of the history I was writing about? Had I, really and truly, become a sister soldier? When Karen Lewis said "Sisters and Brothers"--which she does, repeatedly, when she speaks--it made my heart flutter, like I finally belonged to a big family fighting for a real cause.

But what was the family, and what was the cause? That's still a little bit unclear to me. Having grown up in the 1980s and 1990s, in a non-union family, I was raised to treat trade unionism with the same suspicion as almost every other educated person in this country who has not belonged to a union. In college and early in graduate school, I had been skeptical about efforts of graduate students to organize, particularly because, to my mind, these were elite institutions who were making the lives of their graduate students pretty darn nice. I also remember explaining to a friend why it made me so uncomfortable: we are not sweatshop workers, I said. We were, in point of fact, grateful, at the University of Chicago, to receive any teaching appointments at all; we were not the overworked, underpaid graduate students of the large state universities. At the time, I thought it somewhat high and mighty to be demanding free health insurance when we were already getting so much for free--a tremendously prestigious education in exchange for little-to-no tuition, for example. (This is not to say that PhDs do not "pay" for their education, in blood, sweat, and tears. But, with some frugality and austerity, the living stipend we are given is not unlivable. Most of the payment comes in the form of tears.)

To be clear--at the University of Chicago, the first whisperings of graduate student organization came at a time when PhD students were not universally funded at the same level. In fact, it was through the efforts of organized graduate students--in some cases, against the professed wishes of their professors--that the University finally agreed to fund all PhD candidates equally, which meant a dramatic drop in enrollments in the Humanities and Social Science divisions. But it was being around and intimate with this organization and seeing its effects--only just before the whole world watched the United Auto Workers let themselves get royally screwed in order to save their existence--that made me think twice about the power of collective action, if not of collective bargaining.

So, when Karen Lewis called me "sister," it was as if she had said my name, even though I was just one among nearly 30,000 Chicago Teachers' Union members. It would be several months before I became more familiar with the various caucuses and curmudgeons, the in-fighting that happens in every big family.

In my own nuclear family, I am the only girl of five children. That's a big family, by the standards around which I grew up. And being the only girl could be a lonely existence, at times. It was sort of like being an only child, while also being a middle child--which I also am. When I tell people that I'm the only girl, they respond in one of two ways: "I'm sorry, that must have been rough" or, "You must have been really spoiled." Well, of course, both are true, as far as these things go. It was rough and I was spoiled. I was treated like an only child and like everyone's annoying kid sister, all at the same time, and by everyone in not only my immediate family, but also my extended family, in which, in my generation on my dad's side, there is but one girl: this one.

The second girl to come along came along around 1989 or thereabouts, and she was my first real sister: my sister-in-law, the one I wrote about some weeks ago who is Tim Kreider's sister. When I read Tim's essay in We Learn Nothing titled "Sister World," I felt an uncanny, and misplaced, sense of concern and anger when I read this paragraph, worth reproducing in its entirety:

I'd always thought of being adopted as being about as interesting and significant a fact about myself as being left-handed or having family in Canada. What seems freakish and fascinating to me is something so commonplace most people take it for granted: being related. As an outsider and a newcomer to this phenomenon--what people call kinship, or blood--I may have a privileged perspective on it, like Tocqueville visiting America. What's so familiar to you it's invisible still seems outlandish to me. For most people the bonds of blood and history are inextricable, but I experienced them in isolation from one another, just like my transgendered friend Jenny has had the rare vantage of living as both a man and a woman. Meeting biological relatives for the first time in midlife, I felt like one of those people, blind from birth, whose vision is surgically restored, and must blunder about in an unintelligible new world, learning, through trial and error, how to see. You can't understand the word blue until you see the sky for the first time.

My first thought when I read this, truly, was, "Hey! You can't talk about my sister like that!" Of course, that makes no sense--she is my sister by the law of marriage, and his by what seems like a firmer, more permanent law, the law of adoption. But it shows, with some clarity, the difference in idea that I might have about "relatedness" than someone like Tim, who grew up adopted and therefore always-already alone. You'll notice, for example, that he slyly equates being adopted with singularity: the "freakishness" of being left-handed and having relatives from Canada, both of which are, I think, true about him. I don't have figures in front of me, but I can recognize that being adopted puts one in a silent minority, just like having Canadian relatives or being left-handed does. (My sister-in-law is not left-handed, but my nephew is, which means left-handedness runs in her family, by law and by blood, as it does in mine, by blood and by law.)

