While many have highlighted the school-to-prison pipeline phenomenon, we are less likely to confront the schools-as-prisons reality many high-poverty and minority children suffer; and thus, a reader:
When High School Students Are Treated Like Prisoners
Education Reform in the New Jim Crow Era
Review: Police in the Hallways: Confronting the “Culture of Control”
Authoritarian Schools, Authoritarian State in the Service of Privilege
Between two versions of libertarian ideology, I think, many in the U.S. have committed to the wrong one: childish Ayn Rand libertarianism instead of the child-like (idealistic) Henry David Thoreau libertarianism found in the opening of his “Civil Disobedience”:
I heartily accept the motto, — “That government is best which governs least”; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe, — “That government is best which governs not at all”; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have. Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient….
But, to speak practically and as a citizen, unlike those who call themselves no-government men, I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government. Let every man make known what kind of government would command his respect, and that will be one step toward obtaining it.
While I find the rugged individualism and self-defeating as well as heartless selfishness of Rand libertarianism ethically repulsive, the tension offered in Thoreau’s quest for no government strikes me as a practical mechanism for maintaining democracy against the threat of totalitarianism.
And it is at his “better government” call that I think we can look to something such as the roads and highways in the U.S. for a template.
While we may quibble over road conditions near our homes or on our commute to work, I think we must all acknowledge in the U.S. that the publicly funded infrastructure is foundational for market success in the nation. As well, while we have depended on the political system to approve and fund those roads, highways, and bridges, we have not then turned over the design and construction of that system to politicians, but to engineers and construction experts.
That distinct line, however, has not been nearly as sacred in public education, where political leaders and appointees have far too much direct influence not only on the funding but also on the actually policy—the result being that we have far less to be proud of from our public schools than our public highway/road system—the former still much further from achieving the original intent than the latter.
I was reminded of all this once the social media frenzy began about President Barack Obama’s plan to “mak[e] two years of community college free for students,” as reported in Politico. That news prompted #FreeCommunityCollege on Twitter as well.
Against the Obama administration’s abysmal record on public education, this plan certainly sounds encouraging, but the media and public response highlights a serious problem beyond the usual concern about clamoring to score partisan political points: Obama’s plan if approved would create fully publicly funded and no-tuition community college, not free community college.
As well, this plan is a pale version of what Germany has recently re-embraced, as explained by Barbara Kehm:
From this semester, all higher education will be free for both Germans and international students at universities across the country, after Lower Saxony became the final state to abolish tuition fees….
It’s important to be aware of two things when it comes to understanding how German higher education is funded and how the country got to this point. First, Germany is a federal country with 16 autonomous states responsible for education, higher education and cultural affairs. Second, the German higher education system – consisting of 379 higher education institutions with about 2.4m students – is a public system which is publicly funded. There are a number of small private institutions but they enroll less than 5% of the total student body.
This is not a matter of mere semantics, but the German commitment and Obama’s community college proposal are about not charging students (a user fee similar to toll highways in the U.S.), but instead making a social commitment to fully publicly fund all or some of any person’s higher education (an education version of our public highway system).
“Free” is not only factually inaccurate, but the implication detracts from the exact concept that needs our support now more than ever: “publicly funded” is a necessary and rightful commitment by a people that builds the foundation upon which all else exists—life, liberty, and the pursuits of happiness as well as the glorified free market in the U.S.
To return to my example above, try building your company yourself without the publicly funded roads and highways, without the publicly funded judicial system, just to start. Yes, our publicly funded institutions in the U.S. have many problems and flaws, but the one aspect about them that isn’t flawed is that they are publicly funded.
While I am deeply skeptical of our partisan political system masquerading as democracy in the U.S., I certainly join those cheering Obama’s plan for no-tuition community college; however, my guarded optimism has strings attached, requiring that this proposal is the first step toward addressing several issues related to education:
Instead of rushing to promote misleading hastags or to prop up a political candidate along partisan lines, we should see Obama’s proposal for no-tuition community college as an opportunity to “make known what kind of government would command [our] respect,” to emphasize the essential nature of publicly funded institutions that constitute “better government.”
The fruits of the Reagan Era are proving to be mostly poison apples.
Both begun under Reagan, mass incarceration and high-stakes education reform have escalated the rise of the authoritarian school and the authoritarian state in the service of privilege.
