“It was money that drove me to the naked girl business,” writes Molly Crabapple, adding:

I got my first regular gigs working as an artist’s model. For ten dollars an hour, I shivered before roomfuls of university students. Poses started at thirty seconds, and by the end, we stayed frozen for twenty minutes at a time. Posing had all the fascination of sitting on a cross-country bus ride with no book….Professionalism meant objectification—not the sexy kind, but the kind that turns you into an object, like a chair.

Crabapple is today a professional artist, a real woman—both like and unlike, I would argue, Jessica Jones, a fictional character given a wider popularity now that she has been drawn from the world of comic books into the Netflix universe.

Crabapple and Jones offer narratives about the world and lives of women—not a complete picture, but a vivid and disturbing one.

I have recently finished the first Netflix season of Jessica Jones and was compelled to include the importance of the series in a chapter I just submitted on comic books and race. I am unable to extricate from each other that popular media represents race and gender as well as sexuality in normative ways that reflect the very worst of U.S. culture while mostly skirting the opportunity to confront and even change the violences suffered by so-called minority populations.

Meredith J.C. Warren explains about efforts to uncover how the historical Jesus looked:

It is no surprise that many contemporary depictions of Jesus show him as representing what is upheld by Western standards of “normative” (that is, culturally imposed and valued) male beauty….

Our images of Jesus, then, say more about us as a society than about his historical appearance.

Religious narratives serve to maintain those norms, just as popular media function.

Yet for black and brown children, the stories they read rarely include them. Walter Dean Myers recalled his own journey to being a beloved black novelist for teens:

But there was something missing. I needed more than the characters in the Bible to identify with, or even the characters in Arthur Miller’s plays or my beloved Balzac. As I discovered who I was, a black teenager in a white-dominated world, I saw that these characters, these lives, were not mine. I didn’t want to become the “black” representative, or some shining example of diversity. What I wanted, needed really, was to become an integral and valued part of the mosaic that I saw around me.

Myers found James Baldwin, he noted, concluding: “Books transmit values. They explore our common humanity. What is the message when some children are not represented in those books?”

“Literature’s job is not to protect young people from the ugly world,” argues Daniel José Older; “it is to arm them with a language to describe difficult truths they already know.” For Older, today, the question is “Do black children’s lives matter if nobody writes about them?”

And here I come back to the very real lived experiences of Crabapple and the fictional world of Jones.

As Emily Nussbaum somewhat reluctantly admits, “[I]n the world of Marvel Comics, a female antihero—a female anything—is a step forward. But a rape survivor, struggling with P.T.S.D., is a genuine leap.”

The superhero genre of comic books in the U.S. has a long history of objectifying women with roots in jingoism and racism. And as the ascension of Sam Wilson/Falcon to the new black Captain America and the lingering sexualizing of Wonder Woman reveal, superhero comic books have yet to shake off much of that dim past.

Should we, then, marvel at Jessica Jones as a woman ex-superhero?

The Netflix series opens by being fairly true to Alias, the graphic series; however, the Netflix adaptation mutes the superhero elements. Focusing on this version is important because the Internet series is reaching a wider audience than the original graphic version.

Jones’s story—a woman with super powers who gives up her superhero gig after horrific trauma at the behest of super-villain Kilgrave to become a private investigator—proves to be a “step forward” after all in terms of both gender and race.

The very complicated and sexually charged relationship between Jones and Luke Cage may be one of the best elements of the adaptation for both the quality of the dialogue and character development as well as the rare depiction of sex between white Jones and black Cage.

But it is the connection between Jones and Kilgrave, running the entire 13 episodes of the first season, that highlights the power of this series to confront the objectification experienced by Crabapple.

Kilgrave is the hyper-embodiment of misogyny, paternalism, and the male gaze; his victims must do whatever he demands when they are breathing the same air, and for Kilgrave, his singular obsession is Jones, who before the action of the series he has controlled, abused, and nearly destroyed.

Many other characters have suffered in ways similar to Jones—often gruesome and the result of Kilgrave’s amoral whims.