Now that I re-read the passage with new eyes, I see that Tim is more ambivalent than I thought about having blood relatives vs. having legal relatives. He rightly historicizes blood relation as only one kind of "kinship," but he comes frighteningly close to qualifying it as a better kind of kinship than the other kind. If one could only have sisters by blood, then I still wouldn't have any. I could, in fact, never have any, a fact that became clear to me when I was 5 years old, and, when my fourth brother was born, I asked my mom, while still in the hospital, when she would be having another child. She responded, with memorable vehemence, "never!"

Walter Benn Michaels (that guy again), makes a very strong case in his book Our America that the idea of the nuclear family as it is developed in modern American literature is a cover story for another very American idea: race and racialism. One of the novels he reads (attacks) on these grounds is one of my favorites: Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury. In that novel, Walter reads everyone's love of Caddy, the absent sister, as not incest, per se, but rather, as a version of racism: preferring your family means preferring those of your own race. Similarly, the Ex-Colored Man in Johnson's novel endorses racism by his very renunciation of it: you can only refuse to be colored and choose to pass if there is something to being colored other than the color of your skin--something like blood, as in the famous "one drop rule," or, in Walter's argument, something like culture.

Learning this argument from taking a class with Walter and reading his book made me initially uncomfortable, as I have written before. I am a mixed-"race" child, and therefore a mixed-culture child, and that part--the culturally-other-part--of my identity has always been strong, even though I sort of "got over it" when I was in college and learned of more interesting and worrisome dilemmas having more to do with racial inequality, and less to do with me. But, in spite of Walter, and maybe, just a little bit, to spite him, I care about my people. The the reading of Faulkner, who I already knew as a white supremacist, was almost more painful than the reading of Johnson, who I already knew was not a white supremacist. I loved that novel! And I loved it first and foremost, I am ashamed to say, because I automatically love, blindly, all stories about families in which there is only one girl, from Duck Tales and Voltron to Emma and The Corrections. Caddy Compson's status as the only girl in her family is the least of the Compson family's worries, and The Sound and the Fury is, as even Walter admits, a great work of art, for other reasons. But, for me, just like he does in As I Lay Dying, Faulkner had me at the one girl, freaks though they are. Like me, the women in these stories have no sisters. It is my oldest, and weakest, soft spot.

Like Walter, Tim goes on, in his story, to discover that having cultural values in common can feel more like brother-sisterhood than having family in common. His biological sisters are more "like him": they are humanists, they like--oddly--the same kinds of food. But I have to say, though all four of my brothers are doctors, and we don't always find a lot to talk about, I still love all four of them tremendously, with much of the room in my admittedly roomy heart. And I love my sister who is Tim's sister. She and I have a lot in common, too: she is a fiery, assertive, professional woman, and she has been an inspiration to me ever since I met her, when I was very young and had very, very high expectations for my first sister. She is also, as it happens, a great mom. To say the least, it's not easy, these days, to be a fiery professional woman and a great mom at the same time.

My expectations were met not only by my sister-in-law, but also by my sister Karen Lewis and my 30,000 brothers and sisters in the Chicago Teachers Union when we went on strike and won. For the first time in my life, I closed ranks with my union family and Won! An! Argument! The argument was about more than just one thing, as they usually are: it was about teaching and teachers, about dignity and workers' rights, and about real education equality for students. But, in some ways, it didn't matter that what I was fighting for wasn't the same as what every single one of my sisters and brothers was fighting for. The fight, itself, felt good and right. And what we won has benefited my students, my colleagues, and me, personally, and other teachers, throughout the nation. And no one, not even Karen Lewis, knows just what causes or what people the CTU will benefit next, but the strike sure gave people a helluva lot of hope. There are only a few things I have done in my life of which I am prouder. And, after the strike, at my dissertation defense, I was able to say that I know, for a fact, that participating in a strike is fun. Like (I wrote "just like" and then decided to delete the "just") the workers and humanists in my dissertation, I sang songs and marched in the streets. I even sang one of the same songs, with different words. For Langston Hughes, Theodore Ward, and many others, the song was both "John Brown's Body" and "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." For me, it was "Solidarity Forever." I sang it over and over. It's my favorite.

