Monthly Archives: October 2013
Is Learning to Read Natural?
I need to offer as few clarifications since my recent post on how the teaching of reading has been historically corrupted by the influence of reading programs. The motivation of the clarification comes from a comment posted by KenS.*
First, my literacy teaching for the past thirty years does rest on a controversial concept—that grammatical knowledge is essentially biological (see Pinker and Chomsky). This I believe is important as it helps keep literacy instruction from being reduced to seeing language as something acquired.
Next, and to KenS’s questions, speaking and listening are inherent to being human, but reading and writing are artificial, thus acquiring reading and writing are not natural.
However, my point in the earlier post, which certainly wasn’t clear or fully explored, is that Dewey’s claim about not needing to teach reading is grounded in that when children have privileged environments, notably ones that are language and text rich, the acquisition of reading can appear to be natural.
Our goals, then, should be to insure all children have privileged homes that are conducive to language acquisition and that schools provide parallel environments that foster and reinforce literacy acquisition.
One additional caveat is all of the above is addressing decoding and comprehension (“reading” is a complex term). But I never see decoding and comprehension as going far enough in formal education.
Direct instruction and careful fostering of critical literacy must be provided to all students, and the acquisition of critical literacy, I believe, is certainly not acquired naturally since it requires that we confront and challenge all of the conditions that constitute “natural” for each person.
I hope this is more clear and addresses the great comment from KenS.
* See the comment from Kens at my original post and below:
First, Dr. Thomas, thanks, as always, for making me aware of historical perspectives I was not previously aware of. Your writing always provides much food for thought.
I am not certain of your point with this post, however, and because understanding how young people learn to read (or don’t) has become so important to me, I hope you will clarify for me.
Mea culpa: Despite the fact that I am in my 17th year of teaching middle school English, I have come to see myself as a teacher of reading only gradually. Earlier in my career I saw it as my job to teach literature and academic writing. It took me far longer than it should have, but I finally began to wonder why students reached middle school with such widely varying aptitudes for understanding what they read.
My question pertains to your statement that your “perspective on reading isn’t all that different from Dewey’s” belief that “reading just happened.” How close, then is your perspective to Dewey’s position?
Dewey’s stance contradicts what I’ve come to believe – although there seems to be much disagreement about reading instruction, even among experts, so I am keeping an open mind.
OK, I’ll try to be brief: Pinker, in The Language Instinct, convinced my that young children are wired to learn oral language without formal instruction. Hart and Risley, in Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experiences of Young American Children, convinced me that the extensive differences in the quantity and quality of verbal experiences among children had an enormous impact on children’s readiness to learn once they started school. Lakoff and Johnson, in Metaphors We Live By, led me to believe that the advantages affluent children had in verbal practice led not only to a larger vocabulary, but a conceptual system far more prepared to make sense of the abstract content they encountered in school.
But here is where I disagree with Dewey; here is where I think he just didn’t understand that a reason he didn’t remember being taught to read is that his young mind didn’t have the conceptual framework yet to be metacognitive about what he was undergoing in his childhood.
Dr. Diane McGuinness, in several books, has argued that children don’t naturally learn to read any more than they naturally learn to work on car engines. Yes, some people have more aptitude for learning how car engines work, just as some people learn to read faster. But, still, having some guidance from someone more experienced seems a “natural” part of our development as humans.
McGuinness points out that writing systems are a human invention and the English alphabetic system is particularly complicated. To fully understand it, children must be taught to decode written words and encode into writing the sounds we produce as words. She also points out that the brain is an incredible pattern-spotting machine, and children will learn, even when teaching methods are not particularly efficient.
Now, to be clear, it seems to me there are essentially two stages (that must overlap) to learning to read – learning to decode and encode the code that is our alphabet, and learning to read for meaning. Perhaps I misunderstood your position, and you were referring to learning to read for meaning. To some extent, I think that can occur more “naturally,” as our brains are also meaning-seeking.