During the past few years, teachers and police are coming under increased scrutiny in the wake of disaster capitalism’s influence how we do school and how we enforce law—significantly at the expense of children living in poverty, black and brown children, and children speaking home languages other than English.
Jose Vilson has offered a bold and critical examination of how political and public calls for greater teacher and police quality and oversight intersect, revealing, I think, that these are not simple black and white issues. Bad teachers and bad police there certainly are, but to play the flawed individual game feeds into the central problem in the U.S.: We refuse to acknowledge systemic causes (racism, sexism, homophobia) for individual situations.
Vilson builds to what I think is the crux of the matter: “To protect and to serve, and that’s something we can never turn our backs to.” Teachers and police are public servants, embodying the will of the people. As public servants, teachers and police fail their charge when they twist their service into authority over the public, instead of from or in service of.
Authoritarian (and thus “bad”) teachers and authoritarian (and thus “bad”) police are consequences of a larger reality: The U.S. is a racist and sexist nation functioning as an authoritarian state, and most of our structures serve that status quo as well as the interests of the privileged.
Democracy and meritocracy along with the ideals of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for everyone remain worthy of a people, but those are not what our public institutions serve in the U.S. today.
Sacrificing Democracy and “Other People’s Children” at the Alter of Authority
Well before Bill Ayers was demonized during Barack Obama’s run for president or before Ayers’s radical past was more widely recognized after his memoir in 2001, I was introduced to his wonderful To Teach while in my doctoral program in the mid-1990s.
Ayers offers characterizations of traditional schooling that resonated with me then and do also now:
There are a lot of quiet, passive classrooms where not much learning is taking place, and others where children’s hearts, souls, and minds are being silently destroyed in the name of good management….
In school, a high value is placed on quiet: “Is everything quiet?” the superintendent asks the principal, and the principal asks the teacher, and the teacher asks the child. If everything is quiet, it is assumed all is well. This is why many normal children—considering what kind of intelligence is expected and what will be rewarded here—become passive, quiet, obedient, dull. The environment practically demands it. (pp. 23, 64)
At nearly every level of considering education, we always come back to classroom management and discipline. And it is here I want to ask two genuinely important questions:
Because all of these commitments do accomplish one thing that is actually the sacred element in formal schooling—authoritarian environments.
As long as we remain trapped in accountability reform and in-school authoritarian practices, we are admitting that we are not seeking universal public education in the service of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—individual freedom and democracy.
Authoritarian schools feed an authoritarian state (where, for example, police are feared and teachers are disrespected).
Democracy must be fertilized with schools that practice community and collaboration.
So in our necessary and important rush to honor good teachers and good police, let’s be careful about our accusatory gazes because when teachers and police are bad, it may well be that their behavior reflects a failed system, an authoritarian system that serves the status quo and the interests of the privileged.
We need to lift our eyes and look closely at who supports accountability-based education reform and harsh in-school policies—and why.
There is the place to start toward better teachers and police who honor, as Vilson noted, their need to serve and protect as agents of the public good.
—
[1] I think in the context of these two questions, we must ask, Why are reformers convinced class size doesn’t matter (despite many enrolling their children in private schools with very low class sizes)? The answer is likely that large class size forces teachers to focus primarily on classroom management/discipline and consequently accomplishes again the main objective: authoritarian classrooms.
NOTE: HT to David Kaib for a series of Tweets recently.
Possibly my greatest commitment while teaching public school English in a rural SC high school for 18 years was listening to my students, and by that, I do not mean listening to them during class discussions or in conferences (I did that also).
I mean listening to students when they didn’t know an adult was listening.
Some of those moments that have shaped my teaching include the following:
Some of the listening I did, however, took much more time and required inference on my part. But it is that sort of listening that ultimately shaped my understanding that grades, averaging grades, rubrics, and grading policies contribute significantly to student opportunities to avoid being engaged with learning.
Let me explain.
Over a long period of time, and while carefully listening and even asking questions, I learned that many students gamed their math classes so that they passed math courses while never passing a single math test or exam.
Students had discovered that playing the game of averaging grades and manipulating the impact of non-test assignments (homework, projects, class participation, extra credit) on those averages allowed students to pass the course with a minimum of studying or learning the material for quizzes, tests, and exams. And, yes, the irony here is that students used math to avoid being engaged in actually learning math.