Pop culture doesn’t have to be perfect to be good, and Jessica Jones is very often good. But that good is very disturbing.

Jones and Kilgrave are exaggerations of the conditions women must endure under the privilege of men—but those exaggerations are not as extreme as we would like to pretend.

If you doubt this, read Crabapple recounting a dehumanizing video shoot: “Two hundred dollars to writhe around in a bikini for a heavy metal video. While a grip poured live crickets on my tits.”

Jessica Jones holds promise, but as Myers lamented: “There is work to be done.”

—

Please note the substantive counterarguments by @SonofBaldwin in the Tweets below:

@plthomasEdD @themiddlespaces I don’t find Jessica Jones to be a step forward, in terms of race, at all.

— Son of Baldwin (@SonofBaldwin) December 21, 2015

 

@plthomasEdD @themiddlespaces Jessica Jones reifies stereotypes about black men AND women.

— Son of Baldwin (@SonofBaldwin) December 21, 2015

 

@plthomasEdD @themiddlespaces Jessica Jones also perpetuates a chilling “Missy Anne Syndrome.”

— Son of Baldwin (@SonofBaldwin) December 21, 2015

 

@plthomasEdD @themiddlespaces In Jessica Jones, a white woman kills a black woman and then sleeps with the black woman’s widow.

— Son of Baldwin (@SonofBaldwin) December 21, 2015

 

@plthomasEdD @themiddlespaces And the set up is that she should be forgiven because her desire is sincere.

— Son of Baldwin (@SonofBaldwin) December 21, 2015

 

@plthomasEdD @themiddlespaces In Jessica Jones, the black men are protective of her despite how toxic and dangerous she is for them.

— Son of Baldwin (@SonofBaldwin) December 21, 2015

 

@plthomasEdD @themiddlespaces In terms of PTSD and rape culture, however, this show gets a great deal right.

— Son of Baldwin (@SonofBaldwin) December 21, 2015

I was not born to be what someone said I was. I was not born to be defined by someone else, but by myself, and myself only.

James Baldwin

As I hurtle toward the midpoint of my 50s, I am more acutely aware of the intersection of my redneck past and anxiety.

Wrestling with debilitating and relentless anxiety is, I realize, a journey; there is no finish line where anxiety is left behind.

And there is only a tortured peace in knowing and having the compassion of those who understand because those who understand, we must recognize, share the same prison.

Anxiety, for me, is the tension between who we are in our bones as that contrasts with the expectations of whatever cultural or subcultural norms in which we exist.

This brings me once again to my redneck past.

Born, having grown up, and living as well as working in the South for almost 55 years, I am simultaneously a white, heterosexual man of the South and in many ways an outsider in that same homeland.

In my late teens and early 20s, mostly during the formative years of college, I had to confront who I was in my bones that did not match the racism and fervent, evangelical religiosity of South Carolina.

When I opened my mouth then, when I open my mouth now and utter the same words I write almost daily, anyone within ear shot has the same recognition that my dear friend and brief mentor Joe Kincheloe had the first time we spoke on the phone, “Why, you are from the South aren’t you”—in a drawl that sounded very much like home to me.

Joe passed away far too young in 2008, and we co-authored a book in 2006 as part of his limitless kindness as an academic who had struggled to find his place in academia—where from the South to the Midwest and then the Northeast (before fleeing to Canada), Joe confessed to me that he was routinely marginalized for his Southernness, notably his drawl that I share.

Joe and I share something else that is very important—an Otherness beneath the powerful veneer of our tremendous privileges of race, gender, sexuality, and academic proclivities.

I am not completely sure of how this happened for Joe, but I know that coming to recognize and understand my Otherness began to build in me the humility I needed to avoid falling victim to my privilege—to avoid believing that my accomplishments were more the result of unique effort or qualities in me than my unwarranted privilege.

Like battling anxiety, however, that is a journey, not a destination.

Especially in high school, I found myself nearly physically repelled by organized religion—drawn again by my bones to George Carlin and later Kurt Vonnegut for their artful deconstructing of moral and ethical ways of being that transcend religiosity or even claims of a Higher Power.