Finally, all this has led me to believe most definitely that discrepencies in wealth and power and priviledge are responsible for the much of the discrepencies we see in children’s academic achievment. In that regard, I agree with you 100%.
Teaching Reading and Children: Reading Programs as “Costume Parties”
Well into my 30s and during my doctoral program, I was finally afforded the opportunity to read carefully the work of John Dewey. This late scholarship on my part is an indictment of teacher certification, but it is also a window into the historical and current misinformation about the state of reading and the teaching of reading in U.S. schools.
Dewey, the Father of Progressive Education, I discovered, believed that we do not need to teach reading; Dewey noted that reading just happened, basing this claim on his own inability to recall having been taught to read.
The first time I came across this—considering I was then and remain primarily a teacher of English—I was puzzled that Dewey could be so wrong about reading and so compelling* about education in general.
With time, however, I realized that my initial rejection of Dewey’s belief about reading sprang from my perspective as a teacher: Teachers are predisposed to seeing themselves as change agents, as causational in the learning of others.
As an avid reader and writer, if I am honest, my perspective on reading isn’t all that different from Dewey’s. It is likely that Dewey and I experienced similar conditions of privilege that allowed something like a natural learning of reading, and literacy in general.
And it is here that we must confront a foundational question: Why have we declared a perpetual reading crisis in the U.S. throughout the last century?**
Lou LaBrant: A Progressive Voice
Lou LaBrant began teaching in 1906—in a one-room school, nonetheless. LaBrant’s career spanned most of the 20th century, ending in 1971.
Throughout the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, LaBrant built a substantial publishing record that focused on a few powerful commitments: (1) Endorsing progressive education, (2) calling for free reading, and (3) highlighting the importance of libraries and the role of librarians as teachers (LaBrant, 1940).
Progressive education and Dewey became and often remain targets of traditional claims that U.S. public education is a failure. But, as Alfie Kohn has detailed:
Despite the fact that all schools can be located on a continuum stretching between the poles of totally progressive and totally traditional — or, actually, on a series of continuums reflecting the various components of those models — it’s usually possible to visit a school and come away with a pretty clear sense of whether it can be classified as predominantly progressive. It’s also possible to reach a conclusion about how many schools — or even individual classrooms — in America merit that label: damned few. The higher the grade level, the rarer such teaching tends to be, and it’s not even all that prevalent at the lower grades. (Also, while it’s probably true that most progressive schools are independent, most independent schools are not progressive.)
The rarity of this approach, while discouraging to some of us, is also rather significant with respect to the larger debate about education. If progressive schooling is actually quite uncommon, then it’s hard to blame our problems (real or alleged) on this model. Indeed, the facts have the effect of turning the argument on its head: If students aren’t learning effectively, it may be because of the persistence of traditional beliefs and practices in our nation’s schools.
LaBrant’s career and her scholarship, then, represent both an accurate case for progressive approaches to teaching reading and a record of how U.S public schools have failed the promise those practices offered.
More so than Dewey, LaBrant’s scholarship and practice represent a practical progressive pedagogy that rises above “natural” and includes “critical”:
Two adults speak of “progressive education.” One means a school where responsibility, critical thinking, and honest expression are emphasized; the other thinks of license, lack of plans, irresponsibility. They argue fruitlessly about being “for” or “against” progressive education. (LaBrant, 1944, pp. 477-478)
Dewey’s claim of “natural” learning has led critics to demonizing the latter, while LaBrant’s practices are grounded in the former. In reality, again as Kohn shows, neither the misapplication of a laissez-faire progressivism nor holistic, child-centered progressivism has ever characterized the learning experiences of most U.S. students.
And thus, LaBrant’s arguments throughout the first half of the twentieth century remain relevant.
“[L]anguage behavior can not be reduced to formula,” LaBrant (1947) argued (p. 20)—emphasizing that literacy growth was complicated but flourished when it was child-centered and practical (for example, in the ways many privileged children experience in their homes because one or more of the parents are afforded the conditions within which to foster their children’s literacy).