Since students were armed with detailed grading policies, many would keep a running record of their averages, weigh that against the extra credit and non-test grades they could compile, and then maintain cumulative averages just at the passing barrier (often something they learned they could negotiate near the end of the course, as well).
This is just one example of “school-only” practices and “student” behaviors that have guided my own teaching policies that seek ways to end both: I don’t want my class to be “playing school,” and I don’t want the young people in my classes to behave as students.
This came to mind as I exchanged emails with Peter Smagorinsky about a recent post of mine, Email to My Students: “the luxury of being thankful,” lamenting giving grades at the end of the semester.
I want to clarify what I do and why, but also add how I have course policies that delay traditional grading but are driven instead by minimum requirements for course credit that support engagement.
First, some may have assumed that my non-grading practices are somehow related to my teaching at a selective university where that is possible. But I must emphasize that I started de-grading my classes early in my career while teaching in a rural SC public high school, and I did so with all levels of students.
My practices are not about idealized students or settings.
Next, de-grading a class is not about being soft, or easy, or asking less of students. De-grading is about demanding more from students, notably more engagement.
In my courses (then and now), students had/have to participate fully in all activities and assignments [1]. To put this in traditional contexts, students are not allow to “take a zero” on an assignment and then just pass by on the resulting average.
There is no, “I just took zeros on my papers last year and still passed English.” (And, again, many students told me that when I was teaching public school.)
Again, then and now, when students are required to write four original and drafted essays over a grading period or during a course, that means several minimum requirements: initial submission of each drafted original essay (made directly observable during writing workshop in class), required conferences with me after each initial essay submission, and required essay revision meeting minimum expectations of revision (a detailed revision plan we created in each conference).
Don’t fulfill minimum requirements, and you do not receive credit for the grading period or the course (and, yes, I did this during my public school teaching career).
I balance those demands with other important policies: (i) students are allowed to continue revising their work as much as they want and time allows, and (ii) late work is not only accepted, but necessary.
The de-graded classroom is about engagement in the learning process and artifacts of learning. There is nothing soft or easy about any of this, and these are not practices suitable for only some students.
And students are not allowed the manipulation of grades and averages that I have witnessed and continue to witness in traditionally grade-driven courses where students focus on the grades or passing and not engaging with learning.
Minimum observable requirements for student participation trump significantly traditionally graded and averaged testing in terms of creating genuine student engagement in learning.
I want to end by emphasizing , again, that these are not idealistic practices or claims; I also practice concessions to the reality of grades in formal schooling.
The “de-” in de-grading of my classes is best framed as “delayed” because I do invite students to discuss the grades their works-in-progress deserve throughout the process and, of course, I do assign grades at the end of each course.
While delaying grades, however, I am increasing the quality and quantity of feedback my students receive and of student engagement in learning for the sake and advantages of learning.
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[1] As an example, here is my minimum requirement statement from a first-year writing seminar:
Minimum Requirements for course credit:
Let me start with an image.
Whether you have witnessed this in person or on TV, picture a college football stadium during a special event game when the fans organize a “white out” (or other appropriate color). The effect is impressive with the stadium almost entirely one color, a statement by the fans that “this is our house.”
Now, let me make a case about creating that same sort of solidarity among educators and public education advocates through social media.
Historically and significantly during the last three decades, U.S. public education policy and public discourse have been dominated by politicians, political appointees, billionaire hobbyists, pundits, and self-appointed entrepreneurs—most of whom having no or little experience or expertise in the field of education or education scholarship.
In fact, the “white out” in the media is inversely proportional to the expertise in the field:
Next, allow me to chase what may appear to be a brief tangent.
While teaching high school English in rural SC for 18 years, I always enjoyed my U.S. literature unit on Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. One of the lines from the play was particularly enjoyable—when Tituba exclaims, “No, no, sir, I don’t truck with no Devil!”
Having grown up in the 1960s and 1970s, my mind always goes to this [1]:
But students often found the phrasing odd, despite my affinity for the metaphor and power of Tituba’s language.
To this day, I am apt to adopt Tituba’s stance when expressing my allegiances, and that brings me back to the point of this call for social media solidarity among educators and public education advocates.