Family really is forever, and forever is a long time. Has being a sister paid off for me? In the Barton family, I can say with certainty that it has. In the family of the brotherhood of teachers and educators? In the family of man? It remains to be seen. I am no longer a CTU delegate. I had to relinquish the position because I needed the time and energy I put into it for other purposes, being, as I was, a wounded soldier. But, happily, I have not yet had to give up being a sister in the struggle. What that struggle is remains for me to find out, in the only way we sometimes can find out: waiting.

I had a chance to see Walter Benn Michaels speak last week, and I also had the chance to ask him and his fellow panelists what should be done about the fact that very few people in K-12 teaching take any notice of him or the other impressive literary historians in his company. He told me that I should stop worrying about what goes on in the high school English classroom and keep following Karen Lewis! If that's not having my life come full circle, then it is something like that--a good ending to my story of sisterhood, at the very least.

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.

Remembering Derrion Albert: James Baldwin and The Dead

This post is dedicated (if blog posts can be dedicated!) to my dissertation advisors, Ken Warren and Jackie Goldsby, as well as to the many, many other people who have taught me about race, class, and gender. It is also in memory of the many thousands gone. May their deaths not be in vain.

Here's a riddle. Read it, and don't look ahead!

Two people are walking down the street, alone, at night, in an "urban" area. Person A is headed east. Person B is headed west. They both notice each other. What happens next, and why?

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Your answer will say a lot about where you're coming from, but you should not feel ashamed. "Political correctness" does a lot of shaming, and so does anti-racist discourse in general.

We used to use a less generic version of this scenario when I and several other grad students, under the tutelage of my advisor, ran discussions as part of the "diversity" component of freshman orientation at University of Chicago (we called it something else, but that's what it was). In that scenario, Person A was a black male. Person B was you. Is that what you imagined? In the orientation, we asked students if they would cross the street. This has, in fact, long been how green, entitled young people are introduced to an urban university setting. If you're uncomfortable, they tell you, then cross the street. Be extra aware of your surroundings. This is a crash course in "street smarts."

The freshmen would always get really uncomfortable at this point because many of them knew in their hearts that they would cross the street, but to do so is not "politically correct." They would often then make naive--not ignorant--statements about how the man was dressed, or how old he was, or what he looked like. Both times I ran these sessions (over two years), the same thing happened: eventually, a  young black woman would announce that she, herself, would cross the street in this scenario, and the rest of the students would appear incredibly relieved. But then, ideally, there would be a male student of color in the session as well, who would describe how being treated that way makes him feel.

So, who was Person A in your scenario, and who was Person B? Here are some options:

• A: a robber B: you
• A: your daughter B: a rapist or kidnapper
• A: George Zimmerman B: Trayvon Martin
• A: Emmett Till B: "a white woman"
• A: a "gangbanger" B: a rival
• A: Henry Louis Gates B: a policeman

Misunderstandings caused by bias range from the profound to the ridiculous. When the graduate students who ran these sessions would debrief about this topic, there was always tension. The female students would profess their ambivalence about this particular scenario, given their own fear of walking alone in Hyde Park. Other students would also profess ambivalence: of all my friends living in Hyde Park over the last 8 years, only about half a dozen of them have been assaulted, but the fear of it looms. When I spoke with my 11th graders this year about the same scenario, they had similar feelings. They said that they, as Person A, always cross the street when they are alone, if Person B is a stranger of a certain age, dress, and gender. They also said that it hurts their feelings when they are made to feel like they are Person B, and another person crosses the street to avoid them. We talked about this puzzle in a discussion of Trayvon Martin's death, him of the hoodie, iced tea, and Skittles. My students told me that they thought Trayvon could have been one of them.

I've been thinking a lot in the last month and the last week about both Trayvon and Derrion Albert, as well as another child whose name achieved infamy in death: Emmett Till. I have been mourning the children that we've lost in Chicago and the country. Derrion Albert became famous, in his death, as an example of youth violence. Last year, Harper High School, a CPS school in the Englewood neighborhood, lost sixteen students to violence.

Are these children martyrs? Maybe. A martyr dies for a cause. An end to structural racism is certainly a cause, but it's a cause that is so ongoing that we all have compassion fatigue. Instead of noticing that we are not living in a post-racial society when these things happen, we get angry at the President for pointing out that he, too, is black, that Trayvon could have been his son. We get angry at the President for saying that the police officer who arrested Gates did a "stupid" thing. We excuse Gates because he was a Harvard professor wearing a three-piece suit. We excuse the officer because Gates is black. Beer summits take place. Meanwhile, children keep dying.