By mid-twentieth century, LaBrant (1949) had identified the central failure of teaching reading: “Our language programs have been set up as costume parties and not anything more basic than that” (p. 16).
In fact, many years before this observation, LaBrant (1936) confronted the failure of implementing progressive philosophy in the real-world classroom:
An Experience Curriculum in English [A Report of a Commission of the National Council of Teachers of English. W. Wilbur Hatfield, Chairman. D. Appleton- Century Company, 1935], published only a the year ago, is already influencing the course of study in many schools. There is always danger in popular revision that the change may be confined to stated objectives and superficial devices, and that basic understandings may not be involved at all. A teacher eager to join the ranks of progressives recently asked the question: “How can I put the teaching of The Lady of the Lake on an experience basis in my ninth grade class?” The question is but little less absurd than the procedures of many curriculum revisers who re-arrange old materials, add a little in- formality to class discussions and present the result as a mark of progress. We must consequently beware lest many so-called “experience curriculums” be set up without recognition of opportunity for normal, strong and complex experiences, within which language development in reading, writing, talking and listening is an integral factor. (p. 295)
Despite LaBrant’s optimism above about the impact of NCTE’s report, the history of reading programs in the U.S. remains a disappointing trail of costume parties. In fact, the history of reading instruction as little more than a masquerade was tackled by LaBrant (1936) just five years before:
The cause for my wrath is not new or single. It is of slow growth and has many characteristics. It is known to many as a variation of the project method; to me, as the soap performance. With the project, neatly defined by theorizing educators as “a purposeful activity carried to a successful conclusion,” I know better than to be at war. With what passes for purposeful activity and is unfortunately carried to a conclusion because it will kill time, I have much to complain. To be, for a moment, coherent: I am disturbed by the practice, much more common than our publications would indicate, of using the carving of little toy boats and castles, the dressing of quaint dolls, the pasting of advertising pictures, and the manipulation of clay and soap as the teaching of English literature. At almost any meeting of teachers of English one may find, somewhere near the main entrance, a room full of exhibition work. This will include models of the castle from Ivanhoe, miniatures of the lake with Ellen’s isle, weaving ma-chines like those at Raveloe, and soap reproductions of Camelot. Recently a teacher attempted to protest against such an exhibition. The reply was that such materials always drew attention from teachers, more attention than lectures probably, and that pupils also found them interesting. …
That the making of concrete models will keep interested many pupils who would otherwise find much of the English course dull may be granted. The remedy would seem to be in changing the reading material rather than in turning the literature course into a class in handcraft. Good work in handcraft would best be accomplished by a teacher trained in that field. The sand table, the soap for carving, the tiny mirrors for lakes, and the rest of the paraphernalia belong, certainly, outside the literature class. (pp. 245, 246)
The misapplication of the project method as arts and crafts (instead of reading) is a close cousin to what passes for reading instruction today: Test-prep for reading tests (instead of reading).
Reading Programs as “Costume Parties”
If LaBrant were alive today, I suspect she would express the same wrath for Common Core and the high-stakes testing that are the source of the materials bonanza now sweeping across the U.S.: This is once again allowing reading programs to masquerade as reading instruction—except these costume parties are incredibly costly in terms of time and public funding and detrimental to the exact students who need genuine progressive learning environments the most.
Why, then, are we failing reading once again?
There is no market incentive for doing what is right in terms of reading.
New standards and new tests feed our consumer culture, but genuine reading reform would not.
In short, the sort of reading practices we have known to be effective since LaBrant’s career (and echoed by leading literacy experts decade after decade) simply don’t sell:
- Alleviate poverty and inequity so that all children live in homes that foster early reading development.
- Choice reading, not prescriptive reading programs, is essential to reading development.
- Access to books, such as libraries as well as books in the home, is also central to reading growth.
Thus, if genuine social and school reform focused on the above, instead of new standards, new tests, and new materials, consider the consequences:
If all children entered schools as literate as most affluent children, the reading program industry would be destroyed.