Over about two years of blogging at my own site and engaging regularly on Twitter and other social media platforms, I have gradually adopted a stance that I do not truck with those who are disproportionately dominating the field of and public discourse about education.
Yes, I have done my share of calling out, discrediting, and arguing with, but except on rare occasions, I am done with that. Those who have tried to include me in the “@” wars on Twitter may have noticed my silence when the other side is added.
Each time we invoke their names, their flawed ideas, or their policies, we are joining the tables they have set. Once again, look at the chart above.
Also, don’t forget the Oliver Rule in which one-on-one debates imply for the public equal credibility between two people debating. As well, to debate implies that a position is debatable [2], and some issues simply aren’t up for debate.
Therefore, I am now asking that educators, scholars, and public education advocates who are active on social media (blogging, Tweeting, etc.) to make an effort to dedicate a day, a week, a month, or as I have done, a policy to creating our own educators’ “white out” on social media—establishing our place for our voices as a model against the mainstream media dedicated to those with authority (elections, appointments, wealth) but without credibility.
Don’t spend blogs rejecting their public claims and education policy.
Don’t engage them on Twitter, or “@” them into a Twitter exchange.
Symbolic messages matter, and the strongest message we can send about those who shall not be named is exactly that: erase them from the spaces they have dominated without deserving that space.
And in that open arena, let us raise our voices.
Our cases about what is not working and why, our evidence-based proposals for reform, our struggles in the classroom, our successes with students, our recognition of social and educational inequity, our commitment to social justice driven by educational equity—and all on our terms, not theirs.
This is our house.
—
See Also
Claiming the Education Reform Narrative
Whose Reform?: Claiming the Education Reform Narrative, pt. 2
[1] The term “keep on truckin'” likely reaches back to at least early twentieth century Jazz musicians; Robert Crumb popularized this in the late 1960s, however.
[2] Please examine how anti-evolution forces have “won” in the public arena by making teaching an evolution a debate, notably detailed in the documentary Flock of Dodos.
Note: My 2014 end-of-year, holiday gift to myself has been re-reading Neil Gaiman’s American Gods (author’s preferred edition). While considering a post about advice to teachers and professors as scholarly and public writers, I came across a post from a smaller blog of mine, DISCOURSE as quilting from 16 June 2013: remnant 21: “I began feeling more and more uncomfortable with the text that they would be using.” This piece, I think, touches on many things I want to share with readers of my main blog so I am reposting below with small revisions.
—
remnant 21: “I began feeling more and more uncomfortable with the text that they would be using.”
This is the story of one narrator with three eyes: writer, editor, teacher.
No, not three physical eyes, but ways of seeing writing.
It starts (the story, not the chronology of what actually happened) in a bookstore.
I must admit (shame on me) that I order a great deal of books online. I am still a hard-copy sort who loves the cover and texture and weight of books—although I recognize the possible need to shift into the virtual world.
I also must add that my book fetish overrides my concern about BIG online sellers and chain bookstores. Somehow my moral compass is skewed enough to forgive almost anything as long as the sanctity of the book is honored. (I hasten to add, not much here in my soul to respect, by the way; no delusions on my end about that—although I do love children quite deeply and genuinely because I hold out a tiny speck of hope for the future inside a very dark cloud of certainty it’s not going to happen.)
So I was at the chain bookstore to grab a few Haruki Murakami volumes, I hoped. I had plowed through in about a year all his English-language novels, but had yet to venture into his short stories and non-fiction. I expected a chain store had at least some of what I didn’t yet own, and although I had promised myself not to buy any more books until after I received the then soon-to-be-released Neil Gaiman, and read that, I was jonesing for some Murakami and I gave in like a heroine addict—or worse, like someone who loves to read.
I pulled two collections of Murakami short stories off the shelf and touched the covers, testing their weight, and felt suddenly happier than normal. The store was well air conditioned, and I had spent most of the day doing a somewhat hellish bicycling ride with four friends—75 miles into the North Carolina mountains during a warm, almost-summer day in South Carolina.
The bookstore and holding two new books had brought me some calm so I just began to look around, touching and holding books I’d never read, glancing over displays of “Summer Reading” (mostly the sorts of books we cram down children’s throats in school) and noticing that I had read just about all of them.