I was being told (and still am being told) in the South that without accepting Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior, I was a sinner destined for hell—living morally and ethically simply wasn’t enough. The baseball bat of dogma batters basic human decency, you see.

These formative years built my lifelong repulsion for hypocrisy and judgment, coercion—both in my own ways of being and in the behavior of others (especially those in power).

My lingering drawl tells people without doubt I am a Southerner, but since at least my teen years, I have been a stranger in that homeland.

And then in 2002, I moved from teaching English in my hometown’s high school to a university less than an hour away.

Unlike my high school students, however, my college students were occasionally not from the South.

In one of those first years, a student who claimed I was her favorite professor told me during a conference in my office, “I know you are smart, but you don’t sound smart.”

And that resonates with me still, when I hear myself teaching in a blur of passion about that day’s discussion turn a one-syllable word into two. I find myself now stopping and confessing how my redneck self just slipped out of my mouth. It has become a self-deprecating joke, one that elicits laughter, but is yet more veneer to cover my anxiety, my low self-esteem born out of that relentless anxiety.

I know I am smart, but I don’t sound smart.

It’s a journey.

I left teaching high school where I was a badgered non-believer and evolving Marxist to find myself a working-class academic in a selective liberal arts university where otherwise enlightened souls trample on that redneck past.

I don’t belong here—this is my internal monologue on repeat, a not-so-soothing soundtrack beneath the other perpetual internal dialogue with myself that is anxiety (I narrate tales of impending doom endlessly to myself).

As I was recently talking with a rare wonderful who understands (remember the tortured peace of that understanding), I shared about my old-man coming to understand that we must not sacrifice the good at the alter of the perfect.

On my journey, I am trying very hard to honor those I love by being my genuine Self, although that still creates bitter anxiety within the cultural and subcultural norms in which I live and breath.

I don’t belong here (I think, hearing two syllables in “here”), but it is the only here I have. And it doesn’t have to be perfect to be good.

And seeing, embracing that good is a rare antidote to the prison of anxiety.

Part of that good for me has been taking the path of recognizing my otherness that has saved me from the callousness of privilege.

I am lucky for the people in my life who see and love the genuine me, but in a perfect world, Joe would still be here so we could talk about this unselfconsciously and laughing.

—

Joe Kincheloe passed away December 19, 2008.

For Further Reading

With Drawl, Laura Relyea

What These Children Are Like, Ralph Ellison

Tracing the U.S. Deficit in PISA Reading Skills to Early Childhood Evidence from the United States and Canada, Joseph J. Merry Sociology, Furman University

Abstract

Why does the United States lag behind so many other countries on international education assessments? The traditional view targets school-based explanations—U.S. schools attract poorer teachers and lack the proper incentives. But the U.S. educational system may also serve children with comparatively greater academic challenges as a result of poorer social conditions. One way of gaining leverage on this issue is to understand when U.S. students fall behind their international counterparts. I first compare reading/vocabulary test scores for U.S. and Canadian children (ages 4-5) using National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1979–Children and Youth (NLSY79) and Canada’s National Longitudinal Study of Children and Youth (NLSCY). I then compare the magnitude of these differences to similar cohorts of students at ages 15 to 16 using data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). Findings indicate that while the Canadian advantage in PISA is substantial (0.30 standard deviation units), this advantage already existed at ages 4 to 5, before formal schooling had a chance to matter. I discuss the implications of this pattern for interpreting international test score rankings.

TV tells a million lies
The paper’s terrified to report
Anything that isn’t handed on a presidential spoon

“Ignoreland,” R.E.M.

The educational attainment propaganda starts early in formal education with students being shown the simplistic chart of how directly more education seems to insure higher pay:

The message, however, that educational attainment is the “great equalizer” proves to be a deforming myth; for example, consider just one level of teasing out the information above by race:

In fact, data are overwhelming that being born wealthy is far more powerful in determining most people’s lot in life than any degree of educational attainment or other types of effort. White, male privilege trumps almost everything in the U.S., leading to Why Education Does Not Fix Poverty.