Just as the market economy of the U.S. depends on poverty to thrive (and thus market forces will never overcome poverty), the reading program industry depends on struggling readers and thus will never seek ways to foster reading among all children.
The choice before us is to continue the masquerade that is Common Core—one that lines the pockets of curriculum consultants, textbook and testing companies, and government bureaucrats—or to make a truly progressive commitment to both the lives and schools of all children, lives and schools that allow learning that seems natural.
References
LaBrant, L. (1949). A genetic approach to language. Unpublished manuscript, Institute of General Semantics, Lakeville, CT.
LaBrant, L. (1947). Um-brel-la has syllables three. The Packet, 2(1), 20-25.
LaBrant, L. (1944, November). The words they know. The English Journal, 33(9), 475-480.
LaBrant, L. (1940, February). Library teacher or classroom teacher? The Phi Delta Kappan, 22(6), pp. 289-291.
LaBrant, L.L. (1936). The library and “An experience curriculum in English.” The Elementary English Review, 13(8), pp. 295-297, 305.
LaBrant, L. (1931, March). Masquerading. The English Journal, 20(3), pp. 244-246.
Thomas, P. (2001). Lou LaBrant—A woman’s life, a teacher’s life. Huntington, NY: Nova Science Publishers, Inc.
* For the record, I am not a progressive, and I remain about equally disappointed in traditionalists and progressives in terms of educational practices. When I must acknowledge a label, I am most comfortable with “critical.”
** Without a historical perspective of education, the public may be unaware that at any moment throughout the 20th and into the 21st century, the public and professional claim about reading always includes: (a) children today aren’t reading as much as they used to, (b) our literacy rate is in crisis, and (c) we must make sure that all children can read [insert grade level here; in 2013, 3rd grade is the emergency year].
remnant 34: Orwell “loved his country and its working people”
Common Core in the Real World: Destroying Literacy through Standardization (Again)
I have a brief comedy routine I use with my students, typically early in each course I teach—in part to introduce them to me, and in part to make a point about literacy.* The joke goes like this:
“When I graduated high school,” I say, ” I had 7,000 comic books,” slight pause, “and no girl friend.”
The students typically laugh, and then I deadpan, “That’s not funny. That’s sad.”
When they suddenly stop laughing, I smile widely, and we all laugh together.**
I began collecting comic books—primarily to draw from them—in the summer before my ninth grade, the summer I learned I had scoliosis and would have to wear a huge back brace throughout my high school years (23 hours a day at first and throughout school hours into my junior year of high school). That situation provided me with yet another joke for my students; when I tell that part of my life story, I say that I called my back brace “the chick magnet.” More laughter.
By my sophomore year of high school, I was collecting, drawing from, and reading dozens of comics each month. I also had begun reading science fiction (SF) voraciously. I can still recall Lucifer’s Hammer, Rendezvous with Rama and Childhood’s End vividly—not the contents of the books so much as the reading was hard and that I felt accomplished by making my way through each one.
Lynn Harrill was my driver’s education teacher the summer before my tenth grade, and then my English teacher in both my sophomore and junior years. Lynn would prove to be the most important man and mentor in my life after my father, but during tenth grade, he told me that I needed to stop reading SF and start reading “real literature.”
And I did (well, I starting reading real literature, but didn’t stop reading SF). In the next several years, I had read everything by D.H. Lawrence (to whom Lynn introduced me), F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, and many other literary authors.
I owe a great deal to Lynn, despite his being wrong about his proclamation marginalizing SF (and indirectly my comics) and honoring literary fiction. But another moment in my sophomore year of English deserves mentioning.
A required book in my tenth grade was A Tale of Two Cities. The summative assessment on the novel was a multiple-choice test—on which I scored a 96, the highest grade in the class. Most of the students in the class—which was the highest track—made much lower, and they all were mad at me from ruining any chance at the grades being curved.
But that isn’t the important aspect of this story—what is?
I never read the novel.