Then I saw this:
My first thought was how beautiful the cover is, followed quickly by: This is not the cover of the copy I own. I reached for it, touched the cover, tested the weight, and then noticed: “American Gods, author’s preferred text.”
The comic book industry discovered that powerful nerd instinct (something akin to OCD, or simply OCD) that compels some of us to own multiple versions of the same thing. An episode of The Big Bang Theory, “The 21-Second Excitation,” centers on a new cut of Raiders of the Lost Ark containing, yep, 21 more seconds.
I understand this because I was a comic book collector throughout adolescence, I still hoard some comics and many books, and I own the DVD of the multitude of versions of Blade Runner—noting to a friend recently when lending him the set that he should watch only the Final Cut.
Thus, I slipped this version of Gaiman’s novel into my hand with the two Murakamis, but this was more than the careless hoarding of a nerd. This story is about Gaiman’s “A Note on the Text”:
The book you’re holding is slightly different from the version of the book that was previously published….
As they told me about the wonderful treats they had planned for the limited edition—something they planned to be a miracle of the bookmaker’s art—I began to feel more and more uncomfortable with the text that they would be using.
Would they, I inquired rather diffidently, be willing to use my original, untrimmed text?
Now the story loops backward in time.
Maybe a couple of months ago and then a few weeks ago (at the time this post was originally written).
I have been teaching writing in a variety of ways (high school students, graduate students, undergraduate students) for almost thirty years now. I have been a writer (or better phrased, I should note the amount of time that has passed since I realized I am a writer) since a spring day in 1980 when I sat in my third-story dorm room writing what I consider “my first poem,” an e.e. cummings homage about throwing a Frisbee. And I have been an editor of columns and books for several years now, close to a decade, I believe.
As a scholar, I often submit work and have essentially the same sorts of responses from the editors in charge of my work, responses that rise above the essential and welcomed editing that all writing needs and deserves.
Often, the editor doesn’t want my work; the editor wants the piece s/he would have written.
Now back to Gaiman’s “author’s preferred text.”
I looked at that marvelous blue cover, and thought, What? Neil Gaiman had a text published that he didn’t quite want?
So buying this edition of American Gods, first, was to appease my own psychoses. Next, it was a political act to honor Gaiman’s “preferred text,” a political act from a not-really-very-important writer (but a damned loyal reader) to a real-honest-to-god writer. A deposit in the intersection of karmas among writers, readers, lovers of art.
But all of this leaves me sad ultimately, sad in a way that will from this moment on inform me as a writer, editor, and teacher.
When I was younger (not much) and couldn’t get anyone to publish my work, I dutifully worked through the nearly-all-red track changes of edited submissions. Like the mother’s boy I am, I wanted so badly to please—and be published.
Over the last several years, however, I have gained the luxury of being well published, and despite my eternal quest to be wanted, to have others say my writing matters, I have twice now pulled scholarly pieces from projects after the editors and I spent a great deal of time revising my initial pieces.
And sitting there with Gaiman’s “preferred text” beside the computer, I was working toward being at peace with this idea:
Once a piece of my writing stops being mine, and starts being yours, I have to say with all due respect that maybe you should just write the piece yourself.
Although I am not completely sure this is true, I used to share with students that Ernest Hemingway wrote The Sun Also Rises to show he could write a better The Great Gatsby. (And he did, I think.) All in all, seems the right thing to do. We are the richer for it, and what a shame if one had simply edited the other into writing only the one book?
And since I have ignored all conventions of chronology here, let me slip again to a moment when I had to make that decision.
An editor (a kind and careful soul) had heavily edited a piece, moving large sections of text, and then noting (and this will seem quite trivial) that she had changed my final subhead to “Conclusion.”
The straw that broke the camel’s back—I couldn’t allow a piece published with my name have a subhead I have been urging my students and works under my editorship to avoid. Conclusion?
Is there anything more lifeless than that? Anything that tells the reader that this writer doesn’t really have anything to offer? That this writer is just getting on with it, getting this thing over?
Writing is collaboration, and so is reading.
As writer, editor, and teacher, however, I must respect the piece the writer wants to share, lest we all sit alone talking to ourselves.
The story ended there. I had to work on a poem about lavender silk monkeys and continued to avoid working on three chapters due for scholarly books in a few months.