When James Baldwin was writing, we did not yet have compassion fatigue, and he wrote with compassion and rage about the deaths and murders of his closest friends and more distant acquaintances: Eugene Worth (d. 1946), on whom he based the character Rufus Scott, who, in Another Country (1963), commits suicide by leaping from "the bridge named for the father of his country"--the George Washington Bridge. Medgar Evers (d. 1963), to whom he dedicated, along with the four girls killed when a terrorist bombed a church in Birmingham in 1963, the play Blues for Mister Charlie, which was based on the death of Emmett Till (1954). Malcolm, d. 1965. Martin, d. 1968. Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, 1969.  The unknown thousands killed by lynchings or in race-related uprisings in Detroit (1943 and 1967), Harlem (1919, 1935, 1943, 1964), East St. Louis (1917), Los Angeles (1943, 1965, 1992), Oakland/Berkeley (1967-68), Ole Miss (1962), Tulsa (1921), Newark (1967), Washington, D.C. (1919 and 1968), and Chicago (1919, 1951, 1961, 1966, 1968).* Many of these cities had further issues with race-related protests-cum-violence after Baldwin's death. Crown Heights, Brooklyn, in 1991. L.A. again in 1992. Detroit again and again. Oakland in 2009. And Ole Miss....last month!?!? Is it possible?

It says something, to be sure, about our "nation of nations" that we boast the longest list of "ethnic riots" in this Wikipedia article. If Baldwin were alive, he would take one look at us and say something like: "Post-racial society, my ass." Outside the U.S.? We're considered by many not a racial utopia (which is what I was brought up to believe, being biracial), but, rather, a racial dystopia, where if you're young, black, and male, you have a better chance of ending up dead or in prison by the age of 25 than you do of going to college.

Baldwin wrote Blues for Mister Charlie between 1954, when Till died, and 1963, when Evers died. It was first performed in 1964. Baldwin made Richard Henry a cross between Till, Evers, and his friend Eugene Worth--Richard is a young adult, 20-ish, who has spent some time in the north trying to become a jazz musician, and has come back home south, addicted to drugs and penniless. I sometimes wonder why Baldwin didn't make Richard a child. Till was 14 when he was murdered "for whistling at a white woman." Perhaps Baldwin wanted the actor playing him to be really good. Perhaps even Baldwin couldn't stand the idea of putting a 14-year-old on stage and then having the audience watch while he is murdered by racism.

Much of the history of racial violence in Chicago takes place at the beach. This is not a coincidence. Chicago's beaches were informally segregated for years because no one wanted black boys to wade in the water with white girls. The "myth of the black rapist," as it is called, has probably killed more black men than the Afghanistan and Iraq wars combined (though those wars are also killing predominantly black, brown, and poor-white American men). Thousands of men, women, and children were lynched in the South in the hundred years between the end of the Civil War and the passing of the Voting Rights Act. Many of these were black men, and the majority of them were accused of raping white women, touching white women, or just looking at white women the wrong way. Tom Robinson in To Kill a Mockingbird isn't just a fictional character. He's real. I first learned about this kind of injustice from children's literature. I read Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry at 10, and To Kill a Mockingbird at 14 (and then once a year, every year thereafter, for a long time). I credit those books (and my Grandpa Barton (nee Bortugno) and my mom) with teaching me to hate racial injustice at a very early age.

But there is a problem with Blues for Mister Charlie, as with Native Son and Invisible Man, and it's this: those great black male authors, my heroes, were sexist! Bigger Thomas stuffs a white woman's body in a furnace and then beats a black woman to death with a brick. Ellison's Jack-the-Bear sexually manipulates a rich white woman. In Blues, Jo Britten, the white woman that Richard Henry flirts with--on purpose, to make her uncomfortable--is a stupid harpie. And Juanita, the black woman whom everyone is in love with, is a magic negress: Richard loves her, Richard's father loves her, all of the other students love her. Even Parnell James, the Atticus Finch-esque newspaper editor, is in love with her. All of them think that she can fix their lives. Perhaps the worst version of racist-America-as-white-woman was LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka's Lula in Dutchman. Man, I love-hate that play. Lula, a symbol for America and the very first manic-pixie-dream-girl, murders Clay, a young black man with all the world before him. Racist America sure is a femme fatale. What about the black girls and women? What about Sweet Lorraine, and Alice Childress, and Gwendolyn Brooks, and Margaret Walker, and Paule Marshall, and Ann Petry, and all the unknown babymamas? Many thousands gone, indeed.