I scored a 96 by reading the Cliff’s Notes and taking careful notes in class.
Common Core in the Real World: Destroying Literacy through Standardization (Again)
An essay in the Educational Research Bulletin addressing reading requirements in high school opens with the following:
Within the last few years heated discussion has centered around the question of free reading for high-school students in English classes. Critics have insisted that interest as a basis for book selection merely tends to establish poor taste; they have stressed the importance of organization in reading as in any program; they have assumed that free reading, with its emphasis upon pupil-direction, lacks content. Indeed, the arguments in slightly more abstract form are those frequently advanced against any program in whose construction pupils participate, and have been offered as criticism of the whole progressive-school movement. (p. 29)
While this could easily be a description of the debates surrounding Common Core, this is by Lou LaBrant, written in 1937.
LaBrant presents a careful study of the positive consequences of free reading in the context of the traditional view that students must be assigned reading and that students must also read primarily (if not only) from the Great Books. She concludes from the study:
The theory that in a free or extensive reading program designed to utilize interest and to serve individual needs there will be fruitless reading of light fiction gains no evidence from this study. The report does, however, point to the possibility that the adolescent has much greater power to read and to think intelligently about reading than the results of our conventional program have led us to believe. (p. 34)
In the seventy-plus years since LaBrant’s piece, as literacy scholars such as Stephen Krashen have argued and detailed in their research, student literacy has been shown to spring from choice reading and access to books (in the home and libraries)—not from prescribed reading lists, not from revised standards, and certainly not from testing reading.
Advocates for Common Core insist that CC is not prescriptive and that CC is not the tests to come from these new standards.
Those advocates are simply ignoring the real world and the history of standards-bases education in the U.S.; they are, in fact, confusing the use of “to be” verbs with “should.” It may very well be that CC should not be prescriptive and should not be reduced to the tests. But should does not dictate what most surely is and will be.
Last week, for example, a former student of mine who is now a high school English teacher texted me distraught. Her English department is aggressively pursuing a new policy to end the use of young adult (YA) literature in the high school courses at her school. Why?
The department leaders have argued that CC requires literature that is “rigorous.”
Despite having abundant evidence on her side (including research and that students do read voraciously YA literature), she has been told to stop her resistance.
Another former student of mine who teachers high school English also faced harsh evaluations during her first year of teaching because she designed and implemented a wonderful unit around The Hunger Games. Despite the huge popularity of the unit among her students (and among student not in her class who were drawn into the books because of word of mouth), the leaders of her department also reprimanded her for depending on lesser literature—arguing that her students needed higher quality reading (required Great Books, again).
In the real world, CC and the tests that are to follow have and will once again reinforce the exact practices that have harmed literacy among students for a century; teachers will be emboldened to assign Great Books (and marginalize further everything else) and teachers will be compelled to teach to the test.
In the real world, as Gerald Bracey has explained, what is tested is what is taught—especially when standards and testing are part of high-stakes accountability. CC may in fact raise (eventually) some reading test scores, but I guarantee it will only harm the teaching of literacy and the literacy of students.
I have slipped past the age of 50. I have read thousands of books and written several myself.
My greatest literacy joys remain authors I was never assigned, but discovered for myself—Milan Kundera, Kurt Vonnegut, Margaret Atwood, Haruki Murakami, Neil Gaiman.
My literary life can be traced back to my mother and the wealth of children’s books that populated my childhood home and then my deeply self-conscious nerd self as a teen sitting in my comic book room surrounded by comic books and stacks of Arthur C. Clarke novels.
I graduated high school with mostly As in math and science, intending to be physics major, because school had profoundly misled me about the joy and wonder of words.
In college, on my own, I learned otherwise.
There is no justification for CC and the tests that have and will follow if we genuinely seek to offer children the rich and valuable literacy that every child deserves. Denying students choice is ignoring what we know about literacy development as well as the essence of basic human agency.
Common Core in the real world is once again destroying literacy through standardization.