By sheer coincidence, or at the bidding of the book gods [1], I discovered a connection between U.S. poet E.E. Cummings and Wonder Woman creator William Moulton Marston:
And then, on Thursday, June 24, 1915, an unseasonably cold day, Marston graduated from Harvard. In exercises held at Sanders Theatre, E.E. Cummings, a member of Marston’s class, delivered a speech about modernism called “The New Art.” (Lepore, p. 42)
After reading Susan Cheever’s compact and engaging E.E. Cummings: A Life, I turned to Jill Lepore’s The Secret History of Wonder Woman, completely unaware of the connection. Paired, however, these well written and researched books are also powerful histories that reveal the (possibly distorted) influence of Harvard in the U.S. as well as insight into the intersection of early twentieth century intelligentsia, art, and pop culture.
My initial interest in Lepore’s examination of Wonder Woman rested on my comic book background—although I was a Marvel collector in the day and quite not DC. However, Lepore’s volume is much more than about Wonder Woman or even a solid biography of Marston; this is a somewhat shocking story about U.S. feminism and sexual politics, commercialization, pop culture, and the enduring power of myth.
As a lifelong educator who essentially hid my comic book reading/collecting throughout junior and high school, I was initially sympathetic to Marston, who struggled at Harvard:
“I had to take a lot of courses that I hated,” [William Moulton Marston] explained. English A: Rhetoric and Composition was a required course for freshmen. “I wanted to write and English A, at Harvard, wouldn’t let you write,” he complained. “It made you spell and punctuate. If you wrote anything you felt like writing, enjoyed writing, your paper was marked flunk in red pencil.” (p. 6)
Especially in the wake of reading again about how Cummings developed while at Harvard, I recognized in Marston’s life (among his proclivities for living with and fathering children by multiple women) the development of creativity as an act against the norms of one’s time or community.
The short version of Lepore’s work is that Marston stumbled—often badly—through a career as a scholar/academic and inventor of the lie detector test until he created Wonder Woman in the foundational years of superhero comic books, the 1930s-1940s. However, what Lepore details well is that Marston’s creation grew significantly from the U.S. feminism movement in the early twentieth century and his relationships with Sadie Elizabeth Holloway, Margaret Sanger, and Olive Byrne.
While comic books and superheroes in the early decades of the medium from the 1930s and into the 1950s were often discounted and even savagely attacked as corrupting of children, Lepore builds a case not for Marston (who certainly comes off poorly as often a charlatan and essentially a self-centered hypocrite) but for the potential of pop culture as social activism.
Wonder Woman was created and written by Marston (with significant help, it appears, from the many women in his life) as a manifesto for women’s liberation, equality—sexual liberation, reproductive rights, work-place equality.
The farther Wonder Woman drifted from Marston, who wrote most of her comic book adventures from the early to late 1940s, the less that ideal held against the influence of the market, where traditional womanhood sold better than radical feminism (or least, that is what publishers believed).
Superheroes as pop icons have entered the U.S. consciousness through many media—comic books, television (Batman, The Hulk, and Wonder Woman, notably), and film. At any given moment in history, then, the “hot” superhero is often dictated by the medium of prominence. As a result, few people are likely aware that Wonder Woman was among the first big three in superhero comics, along with Superman and Batman.
And while all three have endured 70-plus years in pop culture—with all three having peaks, valleys, and fairly dramatic reboots—Wonder Woman has certainly not maintained either Marston’s original intent or the same weight as Superman and Batman.
That in itself is a message about how far women have yet to go in the journey to equality so well detailed by Lepore in her portrayals of Holloway, Sanger, Byrnes, and others.
Regretfully, after reading Secret History, I have a parallel concern I raised about a black Captain America: If Wonder Woman reinforces female stereotypes, objectifies women, what good a woman superhero?
Hugh Ryan shares this concern by considering both the new team writing and drawing Wonder Woman, David and Meredith Finch, and how that essentially spits in the face of Wonder Woman as feminist ideal:
That comics are a bastion of sexism is a truism so banal it almost goes without saying. But it is particularly galling to watch the feminist superhero be treated in such a way. The Finches have made no small point of the fact that Meredith is one of only a handful of women to ever write Wonder Woman. “I love the idea that it’s a woman writing a woman,” David said in an interview with USA Today, “because we’re trying to appeal to more female readers now.”