But I'm still thinking about martyrs. The Southern Poverty Law Center's list of Civil Rights Martyrs ends with King's assassination. Could we or should we think of Derrion and Trayvon as Civil Rights Martyrs? I know that Derrion's name has been coming up a lot in talks of school closings in Chicago. I have a friend in the history department at U of C who also made this argument last spring, when U of C had a conference on how to write the history of Jim Crow, now that we live in a "post-racial" (sarcasm) society. Toussaint Losier, who has spent his entire graduate career advocating and agitating for workers' and prisoners' rights in Chicago (and therefore I don't think he'll mind my using his name), gave a brilliant (to my mind) paper about mass-incarceration, referring to Michelle Alexander's bestseller The New Jim Crow. But the introduction to his paper was about Trayvon and the response to his death.

What have we learned from the deaths of these children? This summer, Rahm Emanuel went on the CBS Evening News and begged the gangbangers to go into the alleys and shoot each other up.

"We've got two gangbangers, one standing next to a kid. Get away from that kid. Take your stuff away to the alley. Don't touch the children of the city of Chicago. Don't get near them."

Man, you sound tough on crime when you say shit like that, Mayor Rahm. When you talk about "family values" like some sort of drunk (on power) Reganite. But you forget something. Gangbangers are children, too. Anyone who has watched The Wire, or actually worked in a Chicago Public School, or read an article about the death of a teen promising that the dead teen was not a gangbanger, but rather an honors student, knows that the ones who die are usually the children. Calling them "thugs" is an attempt to make their lives worth less than the life of another human being. All due respect, Mr. Mayor, but gangbangers don't deserve to die any more than any other child does. SIXTEEN dead in just one Chicago high school in one year. What must it be like to grow up knowing for certain that someone you know, maybe someone close to you, won't live past 18?

The group CeaseFire has been doing amazing work trying to get the word out about this, in part through the incredible and sad PBS Frontline documentary The Interrupters. I showed The Interrupters to my students, and the reaction was mixed. Some of them were fascinated, some thought it was kinda boring. After all, they're living in it. If you're a young man in the neighborhood where I teach, you can't wear a hoodie, they told me. At least not with the hood up. If you have your hood up, people will stop you and ask you who you are, which means, "With whom are you affiliated?" Children on the south and west sides of Chicago plan their routes to school so that they don't cross gang boundaries. They won't walk to the library if it means someone will not-recognize-them and jump them. I have students who have joined gangs just so that they'll feel safe walking around their neighborhood. "Gangbangers" is a term that dehumanizes them, turns them into criminals, when a lot of them are just kids trying to survive.

On the last day of school last year, my principal told our students to stay safe and stay indoors. That is the hell that our children are living in, Mayor Rahm. So yeah, it makes me pretty angry when you end funding for the "Culture of Calm" program that was started in response to Derrion Albert's death, just because it hasn't fixed structural racism in three years. And yet you pour money into charter networks that will treat the children like they're already criminals, making them wear uniforms and walk in single file, not speak unless spoken to, cover up all their tattoos. And then you, Mayor Rahm, and you, President Obama, and you, Arne Duncan, do photo ops at these schools, elementary schools with silent hallways, where the kids raise their hands "crisply" and SLANT, just like good little robots. And the teachers and principals say that it's all for the children, that this is how children succeed. They're wrong. That is structural racism. Teaching students how to love dead white poets, how to eat at a restaurant, how to "do school." It's true that they need to learn to play the game. But they need to play the game in order to change the game.

But shame on you, Mr. President! The "melee" that killed Derrion Albert was caused by school closings that included kids from Altgeld Gardens, where you once worked as a community organizer. Remember where you came from, for once in your life!

When I was in my second year of graduate school, Lauren Berlant told me that I needed to write with more rage. My hero(es) for this kind of writing are Baldwin (and Berlant). If 16 dead children in one school in one year doesn't fill you with rage, then maybe it's true that you're not paying attention.


*I'm sure I've left some out. See here and here for somewhat comprehensive lists.