* This blog was inspired by Christopher Lehman @iChrisLehman.
** My newer joke springs from The Big Bang Theory; at some point I tell students I watch and enjoy the show, and then pause before saying quite seriously I don’t understand, however, why people think it’s funny. Then I smile widely.
The Central Issue at the Heart of America’s Growing Education Gap
Ali: “You must listen to me”
1972
James Baldwin declared in his No Name in the Street:
The truth is that the country does not know what to do with its black population now that the blacks are no longer a source of wealth, are no longer to be bought and sold and bred, like cattle; and they especially do not know what to do with young black men, who pose as devastating a threat to the economy as they do to the morals of young white cheerleaders. It is not at all accidental that the jails and the army and the needle claim so many, but there are still too many prancing around for the public comfort. Americans, of course, will deny, with horror, that they are dreaming of anything like “the final solution”—those Americans, that is, who are likely to be asked: what goes on in the vast, private hinterland of the American heart can only be guessed at, by observing the way the country goes these days. (Baldwin, 1998, pp. 432-433) [1]
George Carlin opened one of his best routines singing Muhammad Ali’s name as part of his album Class Clown (“Muhammad Ali – America the Beautiful”), explaining about Ali’s exile for refusing to fight in Vietnam:
He said, “No, that’s where I draw the line. I’ll beat ’em up, but I don’t want to kill ’em.” And the government said, “Well, if you won’t kill people, we won’t let you beat ’em up.”
1967-1970
From March 1967 to October 1970, Muhammad Ali lived in America the Beautiful, not as a free man, but as the embodiment of Baldwin’s declaration in 1972. Ali as African American and Black Muslim was trapped between the rule of law and his own code of ethics—which he explained as alternatives:
I have two alternatives: either go to jail or go to the army. But I would like to say that there is another alternative: and that alternative is justice.
This Ali in a suit and tie behind a microphone, glancing down to read from his prepared statement, stood in stark contrast to the Ali draped in a towel and swarmed in the boxing ring where he declared, “I shook up the world!”
1968
John Carlos and Tommy Smith stood, fists raised at the Summer Olympics.
Black people actually’ve been in jail for 400 years, we’ve been here in America….They can’t believe that I’m this strong. They thought they would weaken me and put fear in me by threatening to go to jail and taking my earning power. And they won’t let me work in America…
2013
My colleague, Scott Henderson, and I are currently editing a volume on James Baldwin, and during the review of the draft chapters for the collection, I began to see ads for a film about Muhammad Ali produced by HBO, Muhammad Ali’s Greatest Fight. The ads called to me in the same way I am always moved when I hear Carlin singing Ali’s name: “Muhammad Ali, Muhammad Ali, Muhammad Ali, it’s a nice musical name, Muhammad Ali.”
So I found myself watching the HBO film, at first not yet clear if it was a documentary (my hope) or a fictional film; I was certain I wasn’t interested in watching someone portray Ali. I wanted Ali.
And there he was, Muhammad Ali, archival footage to open the film, and then, despite the film focusing on the Supreme Court and the all-white crew of young men working at the Court, Ali appears throughout the story again and again. The real Ali—each time I could not stop myself from smiling at his bravado and his ability to float like a butterfly and sting like a bee outside the boxing ring.
But there is a subtext to this film focusing on the Supreme Court dominated by old white men. There is a subtext in 2013 about why now—why now is Ali’s fight with the government about his refusal to fight in Vietnam being recognized and validated?
Ali, once again, is pushed to the background in the HBO film, a work that becomes in many ways a layered narrative of privilege—white privilege and male privilege.
Some of those layers can be found in the book that provides the basis for HBO’s film.
Some of those layers can be found in the documentary that doesn’t appear to share the privileged status of an HBO production: The Trials of Muhammad Ali.
•
Privilege is a closed space.
That space is behind a wall that provides the privileged their perch of authority as well as a walling out those Others.
Ali, Carlos, Smith, and Malcolm X lived outside the wall, and still remain under the gaze of privilege—to be acknowledged and explained when the time is right, when those with privilege see fit.