Seeking to be celebrated for simply hiring a woman is tokenizing and offensive. From writer Gail Simone to artist Fiona Staples, there are incredible women already working in the industry. Let’s celebrate them. The Finch’s ideas of feminism, strength, and what appeals to women today seem retrograde, borderline misogynistic, and—to be frank—boring. Wonder Woman deserves better.
Cheever’s biography of Cummings and Lepore’s exploration of Wonder Woman reveal that truly flawed men (in these two cases) are often behind genuinely marvelous creation. And thus, the irony increases: Just as Cummings and Marston created as often flawed reactionaries, in spite of their environments, against the norms, we are now faced with rejecting a popular media failing not just Wonder Woman, but women once again.
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See Also
In the U.S., Where the Female Nipple Is More Dangerous Than a Gun
[1] Since I am currently re-reading Neil Gaiman’s American Gods (author’s preferred text), I concede the possibility of the latter.
I was afraid
“Conversation 16,″ The National
I’d eat your brains
Cause I’m evil
The foundations of my own quest to be a poet and fiction writer were laid while reading and hoping to be e.e. cummings and J.D. Salinger (hence, P.L. Thomas). Both share an idealizing of childhood and innocence against a skeptical, if not jaded and cynical view of adulthood.
Salinger’s short fiction also spoke to my early faith in craft; his stories are like diamonds so perfectly and carefully cut that one is both unable to look at or away from them.
Also—and quite logically in hindsight—I became fascinated with Franz Kafka, who posed a problem for my obsession with writer’s craft since his work was in translation and there was something unnamable in his stories and diaries/letters that moved me unlike cummings or Salinger.
More or less thirty years later, I am a much different writer as well as a much different reader. Part of my more recent journey has been the work of Haruki Murakami, who now bookends my Kafka phase with his magical nightmares that seem to defy much that I know about writing and reading (notably any clear concepts of genre).
The Murakami bounty in the last year-plus has been magnificent: “Samsa in Love,” “Scheherazade,” Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, and Matthew Carl Strecher’s critical work, The Forbidden Worlds of Haruki Murakami.
But the work that has lingered for me is his The Strange Library because it captures nearly everything both marvelous and difficult about Murakami.
Many years ago I read The Nightmare of Reason: A Life of Franz Kafka by Ernst Pawel and have always thought the title was perfect. It is the Kafkan in Murakami—and notably in The Strange Library—that pushes me to magical nightmare for Murakami.
As a book lover and library advocate, I first noticed The Strange Library is a physical argument for the power of hard-copy books (not ebooks). The clever flap opening, the stunning illustrations, the heft of the cover and paper, the neoclassic typewriter font, the occasional blue type, the ink smell, the odd and final tiny-print paragraph—all of these publishing craft elements shout out for the enduring beauty of buying and holding a real-life, printed book.
Having recently presented at NCTE’s national convention on the importance of libraries—highlighting Ray Bradbury, Neil Gaiman, and Louise DeSalvo—I was even more eager to read Murakami’s story since he has included libraries before (see Kafka on the Shore).
While DeSalvo’s memoir, Vertigo, opens with the library as sanctuary, The Strange Library is immediately ominous: “The library was even more hushed than usual,” it begins with the main character’s shoes making a “hard, dry sound…unlike my normal footsteps.”
Although the nameless boy frequents this library, the librarian is unfamiliar, and this experience reveals the library to be a labyrinth and a magical nightmare leading to the boy imprisonment and horrifying fate:
The sheep man cocked his head to one side. “Wow, that’s a tough one.”
“Please, tell me. My mother is waiting for me back home.”
“Okay, kid. Then I’ll give it to you straight. The top of your head’ll be sawed off and all your brain’ll get slurped right up.”
I was too shocked for words.
“You mean,” I said, when I had recovered, “you mean that old man’s going to eat my brains?”
“Yes, I’m really sorry, but that’s the way it has to be,” the sheep man said, reluctantly.
The sheep man has also appeared in Murakami before: Dance Dance Dance and A Wild Sheep Chase.
The story is brief, but layered in the way that makes Murakami, Murakami: places and people are not simple dualities, but simultaneously opposing forces, to the point of being irreconcilable.
