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.

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.

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."

I'm a Feminist Again: A Micro-autobiography

Now, I'm guessing that the majority of my handful of readers have read the title up top and said, "again"?

Yes, again. I have always been a feminist, even, I think, before I knew the word, because I have a strong, successful mother and I grew up in a household with four brothers and no sisters. Us girls gotta defend ourselves. Someone--my dad?--gave me one of those little feminist quote books that you can get in the bargain section at Barnes and Noble. Maybe I bought it for myself. I had a little commonplace book that I started sophomore year that had all these feminist sayings in it. I got all mad at my family whenever they tried to tease me about PMS (which they did all the time!) I loved Gloria Steinem and Joan Didion.

But when I was in college, I sort of got over feminism. College was a magical place of surprising levels of gender equality. Maybe Title IX has something to do with that--no sarcasm, that thought really just occurred to me. In college, gender-based literary studies sort of turned me off. I did take one class that I really loved about race and class, so I started to get interested in that. My roommate all four years of college is/was queer and I want to say he was a gender studies major, but now I can't remember. He was really involved in the women's center and also the LGBT group. College was the first time I had a lot of gay friends, so I got really interested in the queer studies side of gender studies, but a lot less interested in the women's studies side.

The Quaker school was also very progressive from a gender standpoint. We had faculty members who were out, we had an active GSA, my colleague taught a gender studies senior elective, and tons of students took it. We had very few problems with body image or disordered eating, even with the boys on the wrestling team, which had the same following as a football team (since we didn't have one of those. Football is too violent for Quakers.) It's true that I sometimes butted heads with male and female students in ways that had to do with gender, but the students at that school didn't seem to "need" much education (though they always do, I now realize) in political correctness, because Quaker education is awesome like that.

Political correctness, by the way, is a sort of obnoxious but convenient name for the practice of avoiding saying things that are racist, sexist, homophobic, or disrespectful toward people with disabilities, or disrespectful, discriminatory, or stereotyping of any one group. A lot of people think political correctness is silly, but maybe they wouldn't if they had the experience I had at the beginning of this year, with my 9th grade students unwittingly whispering sexist anti-Asian racial slurs, at first as a joke, and then, after I had explained how personally offensive it was, about me directly. (This is a "teens don't know any better, and they're mean" moment.) Since everyone now reading this blog knows where my school is, I don't want to embarrass my school or my students by explaining any further, but let me just say it was shockingly ignorant. Once the Dean of Students came into my class to explain to them the seriousness of what they were doing, it was over. I'm really proud of my 9th graders for taking it seriously, and several apologized to me personally.

So anyway, back to feminism. In grad school I got really interested in reading about the history of gender and class in a class with Lauren Berlant, and I also continued to be really interested in the dynamics of gender and race and class. But making the argument "this text is misogynistic" just didn't interest me at all. So I sort of left it. I planned one dissertation chapter where I was going to talk about gender and these two awesome female playwrights (Lorraine Hansberry, who you've heard of, and Alice Childress, who, in my opinion, deserves to be even more famous). But I ended up cutting that chapter to save time. I may end up writing it some day. But it's not all that surprising, given the trend of my interests, that it was the chapter I decided to cut. Of all the texts discussed in my diss, only one is by a woman (Alice Childress's play Trouble in Mind, which has experienced a bit of a revival in the last decade, so if you ever get a chance to see it, do see it. It's a brilliant play.)

These days I find myself returning to my feminist roots, including rediscovering Didion (I mean, I've read Didion all along, but right now I'm on a Didion bender. I wish she would let me write her biography. That's never gonna happen.) The main reason, I am beginning to notice, is that my students are just dumbfoundingly ignorant about gender and race, and the whole multiculturalism revolution in general, and, sad to say, so are a lot of teachers (I've written about this before). When I was in coursework for my teaching certificate I wrote an essay about how there are literally libraries of books about "the problem with black boys" and ONE about black and brown girls.

Now, it may surprise you, since my school is about 95% Latino and about 5% African American, but my students constantly use racial slurs about each other and about their white and Asian teachers, and literally, literally sexually harass each other and their female teachers. My students say all kinds of awful things--racist, sexist, you name it. And they sometimes think awful things. And my girls have terrible body image issues. And lots of girls accidentally become mothers.

So I had one student last year who became a mom at 15, and She. Is. Awesome. She has done such an amazing job of figuring out how to give her daughter a great life and still be an honors student. I'm so proud of her and impressed by her that sometimes I wish that she could help me if I ever get pregnant--and I'm twice her age. This year, I have another student, a junior, who is due at the end of the month. She's in lots of discomfort, but she is an extraordinary young woman, because she comes to school almost every day, and she does all of her work, and she's one of the hardest working students I've ever met.

So one day I asked the one student from last year, now a junior, if we had a support group for moms at our school. Here's our conversation:
Me: Do we have a group for students who are moms?
She: No. I kind of wish we did.
Me: Yeah. Lots of other schools have one. Maybe I'll start one or try to find someone to start one.
She: That would be great. I'll help you if you want.
Me (in my head): No, you'll start it and I'll help you.

So that is exactly what's happening! I'm so excited. She's excited. Our co-sponsor is excited. The other moms and expecting moms at the school are excited. I just hope it actually gets off the ground. I asked my student--the one who will now put on her transcript that the was the founding president of this group--what we should call the group when we talk about it at school, so it sort of has a code name. She said--I'm not making this up--that it should be "something about not giving up." So we decided to wait for inspiration to hit us and let each other know when we had an idea. I asked my husband, who is a brilliant song lyricist. He said we could use FIGHT as an acronym, and then we figured out what the words would stand for. But then I said it would be better if it was a Spanish word, so then he figured out an acronym for L.U.C.H.A. Either way, I'm going to have to turn away the male students (one in particular I already have in mind) who think it's a fight club or a wrestling club. But it's gonna be great. And this is another one of those times when I'm just so full of love for my students for helping themselves, and believing in themselves, and fighting for what they deserve.