Ali remains mostly cartoon in America, reduced to his athletic bravado (“I am the Greatest!”) in the same way Martin Luther King, Jr. is tolerated as a passive radical, but not as the voice of protest and action that complimented Ali’s anti-war convictions:
We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and for justice throughout the developing world, a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark, and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.
1933
Carter Godwin Woodson confronted The Mis-education of the Negro:
[T]he educational system as it has developed both in Europe and America [is] an antiquated process which does not hit the mark even in the case of the needs of the white man himself….The so-called modern education, with all its defects, however, does others so much more good than it does the Negro, because it has been worked out in conformity to the needs of those who have enslaved and oppressed weaker people….The same educational process which inspires and stimulates the oppressor with the thought that he is everything and has accomplished everything worth while, depresses and crushes at the same time the spark of genius in the Negro by making him feel that his race does not amount to much and never will measure up to the standards of other peoples. The Negro thus educated is a hopeless liability of the race. (pp. 4-5) [2]
1963
Baldwin asked, “Who is the nigger?”:
1966
And then Baldwin wrote in The Nation:
This is why those pious calls to “respect the law,” always to be heard from prominent citizens each time the ghetto explodes, are so obscene. The law is meant to be my servant and not my master, still less my torturer and my murderer. To respect the law, in the context in which the American Negro finds himself, is simply to surrender his self-respect….
These things happen, in all our Harlems, every single day. If we ignore this fact, and our common responsibility to change this fact, we are sealing our doom. Here is the boy, Daniel Hamm, speaking—speaking of his country, which has sworn to bung peace and freedom to so many millions. “They don’t want us here. They don’t want us—period! All they want us to do is work on these penny-ante jobs for them—and that’s it. And beat our heads in whenever they feel like it. They don’t want us on the street ’cause the World’s Fair is coming. And they figure that all black people are hoodlums anyway, or bums, with no character of our own. So they put us off the streets, so their friends from Europe, Paris or Vietnam—wherever they come from—can come and see this supposed-to-be great city.”
There is a very bitter prescience in what this boy—this “bad nigger”—is saying, and he was not born knowing it. We taught it to him in seventeen years. He is draft age now, and if he were not in jail, would very probably be on his way to Southeast Asia. Many of his contemporaries are there, and the American Government and the American press are extremely proud of them. They are dying there like flies; they are dying in the streets of all our Harlems far more hideously than flies. A member of my family said to me when we learned of the bombing of the four little girls in the Birmingham Sunday school, “Well, they don’t need us for work no more. Where are they building the gas ovens?” Many Negroes feel this; there is no way not to feel it.
•
Privilege is a spider’s web.
Where is the space for Ali to speak for Ali? When will that space exist, and how?
I agree with Carlin that there is music in Ali’s name, but the song remains bittersweet—too hard to swallow in 2013.
I cannot disentangle the web of history that remains attached to all of us, regardless of how hard we try to pull the invisible strings from our faces, our clothes, and our skin.
That web we cannot free ourselves from is privilege—and privilege demands only two alternatives.
But as Ali explained, there is a third alternative and “that alternative is justice.”
It is time, we must listen to Ali.
[1] Baldwin, J. (1998). James Baldwin: Collected essays. New York, NY: The Library of America. Originally published in 1972, No Name in the Street.
[2] Woodson, C. G. (1933). The mis-education of the negro. New York, NY: Tribeca Books.
—–
For Further Viewing and Reading
To Jimmy (and Jose), with Love: I Walk Freely among Racism
James Baldwin (Aug. 2, 1924 – Dec. 1, 1987)
“The Deliberately Silenced, or the Preferably Unheard”
What Would James Baldwin Do (Say, Write)?