The Strange Library leaves a great deal unsaid in the wake of nearly too many aesthetic messages, a magical nightmare of childhood that almost reminds me of Neil Gaiman (almost).
The melancholy loneliness that clings to everything Murakami—”After that, I never visited the city library again”—remains once you carefully interlock the flip opening, much as those giant cartoon eyes seem to demand.
However, my heart is warmed because this book demands to be read and re-read, held solidly in your hands that remain somewhat unsure what to do with this odd little book.
For Further Reading
remnant 37: “‘If you think of someone enough, you’re sure to meet them again'”
remnant 61: “The right words always seemed to come too late”
On my post Bearing Witness: Hypocrisy, Not Ideology, Bill Boyle left a long and thoughtful comment, highlighted by a central question I often receive when I confront privilege: “For instance, does the relative wealth I have accumulated via my privilege make any of my statements on addressing poverty hypocritical?”
In many versions, I have been asked about what right do whites have to hold forth on race, what right do the relatively affluent have to hold forth on poverty, what right do men have to hold forth on gender—if privilege, then, discredits the privileged?
My short answer is that one’s privilege is not the determining factor in a person’s credibility, but what one does with that privilege is.
As an educator for over thirty years, a writer and scholar for most of that time, and then a public commentator during the more recent past, I have often had to negotiate my own privilege (significantly in the dominant statuses in the U.S. that drive much of the inequity, bias, and prejudice in the country) against my social justice commitments as well as my developing commitment to bear witness in the tradition of James Baldwin.
The most difficult example of that journey (one begun in the pages of literature when I was in college, discovering and learning from Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, and Alice Walker) has been my own discomfort over bearing witness to the segregating and racist intentions and consequences of the charter school movement (specifically among KIPP charter schools and the many copy-cat “no excuses” charter schools) in the context of evidence that black parents were strongly supporting and rushing to choose those very schools (see Sarah Carr’s Hope Against Hope, which documents that phenomenon).
I was able to rectify that deeply uncomfortable sense that I was being privileged, I was whitesplaining, I was being paternalistic by reading and taking great care to listen carefully to Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, in which she identifies and addresses a similar paradox in the mass incarceration debate; as I have explained:
For example, Carr reports that African American parents not only choose “no excuses” charter schools in New Orleans, but also actively cheer and encourage the authoritarian policies voiced by the schools’ administrators. But Alexander states, “Given the dilemma facing poor black communities, it is inaccurate to say that black people ‘support’ mass incarceration or ‘get-tough’ policies” because “if the only choice that is offered blacks is rampant crime or more prisons, the predictable (and understandable) answer will be ‘more prisons'” (p. 210).
New Orleans serves as a stark example of how this dynamic works in education reform: Given the choice between segregated, underfunded and deteriorating public schools and “no excuses” charters – and not the choice of the school environments and offerings found in many elite private schools – the predictable answer is “no excuses” charters.
Here, then, I want to answer Bill Boyle’s concerns a bit more fully—outlining some key responsibilities of those with privilege as a guide for seeking ways to rise above that privilege, to avoid the trap of hypocrisy:
None of this is mine, of course, and none of this is thus justified because I have deemed it so. Therein lies the great paradox of privilege and living in ways that seek to eradicate privilege.
Today this is the best I have to offer because of the many wise and kind people who have lent themselves to my education, to the lifting of the veil of privilege from my eyes. But tomorrow …
Toward the end of his last interview, James Baldwin explains: “Because you can’t be taught anything if you think you know everything already, that something else—greed, materialism, and consuming—is more important to your life.”
And that is something worthy of bearing witness: our humility, and as Baldwin always reminded us, grounded in love.
—
[1] “Beware the roadbuilders” as a refrain and analogy creates tension against my warning about appropriation and analogy, but it is that tension I use when making decisions about how to frame my necessarily evolving efforts to bear witness and use privilege in the service of others.
[2] An offer that may reveal, as Baldwin argues, “The only thing that really unites all black men everywhere is, as far as I can tell, the fact that white men are on their necks.”
See Also
Roxane Gay’s “Peculiar Benefits”
Gina Crosley-Corcoran’s “Explaining White Privilege to a Broke White Person…”
Education Reform as the New Misogyny: A Reader
The Funny Thing about Privilege, Imani Gandy
White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack, Peggy McIntosh
dr. p.l. (paul) thomas 