Idealized quests for a meritocracy, a society in which effort and such do in fact lead to rewards despite any person’s initial station in life, are just that: a fantasy.

The educational attainment lie has always been a veneer for privilege, and we are well past time to admit this fact.

Greater education should matter, however, and not be reduced to narrow metrics such as earning power.

But the U.S. at the end of 2015 with 2016 just around the corner is not where that is a reality. We are a culture of privilege and Social Darwinism, without compassion for fellow human beings.

And no time each calendar year is more illustrative of those ugly facts than now in the wake of Thanksgiving and the tidal wave of Christmas—when children and young people all over the country are released from the halls of schools to learn how to be good little consumers.

Merry Christmas.

 

Heinemann Online PLC: P.L. Thomas Confronts Privilege

PDF

[Reprinted in part at The Answer Sheet/Washington Post]

It is a nearly imperceptibly short stroll from Donald Trump to Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

The arrogance of power is disturbing for its privilege and bigotry, but exponentially so for the cavalier brashness and absence of self-awareness.

Regardless of the position of power, Scalia’s racist pronouncements about the proper place of black students in higher education (again, a short stroll from Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s rejecting affirmative action, which he himself used during his journey to the highest bench) are inexcusable.

However, there is another story Scalia is inadvertently exposing: the negligence of higher education to teach the students who walk the halls and sit in the classrooms after being admitted.

First, let me pull away from that specific claim to a broader pet peeve of mine: remediation.

Throughout formal education at every level from pre-K through undergraduate (and even graduate) education, students are commonly labeled as remedial (a designation that suggests the students are not at the proper level for the course they are taking) and thus need some additional services.

This is total hogwash. All students are remedial, and no students are remedial. You see, the essential role of a teacher and formal education is to identify what knowledge and skills students have as well as what knowledge and skills students lack (or need developing), and then to teach those students in that context.

So let’s return to higher education in the U.S.—where attending college is not a basic right and is often a tremendous burden on students and their families.

A significant number of students are admitted to colleges and universities for the benefit of the institution (full-pay students and athletes, as the most prominent examples). Often, these populations fall into the deficit category of “remedial,” or would be the exact type of student Scalia has now further marginalized with the damning blanket of racism.

From the most accessible (in terms of admissions) public colleges to the most selective private colleges, access to higher education in the U.S. is nonetheless selective. In other words, colleges accept students (and reject others) under the tacit contract that each belongs there and that the university will provide the education for which the student (or someone) is paying.

Again, I have taught public school in the impoverished rural South and a selective liberal arts university. Those two contrasting settings have shown me that I often taught diligently at the high school setting with little concrete evidence I was successful (many students still scored low in standardized testing), but that I could (if I chose to do so) do very little with my college students (extremely bright and motivated) and there would still be ample evidence of success.

And herein lies the issue no one is talking about beneath the embarrassment of Justice Scalia’s comments: vulnerable populations of students admitted to colleges and universities (often black, brown, poor, and English language learners)—those who need higher education the most, in fact—are being neglected by the very institutions who admit them, often after actively recruiting them (again, the athletes).

I teach two sections of writing-intensive first-year seminars each academic year. The greatest difference between my successful and struggling students is their experiences and relative privilege before attending my university.

Successful students have “done school” in ways suitable for college expectations before while struggling students rarely have.

Too often, echoing Scalia, many in higher education shake their collective heads and mutter these students shouldn’t be “at our college.”

Too often, higher education is a place that simply has no interest in teaching—opting instead for gate-keeping (masking privilege with the bigoted allure of measurable qualifications), housing students for a few years, and then taking credit for the outcomes.

Scalia’s bigotry, like Trump’s, is repulsive, but let’s not fool ourselves that it is somehow unique to a few privileged apples (who Ta-Nehisi Coates calls “oafish racist[s]”).

That bigotry is institutionalized all across the U.S., and our places of higher education too often are those institutions.