A Report from Occupied Territory, James Baldwin (1966)
Knocked the Hell Out by ‘The Trials of Muhammad Ali’, David Zirin
U.S. Needs Moratorium on (Privileged) White Men Pontificating on Race, Class, Gender
Most (privileged) white men are wrong about race, class, and gender—and while Mike Petrilli isn’t unique, he does represent how and why:
Second, the reason the overwhelming majority of children are born poor is that they are born to young single mothers without much education or many job prospects. These mothers will struggle mightily to provide the kind of home environment that is necessary to help children get off to a good start in life and in school. To put it bluntly, they tend to be bad parents. (Not “bad” in a moral sense but “bad” as in “ineffective”; with their brains literally maxed out with basic survival, it’s easy to understand why.)
While it is embarrassing enough that Petrilli thinks putting “bad” in quote marks and offering a parenthetical qualification are enough to counter the essential condescension and marginalization in his mischaracterization of people who happen to be trapped in poverty, the larger problem is that Petrilli represents, speaks for, and speaks to a cultural attitude toward the poor (and the affluent/privileged) that guarantees the U.S. remain inequitable, and likely will continue to grow more inequitable: people in poverty are lazy and deserve their poverty while the affluent are hard-working and deserve their achievements.
Before I continue, let me clarify that my calling for a moratorium on white men pontificating on race, class, and gender would include me. And if I am successful in this call, I am eager to comply.
The president/governor Bush clan in the U.S. has rightfully been accused of including several men born on third base who all believe they hit triples. If that characterization is accurate, and I think it is, then I am privileged by being white and male, but compared to the Bushes, my working-class background probably put me solidly at first.
Along with race and gender, I happen to have the sort of mathematical and verbal intelligence that schools and society honor—as well as a sort of Type-A work ethic that tends to be rewarded as well.
In fact, I have worked extremely hard at being a teacher and writer for about 30 years now, achieving a fairly high level of success.
I have earned that success, but let me be very clear that I do not deserve it.
I do not deserve the relative affluence and all the advantages of that while other people are being denied access that I was afforded through no effort on my part. Yes, I have worked hard, but the foundation of my success was pure and simply dumb luck.
Consider Shaquille O’Neal, LeBron James, George W. Bush, Bill Gates, and Mike Krzyzewski. What if these five men had lived in the early to mid 1800s? How would their lives have manifested themselves in that era?
It is without a doubt that two of these men would have had quite different lives—and not because of their talents, character, or determination.
Social norms are powerful and are primary when considering the individual talents of people.
And that leads us back to my call for a moratorium and my claim that most white men are typically wrong about race, class, and gender.
White men have built Western culture (often on the backs of others) and the exact privilege that appears transparent to them.
“Normal” to the privileged constitutes all the forces that assure their privilege and in turn create the poverty and disadvantage of others.
As a result, Petrilli can and does classify single, poor mothers as “bad parents”—and does so while believing himself and hearing from others that Mike is an essentially nice guy.
Yes, Petrilli is a nice guy—in the rarified air of privileged white men in the U.S.
His blogs appear civil and almost reasonable in fact.
But there is nothing civil or reasonable about a privileged class speaking about and for people in disadvantage, as long as that holding forth refuses to acknowledge privilege and the social dynamics that create poverty.
The powerful in the U.S. either create or tolerate whatever conditions exist in the U.S.
The powerless cannot and do not create or tolerate those conditions.
The U.S. is experiencing some of the highest child poverty rates and levels of inequity ever seen in contemporary times. White men still reap the benefits of those inequities while also being primarily the ones with the power and money to control this country.
It isn’t working—except for them.
I suspect the imbalances of inequity will remain for a while, but in the mean time, wouldn’t it be wonderful that where we currently have white-mansplaining, we could have for at least a while just silence that could be filled by those who have been spoken about and for?
The Central Issue at the Heart of America’s Growing Education Gap | Alternet
Secretary Duncan Answers Critics (An Alternate Universe Edition)
Secretary Duncan Answers Critics (An Alternate Universe Edition)
via Secretary Duncan Answers Critics (An Alternate Universe Edition).
dr. p.l. (paul) thomas 